The Gypsy Game Read online

  Mr. Alvillar picked up a pencil and a small notebook and began to draw, glancing up at Marshall now and then. “Beautiful,” he said once or twice. “Perfectly beautiful.”

  April stepped forward determinedly. “Mr. Alvillar—” she started, but before she could say any more, Toby moved between her and his father. Shaking his head, Toby put his finger to his lips.

  “Just a minute,” Toby whispered. “It won’t take him long.”

  He was right. After two or three minutes Mr. Alvillar put the notebook down, went over to where Marshall was standing, and put out his hand. Marshall shook hands solemnly and then turned to look behind him at the mural of animal-humans and human-animals. He studied it carefully before he asked, “Am I going to be in that picture?”

  “Would you like to be?” Mr. Alvillar asked.

  Marshall nodded thoughtfully. “Can I be an octopus? Or else a bear. Can I be a bear?”

  Mr. Alvillar didn’t laugh or even smile. Glancing from Marshall to the wall, he nodded slowly. “Yes. A bear. A strong bear, I should think.” Then he picked up his brush and palette and went back to staring at the wall.

  “Dad,” Toby said, and then more loudly, “Dad! Could you tell these guys something? Could you tell them about how we’re both natural-born Gypsies? Okay? I already told them, but they didn’t believe me.”

  Toby’s dad waved briefly as if he were brushing away a fly and went on staring at the painted wall.

  The whole thing—the mysterious attic apartment, the strange statues, and Toby’s weird, paint-smeared father—was making Melanie feel more and more uneasy. Grabbing Marshall by the back of his shirt, she pulled him away, and, catching April’s eye, she tried to make her face say, “Let’s get out of here.” But just about then Toby’s dad snapped out of his trance and began to talk, and April didn’t want to leave.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “Listen.”

  So they stayed a minute longer to hear what Toby’s father would say.

  Five

  APRIL WAS REALLY amazed to hear that Toby hadn’t been lying after all. At least not completely. What his father actually said, after Toby finally got through to him, was, “Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.” He nodded solemnly, looking at April and Melanie. “My mother, Toby’s grandmother, was born in Romania, of Gypsy parents. So that would make Toby one-quarter Gypsy.” He smiled at April. “Is that what he said?”

  “Well, yes. Pretty much,” April said. “He said he was a natural-born Gypsy and that he knew all kinds of stuff about Gypsies. Like he was a real authority, or something.”

  “Oh, did he?” Mr. Alvillar looked at Toby with a familiar kind of obnoxious gleam in his strange dark eyes. It was easy to see where Toby got his looks, not to mention his aggravating disposition.

  “An authority?” Mr. Alvillar said. He combed his curly black beard with one paint-smeared hand, leaving a slightly purple streak next to a whitish one that might have been natural. “Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that. Never has shown too much interest in the subject before now.”

  “Yes, I have,” Toby said indignantly. “Remember that time you got invited to that Gypsy get-together in Oakland? And I wanted to go too?”

  Mr. Alvillar picked up his paintbrush and palette and stared at his mural for a moment before he answered. “Ah yes, so you did. Right after I told you about the banquet. You seemed to be quite interested in the banquet, as I recall.”

  Toby and his father were still arguing about why Toby had wanted to go to the Gypsy convention when Melanie grabbed Marshall’s hand, motioned to April and Elizabeth, and headed back through the junk piles in the general direction of the outer door. April followed reluctantly. Just before they got out of earshot, they heard Toby saying, “Okay, so I did want to go to the banquet. I thought if we did, maybe you’d learn something about Gypsy cooking.”

  “Gypsy cooking? How do you know you’d like Gypsy cooking?”

  “I don’t know.” Toby’s voice was fading away in the distance. “But I figured anything would be better than all that canned tuna.”

  After they could no longer hear the arguing voices, they lost their bearings and found themselves wandering around between some unfamiliar-looking junk piles. It was beginning to feel a lot like trying to get out of a maze. No matter which way they turned, they seemed to keep coming back to the particularly confusing jungle of junk that surrounded the enormous blue brontosaurus. Again and again they found themselves staring up at its incredibly long neck with its tuna-can vertebrae, then ducking under its immense blue body and squeezing between its huge barrel-shaped legs. They must have passed the dinosaur at least three times before they took a sudden left turn and found themselves right by the big metal door. It wasn’t quite so hard to open from the inside.

  So it turned out that Toby really was a Gypsy. At least a little bit. Only about one-quarter actually, which wasn’t really enough to give him any special rights. That was what April said anyway. That was what she told Melanie on the way home, and it was also what she said to Toby when he called up the next day.

  April had been surprised and a little bit embarrassed when her grandmother said there was a young man on the phone who wanted to speak to April Hall.

  “Who is it?” April asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Caroline said. “He didn’t give his name, but I would guess it’s one of your Egyptian friends. Sounded like the one with all that curly hair.”

  “Not Toby?” April asked, but it was, of course, and what he wanted to know was when the next Gypsy meeting was going to be.

  “Well, maybe tomorrow afternoon,” she said, “but maybe not. Why?”

  “Why? Because I’m coming. And wait till you see what I’m going to bring. I’ve got lots of old books and photographs. Oh yeah, and some antique Gypsy jewelry that used to be my grandmother’s.”

  Until Toby mentioned the jewelry, April had been frantically trying to think of some way to keep him from coming, at least until Ken was back from skiing. It would be a terrible nuisance to have him there when they were just trying to set up the beginning rules and ceremonies for the new game. But, on the other hand, the antique Gypsy jewelry did sound pretty interesting. She wished there was some way they could have the jewelry without having Toby, but obviously there wasn’t. Finally she broke down and admitted that they were definitely planning to meet the next day at three o’clock, as soon as Marshall got back from day care.

  But then she went on to tell him that she and Melanie had decided that being one-quarter Gypsy wasn’t enough to get him any special privileges, so he’d better not count on it. And Toby just laughed and said he didn’t need any special privileges. After he hung up, April called Melanie.

  “Nothing good,” she answered when Melanie asked, “What’s up?” “It looks like old Alvillar’s going to be there tomorrow for sure. I thought maybe he’d at least wait until Ken gets back, but no such luck.”

  Melanie didn’t say anything for a minute, and when she did, she sounded different, kind of flat and unenthusiastic. Almost as if she’d changed her mind about the whole Gypsy Game idea. “Well, maybe we ought to think about being Gypsies some more before we decide for sure,” she said.

  April couldn’t believe it. “Hey, what’s with you, all of a sudden?” she asked. “I thought you really liked the idea a lot.”

  “Well, yes, I did before …” She stopped then, and she wouldn’t say “before” what. But she seemed to get a little bit interested again after April told her about all the things Toby was going to bring. “Real Gypsy stuff?” she said. “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah. If he really meant it,” April said. “With Alvillar you never know if he’s going to do what he says he’s going to do.”

  But this time he did, and then some. He was there all right, not just on time, but early, which was very unusual for Toby Alvillar. When April, Elizabeth, Melanie, and Marshall (with Security again) arrived at the storage yard, they knew at once that he was alre
ady there. The Professor’s shiny new padlock was just hanging there wide open, and the gate was slightly ajar. And when they went in, there was Toby sitting on the floor of the storage shed. Behind him was what looked like a real Gypsy caravan, an elaborately carved and painted wooden house on wheels. April heard a gasp of surprise and then realized it had come from her own throat.

  “Yeah,” Toby said when he saw their faces, “pretty amazing, isn’t it. My dad did it last night.”

  As they got closer, they realized that it wasn’t a real Gypsy caravan but only a picture of one painted on a huge piece of cardboard tacked to a wooden frame so it could stand up by itself. A beautifully painted almost life-sized copy of a Gypsy caravan, with steps leading up to an open door and up above a steeply pitched roof with a stovepipe sticking out on one side. As they all stood there staring, Marshall climbed up into the shed, peeked around the cardboard, and then disappeared behind it. When he came out the other side, he said, “Huh! It’s just an old picture.”

  Toby laughed. “Right on, Marshall,” he said. “It’s a picture all right. But a new one, actually. My dad just painted it last night.” He sighed. “The whole humongous thing. He was about to start making dinner, see, and I was fooling around with a chest of stuff that belonged to my grandmother, and I found this little picture postcard of a Gypsy caravan. I just showed him the picture, and that did it. All of a sudden he was dragging out this huge hunk of cardboard and starting to paint.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said. “For a minute I thought it was real.”

  “Me too,” Melanie said.

  Toby put his hands on his hips and stared at the picture.

  “Yeah. I guess so. I sure wasn’t too crazy about it last night. Had to make my own dinner.” He sighed. “Artists are like that. Mostly you can’t get their attention, and when you do, you wish you hadn’t.”

  April laughed, and when Toby looked at her curiously, she asked, “Like with your Halloween costume?”

  Toby laughed. “Yeah. Exactly. At first he couldn’t be bothered, but then he got this idea of turning me into some kind of new art form, and the first thing I knew, I was completely packaged and labeled.”

  That made everyone laugh, so, as it turned out, the first Gypsy meeting started out with everybody in a pretty good mood. But that was just the first few minutes. After that things went downhill pretty fast.

  Six

  THE FIRST QUARREL was about fortune-telling. April just happened to mention that only girls would get to be fortune-tellers because that’s the way it was with real Gypsies. The women told fortunes, and the men were blacksmiths or mechanics or musicians or animal trainers or other things like that. And then Toby said that he could be a fortune-teller if he wanted to.

  “I’d be great at telling fortunes,” he said. “Besides, if you can pretend you’re a Gypsy, I can pretend I’m a fortune-teller.” Arching an eyebrow, he added, “At least I don’t have to pretend I’m a Gypsy.”

  April threw up her hands. “See, there he goes,” she said to Melanie. “I told you he was going to pull this ‘Who’s the real Gypsy’ stuff on us.”

  Elizabeth cooled that fight by suggesting that there could be a fortune-telling contest, and the winner, the one who told the best fortunes, would get to be the first official fortune-teller.

  For a fourth grader Elizabeth was really amazingly good at thinking up peaceful ways to settle things. Melanie thought it was pretty smart of Elizabeth to realize that April and Toby would love the idea of having a fortune-telling contest because they were both so sure they could think up the world’s most exciting fortunes. So the fortune-teller quarrel ended peacefully, but the next big problem wasn’t so easy to solve.

  The next argument was about whether or not Gypsies stole things. It started when it was April’s turn to tell what she’d found out at the library. One of the things she said was, “The Gypsies in Europe never got to stay in any camp very long because they got chased out by the people who already lived in that part of the country.”

  “Why?” Marshall asked. “Why did they chase them?”

  “Well, because they looked different and had different customs. And because they stole things—”

  “Or because people said they stole things,” Toby interrupted.

  April put her hands on her hips and glared at Toby. “It’s my turn to talk. I thought we said we were going to take turns.”

  “Yeah. To talk,” Toby said. “Not to tell lies.”

  “It is not a lie. I read a book that said that Gypsies had very strict rules about not stealing from each other but that they thought it was all right to steal from the Gadje. Gadje,” she repeated, looking at Marshall and Elizabeth. “That’s what they call all the people who aren’t Gypsies, remember?”

  “Well, that’s not what my dad says,” Toby said. “And besides, what else were they going to do? There were laws that said they weren’t allowed to own land or have any real jobs. So sometimes they either had to steal or starve. But lots of the time they just got blamed for things other people stole. Sometimes other people stole things and blamed it on the Gypsies because they knew everybody would believe that Gypsies were guilty. My dad says that happened a lot back in the olden days when my grandmother was living in Romania.”

  “I know.” Melanie was nodding. “I read about it. Lots of things like that happened. And worse things, too. Things like—”

  But Toby interrupted. He was waving his hands around as he talked, and his voice was getting higher and tighter. “Yeah, you know. I mean, people are like that. That’s what my dad says. People just like to blame everything on someone else so they won’t have to admit that anything’s their own fault.” Then he looked right at April and said, “Like how some female types always blame everything that goes wrong on some poor innocent guy and—”

  That was about as far as he got before April grabbed him by the front of his shirt. But Melanie pulled her away. “Hey, cool it,” she said to April. She thought for a moment before she added, “Besides—he’s right about blaming other people. My mom says the same thing. She says all kinds of people waste too much energy blaming everything on other kinds of people.”

  Toby inspected the front of his shirt. “Yeah,” he said. “I totally agree. So I won’t blame you for tearing my shirt.” He gave April one his most maddening grins. “Not until I talk to my lawyer, anyway.”

  April’s fists were clenched and she was still breathing hard when she heard Elizabeth saying, “Toby! Toby! Did you bring all the Gypsy stuff you were going to show us? We can’t wait to see it. Can we, April?”

  “Huh?” Toby stared at Elizabeth blankly for a second before he said, “Oh yeah. The Gypsy stuff. Yeah.” All of a sudden he was grinning as if nothing had happened. He seemed to have forgotten all about being mad, or about teasing either. “Hey, just wait till you see this stuff.”

  As she watched Toby taking off his backpack, April was thinking, What a wishy-washy wimp he is—right in the middle of a good fight one minute, and then … But as Toby began pulling fascinating things out of his backpack, she lost her train of thought.

  First there was a beautiful embroidered shawl with a long silky fringe, and as Toby unwrapped it, a lot of silvery jewelry set with colored stones spilled out. There were bracelets, necklaces, anklets, headbands, and belts, most of which were set with colored jewels and had dangling streams of glittering spangles.

  “Wow!” Melanie said. “This stuff is gorgeous.” She was hanging a silver filigree band set with green stones around her forehead so that the large center stone hung down almost to her eyebrows. “Look, April,” she said. “How do I look?”

  April looked up from where she was trying to fasten a band of spangles around her ankle. “Great. Wow. That looks great.” Forgetting about the anklet, she stood up and adjusted the band on Melanie’s forehead. Then she stood back to admire the effect. To admire the way the green stone, gleaming in the center of Melanie’s smooth brown forehead between her ar
ching black eyebrows, turned her into something beautifully strange and foreign-looking. Before long they were all adorned with bracelets, anklets, and headbands. Even Marshall was wearing a long shiny necklace.

  Elizabeth, running her fingers over her necklace, started to say, “It makes me feel just like …”

  April and Melanie finished the sentence in unison: “… a Gypsy.”

  Of course that was it. Somehow putting on the beautiful old Gypsy jewelry made the difference, and for the first time they were all feeling almost as much like Gypsies as they had felt like Egyptians.

  But then Toby said they had to take it all off. “My dad said I could borrow it to show you but that I’d have to bring it right back,” he said.

  They hated to give it up. April was handing her necklace back to Toby when suddenly her eyes narrowed. “So, how come you told us you guys were going to starve to death when all the time you had all this expensive jewelry?”

  Toby snorted. “That,” he said, “is one stupid question, February. In the first place you can’t eat jewelry. And in the second place my dad would never sell it. Not in a million years. And in the third place all those stones are just colored glass. I mean, you don’t think Gypsies are rich enough to own real rubies and emeralds, do you?”

  April was glaring. “Well, maybe not. Not unless they stole them, anyway.”

  By the time Melanie and Elizabeth broke up that fight, it was four-thirty and past time for Elizabeth and the Rosses to be back home. So everybody got ready to leave by gathering up all their own personal Egyptian stuff that didn’t seem likely to fit into a game about Gypsies.