The Gypsy Game

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Melanie took the Crocodile Stone because she’d been the one to find it, as well as her blown-glass figurines that had been on the altar of Isis. And April got the papyrus scrolls out from their hiding place under the statue of Diana. Everyone had worked on the scrolls at one time or another, but since she’d been the one to contribute the onionskin paper, she figured they belonged to her.

  At first Toby said he didn’t want anything except Thoth, his stuffed owl, but later he wrapped up the cat skull and the dead tarantula and took them, too.

  After that they all went home without coming to any decision about what to do next, except that they would meet again the next afternoon. Which was just fine except that the Kamata family would be back from skiing by then, and that meant a whole new set of problems to deal with. Problems like how to turn Ken, who was so good at being himself, into a Gypsy just as he was finally beginning to feel comfortable being Egyptian.

  That was what April told Melanie and Marshall as they were saying good-bye outside the Rosses’ apartment. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “I mean, getting Kamata to change.”

  “Yeah,” Melanie said. “Don’t I know it.” Then she grinned and hit herself on the forehead and said, “Sheesh!” the way Ken always did.

  April did the same thing and then ran on upstairs.

  Seven

  THAT NIGHT APRIL called Melanie and asked her to come up after dinner to work on plans for the Gypsy Game, but Melanie said she couldn’t. Her father had an evening class, and her mother was going to a teachers’ meeting, so she had to stay home with Marshall. “Why don’t you come down here?” she said. “You can help me baby-sit.”

  So April took all the library books and went down to the Rosses’. Marshall had already been put to bed, so they could have gotten started right away, except that Melanie kept thinking of other things to do. Things like making hot chocolate and reading the comics and even watching part of a stupid TV show that she usually said she hated. April was puzzled. But when she asked Melanie what was the matter, she only shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m just not in the mood.” And she went on being not in the mood until April got out the book on palm reading. The book was called The Art of Palmistry, and it turned out to be pretty interesting. It told all about the history of palm reading and also had lots of diagrams that showed which lines were supposed to tell about which important parts of a person’s life.

  At first they checked out each other’s life lines, both of which seemed to be nice and long, which was supposed to be very important. And their head lines were deep and fairly straight, which meant that they didn’t have any serious mental problems. According to the book a lot of wiggles and breaks in your head line might mean that you were a little bit weird.

  “I guess we’re both boringly normal,” Melanie said.

  “Yeah, too bad.” April shrugged. “Hey, I know. Do you suppose Marshall’s still awake? I wonder what his palm looks like. I mean, you’d have to say he’s a little bit weird. Like still having a security object when he practically acts like an adult in most other ways.”

  “Well, okay, if he’s not asleep already.” Melanie seemed a little uncertain. “But don’t you say anything about Security to him, April. My dad says teasing just makes it worse. You know he’d just about stopped needing Security until people started teasing him about it.” Melanie smiled when she said “people,” but April got the point. After she’d promised she wouldn’t do any teasing, they tiptoed into his room to see if he was still awake.

  Actually Marshall was still very much awake. In fact, he wasn’t even in the room. Security was there, however, all tucked in with his head on the pillow. But Melanie didn’t seem worried. “The kitchen,” she said. “He’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Sure enough, there Marshall was, standing on a chair by the kitchen counter, smearing honey and peanut butter all over two pieces of bread, not to mention his hands and the front of his pajamas. He didn’t seem to mind when Melanie said they wanted to practice their palm reading on him. In fact, he seemed quite pleased. The only problem was he refused to wash his hands.

  “Why not, for heaven’s sake?” Melanie asked. “Just look at them. Ugh!”

  “Because I haven’t finished yet.” He licked a honey-coated finger thoughtfully. “My feet aren’t gooey,” he said. “You could read my feet.”

  So Marshall sat down on the chair and stuck out his feet, and while April and Melanie studied his soles, he went on eating his sandwich. The only trouble was that the book didn’t say anything about foot-reading techniques, and all the lines seemed to be in different places. So finally they just made up some stuff about how he was going to grow up to be king of the Gypsies and president of the United States and maybe even an animal trainer in the circus. After that he let them clean him up and put him back to bed.

  When they finally got back to the palmistry book, they found some neat things about how to tell how many times you’d be married and how many kids you’d have. But when they tried reading those lines on each other’s palms, they didn’t get very far because neither one of them seemed to have any lines in the right places. They’d just about decided that eleven was a little too young for marriage lines, when Melanie’s mother came back from her teachers’ meeting. She looked pretty exhausted, so April said good-bye and went on home. As she went out the door, she whispered, “Don’t forget. Tomorrow. The Return of the Great Kamata!”

  Sure enough, when Toby arrived at the storage yard the next day, Ken was with him—and they were late, as usual. Elizabeth was away visiting relatives, but April and Melanie had been waiting, sitting at the edge of the shed floor, for at least half an hour. Marshall, with Security hanging around his neck, was digging in the dirt with a pointed stick. April had just said something about people who were always late, when suddenly there they were, Ken and Toby, looking like Ta-da! Toby Alvillar and Ken Kamata have arrived, you lucky people! Closing the gate behind them, they sauntered over to the shed.

  Toby was grinning. “I already told him all about what’s happening,” he said. “And it’s okay. He’s cool about doing the Gypsy thing. Aren’t you, Kamata?”

  Ken only shrugged and went on swaggering around with his hands in the pockets of his new expensive-looking sports jacket. Ken had always been like that. The kind of supercool guy who knew he didn’t have to say anything to get everybody’s attention. Everybody watched while he looked at the new Gypsy caravan mural and then at the stripped-down Egyptian altars of Thoth and Isis and Set. When he got to Set’s altar, he picked up his fake dagger and his shrunken head, looked at them carefully, and stuffed them in his pockets.

  April was getting mad. Who did he think he was, swaggering around without saying a word, while everybody stared at him. “Well, what do you think, Kamata?” she asked, biting off each word angrily.

  Ken slowly turned his head, looking all surprised, as if he couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. “Think? What do I think about—what?”

  April took a deep breath and unclenched her teeth enough to say, “About—being—Gypsies!”

  Ken leaned against one of the temple pillars, pulled out the shrunken head, and began to toss it up and catch it. “I’m thinking,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I decide.”

  “They wear really neat clothes,” Melanie said. “You know, fancy embroidered things with lots of jewelry and …”

  “Jewelry! Holy cow!” Ken said.

  “And they play musical instruments,” Melanie added. Everybody knew that Ken played the trombone in the school band and that music was one more thing he was just naturally great at.

  “Oh yeah?” Ken looked mildly interested. “They play trombones?”

  After Melanie admitted that she wasn’t sure if Gypsies played trombones, Ken went back to playing with the shrunken head. Tossing it up, catching it, and …

  “Hey,” April said suddenly, “and juggling. Sometimes they do juggling.”

&n
bsp; “Oh yeah?” Ken said again. “And what else?” He looked at Marshall, who had come over to watch how the shrunken head’s long black hair streamed behind it when Ken tossed it into the air. “What else do Gypsies do, Marshamosis?”

  “They can read your feet,” Marshall said.

  April and Melanie laughed. “He’s talking about fortune-telling,” Melanie said. “You know, palmistry.”

  “Yeah, palmistry,” April added. “That means telling your fortune by reading your palm. Here, I’ll show you. Give me your hand and …”

  Ken stuffed his hands and the shrunken head back into his pockets. “No you don’t,” he said. “Nobody’s going to read my palm.”

  “No, I mean it,” April insisted. “We can read your palm. Can’t we, Melanie?” She grabbed Ken’s arm and tried to pull his hand out of his pocket. But he only jerked away, shoving April with his elbow. Shoving her so hard she stumbled backward, tripped over the sacred fire pit, and sat down—hard.

  When April got to her feet, her fists were clenched and her eyes were fiery. She had swung once, missed, and was getting ready to try again when Melanie grabbed her arms and pulled her away. Toby grabbed hold of Ken. For a few seconds nobody spoke or moved. A few very long seconds—until suddenly the strained silence was interrupted by an unfamiliar sound that seemed to be coming from just outside the gate. A bumping and snuffling and scratching that started and stopped and then started up again. It was an entirely unfamiliar noise. Unfamiliar, unexpected, and weirdly nonhuman.

  The girls were still clutching each other, but for a different reason now, and Ken and Toby seemed to be doing almost the same thing. But nobody was holding on to Marshall. So while the big kids clutched and stared, Marshall ran to open the gate.

  “Don’t, Marshall. Wait a minute.” Melanie’s voice was sharp and urgent. But she was too late. Marshall had already unlatched the gate and opened it enough to peek out.

  For an endless minute he stared out through the narrow opening without moving or saying a word while Melanie said, “Come back here, Marshall,” and everyone else said things like, “What is it?” and “What’s out there?”

  After what seemed like a very long time, Marshall finally began to move. Pushing the gate slowly shut, he tiptoed back toward the shed. They could see his face then, and it was easy to tell that he was absolutely out of his mind with—happiness? When he was almost to the shed, he pointed back toward the gate and whispered, “It’s my bear. My bear came.”

  Eight

  “A BEAR?” someone yelled, and a second later they were all at the gate, trying to peek out without opening it wide enough to let a bear, or whatever, come through. Toby had gotten there first, but Ken, who was bigger, had the best view. All the rest of them were squeezed in underneath. For a minute there was no sound except some grunting and griping as people got pushed and stepped on. It was Ken who spoke first.

  “It’s nothing but a dog,” he said. “Sheesh, Marshall. It’s just a big dog.” Stepping backward, he yanked the gate open, tumbling people in every direction. Sitting on the ground with Melanie beside her and Toby sprawled across both of their legs, April looked up in time to see a weird-looking creature standing in the wide-open gate. For several seconds it just stood there turning its big black head from side to side, staring at them. At least, it seemed to be looking at them. There was no way to tell for sure. Its eyes, if it had any, were completely covered by a thick, furry mop of black hair.

  Marshall got back on his feet and shoved past Ken. A few feet away from the shaggy creature, he stopped and stared, and the creature stared back. Or at least turned its eyeless face in Marshall’s direction. “It’s not either a dog,” he said confidently. “It’s my bear.”

  Moving forward, he held out his hand, and before Melanie could shove Toby off her legs and stagger to her feet, he reached out to pat the shaggy bump that seemed to be its head. And as he patted one end of the big black hairball, at the other end what had to be a tail, a short stubby tail, began to wag.

  Well, of course it was a dog. Everyone knew that immediately. Everyone, that is, except Marshall.

  “Hello, Bear,” Marshall was saying. As he went on patting, a long red tongue emerged from the hairy mop and licked his face. Marshall giggled happily.

  Melanie looked at April, making an especially desperate “what do we do now?” face. April knew what she meant. She was asking April to help her think of a way to keep Marshall from being absolutely wiped out when he learned that his bear was only an extremely shaggy black dog. “Well, anyway, Marshall, it sure looks like—” April was starting to say, when Toby interrupted.

  “Yeah,” he said, “Marshall’s right. That’s a bear all right.” He stepped forward, stuck out his hand, and let it be licked by the red tongue. “See that? That is definitely a bear’s tongue. A Gypsy bear,” he told Marshall. Turning back toward the others, he added, “That’s the way Gypsy bears always look. They breed them to look that way on purpose, so if the cops start getting after them for keeping a wild animal, they can just say, ‘What do you mean, wild animal? This here is only a very special Gypsy breed of dog.’ ”

  Ken laughed. “Sure it is,” he said. “Well, all I can say is, if that four-legged dust mop is a—” But before Ken could finish the sentence, Toby had grabbed him and was whispering in his ear. As Toby whispered, Ken shook his head, then nodded, grinned, and said, “Yeah, I gotcha. Okay, Alvillar, I think you’re right. That is definitely a Gypsy bear. Best-looking Gypsy bear I ever saw.”

  Toby looked at April. “So,” he said. “Now that we have us a bear—”

  “It’s my bear,” Marshall interrupted.

  “Right,” Toby said without missing a beat. “Like I was saying, now that this kid’s got himself a bear, what kind of Gypsy bear tricks are we going to teach him to do?”

  April eyed him suspiciously. “You’re the one with a Gypsy grandmother. What kind of tricks did your grandmother teach you?”

  For the next ten minutes or so, April and Toby argued about what kind of tricks Gypsy bears usually did and whether they could teach them to Marshall’s bear. And while they were arguing, Marshall coaxed the big shaggy—whatever—into the yard and shut the gate behind him.

  “Come on, Bear,” Marshall kept saying, and the “bear’s” ears would go up and he would go where Marshall wanted him to.

  The dog-bear did seem to like Marshall best, but the weird thing was that he seemed to react whenever anyone called him Bear. Whenever anyone said, “Here, Bear,” he would bounce over to that kid and try to lick him or her in the face. Before long everyone was getting into the act, particularly Toby, who started trying to teach Bear to dance on his hind legs, something that, according to Toby, all Gypsy bears were supposed to do.

  “Here, watch this,” he said. Holding up Bear’s front paws, he made him walk around on his hind legs. Bear didn’t seem to mind. With his tongue lolling out of one corner of his mouth and his head cocked to one side, he shuffled happily around on his hind feet. “Look, he’s dancing!” Toby yelled. He waltzed Bear around two or three times before he turned him loose. “He’s a bear all right,” he told Marshall. “Dances just like one.” Then he sniffed his hands and added, “Whee-oo. Smells like one too.”

  Everybody laughed. All except Melanie. While everyone else seemed to be having a great time, Melanie was looking more and more worried.

  “What’s the matter?” April whispered, pulling her aside, but almost before she finished asking, she began to guess.

  “Marshall thinks that dog is really his,” Melanie whispered back, which was almost exactly what April was guessing she would say.

  April nodded. “Yeah, I was thinking of that. But you know what? The good news is he doesn’t have any identification or even a license. I checked. He has a collar but no license tag. So maybe he is just a stray that doesn’t belong to anybody.”

  “I know.” Melanie’s eyebrows had their worried tilt. “But we’ll have to find out. We’ll have to fin
d out if some family in the neighborhood is missing a big black”—she smiled ruefully—“you know what.”

  “You know what—what?” Ken had obviously been eavesdropping. “What’re you guys talking about? The end of the world or something?”

  “No,” April whispered, “she’s just worried about how Marshall’s going to take it if we find out that his ‘bear’ really belongs to someone else.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that.” Ken actually seemed concerned. “Tough, huh?”

  April and Melanie looked at Ken in surprise and then gave each other a look that said something like, “Well, what do you know. Ken Kamata being a nice guy? Big surprise!”

  It wasn’t so much of a surprise, though, when you thought about the fact that it was Marshall he was being nice about. Marshall seemed to have that kind of effect on people.

  “Hey,” Ken said suddenly, “we could check the bulletin board at Peterson’s. If anybody in the neighborhood loses a pet, they usually put up a ‘lost’ notice there. We could look to see if anyone’s advertising for a lost …” He stopped and grinned. “A lost—whatever. And then if there’s no notice, we can just, you know, stop worrying about it.”

  Melanie sighed. “But I suppose we ought to put up our own ‘found’ notice, too. You know, the kind people put up when they’ve found somebody else’s lost pet.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” April said quickly. “I can do that. I’ll be the one to do that, Melanie.”

  When Melanie looked at her sharply, April tried to look innocent. That was one of the problems about having such a close friend. The kind who guessed what you were thinking even when you didn’t particularly want them to. Like when you were thinking that bulletin-board signs could be written in extremely small handwriting so that you’d practically have to have a microscope to read it. Or else it could be kind of crowded in underneath some of the other notices.

  Melanie was still looking suspicious. “Anyway, even if nobody claims him, that still won’t solve the whole problem. The rest of the problem is, Where is he going to live? It’s against the rules at the Casa Rosada.” She looked at Ken. “So I guess that kind of leaves it up to you or Toby.”