The Gypsy Game Read Online Free Page B

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 snappedout 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 thattime 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 timesbefore 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