The Gypsy Game (2 page)

“But what about Ken and Toby?” Melanie asked. “Shouldn’t we ask them if they want to be Gypsies? I mean, if we don’t even ask, there’s bound to be trouble.”

April grinned happily. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Look out, Toby. Here comes trouble.”

Actually, right at that moment, if anyone had asked Melanie what kind of trouble April was talking about, she probably would have said that April meant herself. That Toby was going to have “April trouble.” But afterward, remembering exactly what April said that day, it occurred to Melanie that it was almost as if April had been doing the oracle thing again. As if she’d looked into the future and seen this big dark cloud of trouble heading in Toby’s direction. Except that back then, on Christmas afternoon, not even a real oracle could have guessed how much, or how really weird, the trouble was going to be.

JUST AS THEY’D planned, April stopped by the Rosses’ apartment on Thursday afternoon, and the three of them, April and Melanie and Marshall, went on down to pick up Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Chung was only a fourth grader, so when she first moved to the Casa Rosada, April and Melanie hadn’t meant to invite her to join the Egypt Game. They finally did after Melanie’s mom and April’s grandmother had more or less insisted that they make the new girl feel at home. But then Elizabeth had turned out to be a great Egyptian. A little bit childish at times of course, but very enthusiastic about everything, and great at keeping her mouth shut around adults and other non-Egyptians. And when April had called up to ask if she’d like to be a Gypsy, she said yes right away.

“Oh yes,” she said as soon as April explained what was going on. “I do. I will. Yes, I want to. When?”

“Well, we’re planning to go to the library this afternoon to start doing the research,” April said. “You know. We’ll probably have to look up a bunch of stuff in encyclopedias and books. So bring some paper and a pencil. Okay?”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said, her voice bubbling over with
enthusiasm and excitement. “Okay. Pencil and paper. Okay, I’ll bring some. Okay.”

April said good-bye and was about to hang up when Elizabeth said, “April, wait.”

“Yeah,” April said. “What?”

“What’s a Gypsy?”

April had a hard time keeping from laughing out loud. “Look, Bethy,” she said. “We’ll tell you all about it on the way to the library. Okay?”

Later when April was telling Melanie about the telephone conversation, she imitated Elizabeth’s high-pitched little-kid voice. “ ‘April. What’s a Gypsy?’ Can you believe it? She couldn’t wait to start being a Gypsy before she even knew what one was.”

But then Melanie pointed out that a lot of fourth graders probably don’t know much about Gypsies. “Actually a lot of sixth graders don’t either, I’ll bet. And besides April …” Melanie smiled and tilted one eyebrow the way she always did when she thought somebody wasn’t being very sensible. Or fair. Melanie had this thing about being fair. “And besides, April, you know Bethy just likes to do
whatever
we do.”

April frowned. Even though Melanie was the best friend she’d ever had, she sure could be a drag when she wanted to. Like when she made you feel kind of mean for saying something mean about somebody, even though you didn’t mean to be mean at all.

But by that afternoon when they started out for the library,
April had forgotten all about being mad at Melanie. She was having too much fun telling everyone what it would be like being Gypsies. She didn’t say too much about the horse-drawn caravans because she couldn’t quite see how they could get hold of a horse—or a caravan either, for that matter. But there were a lot of Gypsy things they certainly could do. Like training animals and wearing Gypsy outfits, for instance.

“The men wear baggy pants and high boots and vests with all kinds of shiny things sewn on them, so they kind of glitter when they walk,” she told them. “And the women wear these bright-colored head scarfs and all kinds of weird jewelry.”

“Weird?” Marshall asked, frowning. “I don’t like weird stuff. What about the bears?”

“Okay, Marshall. Bear info coming up. I’ll get to bears in a …” Really focusing on Marshall for the first time, April noticed something. Security was back again, hanging around Marshall’s neck by two of his legs, just like always. April nudged Melanie and pointed. “How come?” she whispered. “I thought you said he’d quit?”

Melanie only shrugged, so April reached over and tugged on one of Security’s legs, which Marshall really hated for anyone to do. “Okay, Marshamosis,” she said, “how come you brought the octopus? I thought you’d outgrown stuff like that.”

Marshall jerked away and glared at April. “I did,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring him, but he wanted to come. Security likes libraries.”

April might have had some more to say on the subject,
but Melanie poked her hard and shook her head. “The jewelry,” she said. “Tell about the jewelry. What’s weird about it?”

“Well, you know. They wear it kind of all over themselves. Like on their ankles and around their waists and foreheads. Oh yeah. And they tell fortunes.” She looked at Melanie. “That’s one of the best parts. They usually tell fortunes by palmistry. I can’t wait to learn how to read people’s palms.”

“Yes,” Melanie said. “Me too. I’d really like to tell fortunes. And what else, April? What other Gypsy things can we do?”

So April started telling them about training animals and juggling and dancing and things like that, but before she’d gotten anywhere near finished, they were already at the library.

To Mrs. George, who worked in the children’s room, April and Melanie were still the Egyptian Girls, but as soon as she heard that they’d changed to Gypsies, she was enthusiastic about that, too. Before long the three girls were sitting at a table with lots of books and magazines and a couple of encyclopedias, and Marshall had gone off to the little kids’ section with Mrs. George.

At first they started telling each other every time they learned something important. April told what she read about how the Gypsies had originally come from northern India, instead of from Egypt as most people thought. And Melanie found out that right now, in modern times, there were maybe a million Gypsies living in the United States. A little later they all got the giggles when they started trying
to pronounce some words April found in an article about Romany, the Gypsy language. That got a little too noisy for a library, and after Mrs. George gave them a couple of serious glares, they started writing everything down. “Then we can meet in Egypt and read our notes about everything we found out,” Melanie whispered.

“In Egypt?” Elizabeth asked. “I thought we were going to call it Gypsy now.”

April laughed out loud and then covered her mouth with her hand when Mrs. George frowned in her direction. “Gypsy isn’t a country,” she said behind her hand. “Not like Egypt is a country. Gypsies don’t have any particular country. That’s the whole point about Gypsies. They just have, like, special places all over the world where they stay for a little while. Places called Gypsy camps.”

“That’s it, then,” Melanie said. “We can change the name to the Camp. The Gypsy Camp. Everybody in favor say aye.”

The vote was unanimous, three to nothing. “So it’s official then,” April said. “No more Egypt. From now on the Professor’s backyard is officially the Gypsy Camp.”

Right after the voting, which had gotten a little bit noisy, Mrs. George started frowning again, so they went back to writing—and making faces. April was reading about Gypsy fortune-telling, and she kept making faces that said things like “Hey, this is great” and “Wait’ll you hear this.” Elizabeth made faces too, but Melanie, who was reading a big fat book that Mrs. George had found in the adult department, just went on reading quietly with a strange look on her face. April was about to break the no-talking rule and
ask what was the matter, when Marshall came back from the little kids’ section carrying a bunch of books. Right away he began to be a nuisance.

“Where are the bears?” he kept asking, and “When can we get them?” and even “Who gets the daddy bear?”

At last Melanie gave up and said they’d better go. So they checked out a few of the best books, including a great one about reading palms and the big fat one from the adult department, and headed for home.

THE FOUR OF THEM, April, Melanie, Elizabeth, and Marshall, were almost to the Casa Rosada when, just as they turned the corner onto Orchard Avenue, they ran into, of all people, Toby Alvillar. April was talking at the time and walking backward so that she could be sure Melanie and Elizabeth were listening. She had just said, “And they call themselves Roms, not Gypsies, and like I told you, they started out journeying hundreds of years ago from some place in India. At least that’s what most people think. And they have their own laws and religion and language.…” She’d stopped then because she’d noticed that nobody was listening. Instead, they were staring past her at something or somebody over her left shoulder. She whirled around just in time to keep from bumping smack-dab into Toby.

Toby Alvillar’s messy mop of hair hung down over his forehead, so that his oversized eyes peered out between curly brown strands. He was wearing a new Levi’s jacket, probably a Christmas present, and one of his famous Alvillar grins. The kind that sometimes made April want to smack him one, right in the mouth.

“Well, well,” Toby said. “What do you know? If it isn’t February and Company.” Toby had been the one who gave April the nickname February. Nobody else thought it was
very funny anymore, but Toby still seemed to. He looked around her at the other kids and asked, “What was old Feb telling you guys?” Nobody answered. In fact, nobody looked as though they were even thinking of answering. “Okay,” Toby said. “Let’s try an easier question. Where are you guys going?”

April’s stare got even cooler. April Hall’s cool stares were practically famous at Wilson School, but they never seemed to impress Toby all that much. “We’re not
going
anywhere,” she said. “We’ve already been.”

“How about you?” Melanie asked. “Bet I can guess where you’re going. Bet you’re going to Ken’s house.”

“Well, you bet wrong,” Toby said. “His whole family went skiing. Won’t be back till Sunday.”

“Oh yeah?” April said. “How come they didn’t take you with them?” The Kamatas went skiing a lot in the wintertime, and once in a while, since Ken and Toby were best friends, they took Toby with them.

He shrugged. “They asked me, but my dad wouldn’t let me go because we’re too broke.”

Marshall looked puzzled. He stared at Toby’s legs and then at his arms. “Broke?” he asked. “Where? What broke?”

Toby laughed and patted his rear pocket. “Right here,” he said, but Marshall went on looking worried. Toby tried again. “What I mean is moneywise, we are flat-out busted.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “See this?” He waved the money in the air. “This is
it
. Our last red cent. My dad sent me to the store to buy something for dinner and then”—he threw up his
hands dramatically—“that’s all she wrote! The end!
Finito!
After that we starve to death.”

Somebody, Elizabeth probably, gasped. April looked around. Sure enough, Elizabeth looked horrified, and even Melanie had a worried look on her face. April snorted. Couldn’t they tell it was all just an act? Just some more typical Alvillar melodrama. She was willing to believe a bunch of weird stuff about old Alvillar. Like, for instance, the fact that his father was some kind of far-out hippie-type artist and sculptor and that he didn’t have, and never had had, a mother and that he and his father lived in a terminally messy attic apartment with no furniture except for statues. But nobody had ever told April that Toby was starving, and she wasn’t about to believe it now. However, it looked as if some people were willing to go along with almost anything old Alvillar said.

“Really?” Elizabeth’s voice had a catch to it, like maybe she was about to cry. “You’re really going to starve to death?”

Toby looked at Elizabeth. “Hey kid, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Maybe we won’t starve clear to death. Who knows. Maybe my dad will finally sell a painting, or something. Or maybe he’ll sell six paintings and a humongous statue, and next week we’ll move to Palm Springs.” He put the money back in his pocket and jumped up on the low cement wall beside the sidewalk. Holding out his arms like a tightrope walker, he started down the wall looking back over his shoulder. “Good-bye!” he yelled. “Good-bye forever.”

They watched him go. Standing there in a clump on
the sidewalk, they watched as Toby went down the wall, balancing first on one foot and then the other. Suddenly he whirled around and came back toward them. When he was almost back to where he’d started, he stood on one foot, stuck the other way out behind, and bent forward like a gymnast on a balance bar. “Hey!” he said, teetering back and forth. “Are you guys going to …” He bent even farther, looked around cautiously as if he thought somebody might be listening, cupped his hands around his mouth, and whispered, “Egypt? Are you going to—
Egypt
?”

While April and Melanie were still staring at each other, trying to decide what to say, a loud, clear voice said, “Not Egypt. Egypt is all done.” Melanie tried to shush him, but Marshall went right on. “We’re going to be Gypsies now. With bears.”

Toby fell off the wall. As soon as he picked himself up and dusted off his new jacket and the seat of his pants, he put his hands on his hips and stared at April and then at Melanie. “Okay. Tell all,” he said. “What’s this about Gypsies? What’s up?”

At first April tried to pretend that Marshall didn’t know what he was talking about. But Melanie didn’t go along with it. Instead, she grabbed April’s arm and pulled her a few yards down the sidewalk. Cupping her hands around April’s ear, she hissed, “We might as well tell him. I don’t want to lie about it. Not in front of Marshall.”

“It would only be a temporary lie,” April whispered back. “We’ll tell him the truth pretty soon.”

Melanie looked at Marshall and then shook her head
stubbornly. “Marshall’s too young. He doesn’t understand about temporary lies.”