The Gypsy Game

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  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.

  Three

  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.”

  April gave up. “Okay, whatever,” she said. “But Alvillar won’t go along with it. I know he won’t. Just you wait and see. This is going to be war.” As they marched back to where Toby was waiting with Marshall and Elizabeth, she was imagining all the things that Toby would probably say. Like, “The Professor gave us the keys to Egypt, not to some old Gypsy hangout.” Or else, “You guys can’t just decide to change everything without telling me and Ken. We’re Egyptians too, you know.”

  “Okay,” she said to Melanie. “Talk. You think it’s suc
h a good idea, you tell him.”

  “Yeah, Ross,” Toby said. “Talk.”

  Melanie nodded. “All right, I will. Look, Alvillar. We’ve been thinking of doing a thing about Gypsies. You know, just for a while, to see if everybody likes it. We were thinking that maybe we’d kind of run out of Egyptian things to do for the time being, anyway. So we’ve been reading about Gypsies. And we’ve been finding out all this neat stuff and …”

  She glanced at Toby and immediately lost her train of thought. There was a very strange look on Toby’s face. A kind of shocked and amazed expression, as if he’d just heard a tremendous explosion or else stuck his finger in an electric light socket. “Gypsies,” he said finally in a breathless whisper. “You want to know about Gypsies? I don’t believe it! I just don’t believe it!” Backing up to the wall, he scooted up on it and sat there kind of laughing noiselessly and shaking his head back and forth.

  Melanie and the little kids were all staring at him as if they were watching some kind of fascinating TV show. But April wasn’t buying it. “Look, Alvillar,” she said finally, “what are you raving about?”

  “You want to know?” Toby turned his big high-powered eyes toward April. “You want to know what’s so amazing?”

  “Sure,” April said scornfully. “Tell me. I can take it.”

  “Well,” Toby said, “the truth is, you are right now, right this very moment, talking to one.”

  “One what?”

  “One Gypsy,” Toby said. “I am one. I, Toby Alvillar, am a real live, authentic, natural-born Gypsy. Have been all my life.”

  Four

  WHEN TOBY ALVILLAR said he was a Gypsy, Melanie didn’t know what to think. She knew what April was thinking because April said so, loud and clear. Which was that Toby was just shooting off his mouth and trying to get attention, like always. But Melanie wasn’t so sure. Squinching up her eyes, she tried to picture him in a sparkly vest with a bright-colored sash around his skinny middle. The dreamed-up picture came easily: a Gypsy Toby, playing an accordion, while a bunch of trained bears …

  The thought of bears brought her back to reality—and Marshall! Where was he? But actually he was still right there. Just sitting quietly on the wall listening to April and Toby argue.

  “Yeah, sure, you’re a Gypsy,” April was saying. “And I’m Wonder Woman. Look, Alvillar, if you’re an actual Gypsy, how come we’ve never heard about it before? Huh? Tell me that.” She turned to Melanie and said, “Do you get it? I sure do. The very minute he finds out that we want to be Gypsies, he decides that he really is one. The only real one. So guess what that means. That means the only ‘real’ one gets to be, like, king of the Gypsies and decide what everybody else has to do.”

  It did sound pretty fishy, Melanie decided. “Can you prove it?” she asked. “Can you prove you’re one?”

  “Do you mean, like, do I have a card or something?” He reached into his pocket and pretended to pull out a card. “Yeah, sure. See, it says right here, ‘Tobias Alvillar. Gypsy. First Class.’ ” He grinned and shrugged. “No, I guess I can’t prove it, except that I’m a real authority on stuff about Gypsies. I can tell you all kinds of stuff about what they’re like and how they live and why they travel around all the time. Hey, wait a minute. I can too prove it. My dad can tell you that we’re Gypsies. Both of us. He’s even more of a Gypsy than I am. Let’s go ask him, right now. Okay?”

  Melanie and April looked at each other. They looked at the little kids and then back at Toby. Finally they gave each other one of their almost invisible nods, which meant, “All right. Let’s do it,” and a second or two later all five of them were on their way to the Alvillars’ apartment. But almost immediately Melanie, at least, was beginning to have some second thoughts about the whole thing. She was remembering some very strange rumors that she’d heard about Toby’s lifestyle in general and about his father, Andre Alvillar, the artist, in particular. Rumors that, if they were true, might mean that the Alvillar apartment was not a good place to take a little kid like Marshall or a supersensitive one like Elizabeth.

  Catching up with Toby, who was marching ahead like some kind of drum major, she said, “Hey, Toby. Maybe we ought to come some other time. Like, maybe you ought to give your dad some warning before you bring over a whole gang of kids. Besides, won’t he be mad at you for not going to the grocery store?”

  Toby shrugged. “He’s probably forgotten about getting food by now. Artists are that way. Sometimes he forgets about food for days at a time.” He turned to look at Melanie, and all of a sudden he began to grin. “And about warning him that we’re coming … You don’t have to worry in December. In the wintertime he wears overalls.”

  Melanie felt her face get hot. She looked away, wondering how Toby knew that one of the rumors she’d been thinking about was that sometimes his dad painted and sculpted without much on. Like almost naked, for instance.

  Melanie wasn’t too reassured by what Toby had said, but they were almost to University Avenue before she had a chance to talk privately to April. “Uh, April,” she whispered. “I’ve been thinking—”

  April pulled away impatiently. “Yeah? What?”

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve heard that Toby lives in a pretty weird place.”

  “Yeah, I know,” April said delightedly. “Come on. I can’t wait.”

  Melanie gave up. It would probably be all right. And besides, she really was curious to see if any of the rumors were true. She’d just have to be careful to keep an eye on Marshall. And Elizabeth, too.

  Toby lived just off University Avenue on top of a building that was mostly a bar and pool hall. Only you didn’t have to go through the downstairs to get up to where the Alvillars lived, which was good thing because no one was allowed in that part of the building who wasn’t eighteen years old. Instead, you went around back and then up some outside stairs that ended on a rusty metal platform. At one end of the platform was a big metal door that wouldn’t open unless you kicked it. Toby kicked it once, and nothing happened.

  “Back up,” he said, “so I can get a run at it.”

  They all backed up, and Toby ran across the rattly slats of the platform, kicked, and the door crashed open. From somewhere in the distance a hollow-sounding voice said, “Great Caesar’s ghost. What was that?”

  “It’s just me,” Toby yelled, “and some friends! Can we come in?”

  There was no answer, but he went in anyway. Melanie grabbed Marshall’s hand and followed Toby into an enormous room, practically a block long and almost as wide. It had a very high ceiling that was partly made from glass, and on the floor, stretching from one side of the room to the other, was—junk. Most of the junk seemed to be from wrecking yards or construction sites, but mixed in with the pipes and rods and wheels were bicycle handlebars, lampshades, stovepipes, birdcages, telephones, frying pans, and a bunch of pink plastic toilet seats. Some of it was woven and twisted and welded together into strangely threatening shapes with staring eyes and clawlike hands. Some of it was piled into tall, teetering towers like the metal skeletons of ancient castles. But most of it was just scattered around or stacked up in great, dusty piles.

  Melanie pushed Marshall back behind her and held him there as they moved forward, following Toby between two junk piles and, at one point, under the huge blue body of what looked like an almost life-sized brontosaurus.

  Marshall liked the brontosaurus. Hanging back, he pointed up at the tiny head at the end of a long arching neck that seemed to be made of hundreds of welded-together Chicken Of The Sea tuna cans. “Dinosaur,” he whispered. “Stop. I want to see the tuna dinosaur.” But Melanie kept pulling him after her as she followed Toby between the barrel-shaped legs and under the huge blue body.

  From there they wound their way through several other junk-pile jungles. Here and there among the piles Melanie noticed what might possibly be considered a living area: in one place a kind of platform with a mattress and a bunch of blankets scattered around over it; and in another,
a table covered with dirty dishes not far from a greasy-looking gas stove with a gaping, doorless oven. Just beyond the kitchen area they finally came to a stop beside a tall, extremely hairy man dressed in a baggy sweatshirt and incredibly dirty overalls. The man had a paintbrush in one hand and a pallette covered with blobs of paint in the other, and behind him on the wall was a very strange painting of animals that seemed to be half human. Or perhaps humans that were half animal.

  “Hi, Dad,” Toby said. “These are the guys I told you about. The ones who have the other keys to the Professor’s backyard. You know, besides Ken and me.”

  “Aha,” the hairy man said. “I see. I—see.” But he didn’t see, at least not right away, because for the longest time he went on staring at the painting before he looked or even moved. And when he finally did turn around, he very slowly put down his palette and brush, pulled up a chair, and sat down and stared.

  It was a weird feeling, coming into someone’s home, if you could call an enormous attic junkyard a home, and having them just sit down and stare at you. Melanie glanced around to see how the others were taking it. Elizabeth looked as though she was about to make a run for it. Melanie put her free arm, the one that wasn’t wrapped around Marshall, across Elizabeth’s shoulders. And April? April was wearing the deadpan she used around most adults, so for once Melanie couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “These dudes came to ask you something,” Toby was saying. “I told them that we were Gypsies, but they won’t believe me. So could you just tell …”

  Just then his father got up, came over to where they were all standing, took Marshall by the shoulders, and pulled him away from the others. Melanie grabbed for Marshall’s hand, missed, started to say something, and stuttered to a stop. Mr. Alvillar was leading Marshall over to stand near the huge picture that was painted on the wall. Putting his hand under Marshall’s chin, he turned his face toward the light and pulled Security around so that his fuzzy pear-shaped head was hanging down in front. “There,” he said. “Perfect. Don’t move a muscle.” To Melanie’s amazement Marshall did as he was told. Standing very still, Marshall lifted his chin so that the light from the glass ceiling spilled down across his face, turning his skin to dark-brown velvet and making small circular shadows under his long black eyelashes.