Free Snyder, Zilpha Keatley by The Egypt Game [txt]

most disgusting boys in the sixth grade, in a fascinating sort of way. They were best friends and always together, and everybody always voted for them for everything and wanted to be on their team. But not April and Melanie. April and Melanie always told each other that Ken and Toby were just ordinary
    (ugh) boys, and it was stupid the way everybody treated them so special. April and Melanie just couldn’t figure out what people saw in them.
    Of course, Toby had a special talent for getting people off the hook by making the teacher laugh. Just when Mrs. Granger was really building up a head of steam over something, Toby would make some little remark and Mrs. Granger would start choking and have to turn her back. Sometimes she’d try to pick things up where she left off, but all that lost momentum made a big difference.
    Ken was sort of cute in a big blunt cocky way. He had a clean-cut all-American-oriental look about him, and he walked with a high-school swagger. Toby was thinner, with big ears that stuck out of his shaggy hair and enormous brown eyes that were always up to something, like a pair of T.V. screens turned on full blast. But right now you couldn’t see what either one of them really looked like at all.
    Ken had a man’s old overcoat on over a pillow-padded hunchback, and (wouldn’t you know it) rubber monster hands and feet, too, as well as the mask. Ken’s father sold a lot of real estate and he could afford expensive stuff like that. Toby was the box man. He had a small box over his head, with a Saran-wrap covered opening shaped like a T.V. screen to look out through. The rest of him was covered with all sorts of other boxes all strung together and painted
    black and covered with pasted-on ads out of papers and magazines. There were Alka-Seltzer and Pepto-Bismol ads pasted on his stomach box, aspirin ads on his head box, and even Right Guard ad under his left arm.
    “Boy! Are you two in character,” April said. “A monster and a pile of junk.”
    “I’ll have you know that I represent the New American,” Toby said haughtily. Then he grinned. “It was my dad’s idea. He says it’s a new art form he just invented.”
    Toby’s dad was a graduate student at the university. He was also a sculptor who made statues out of all kinds of junk.
    “An art form!” April said. “Well, all I can say

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    IS-
    “Don’t,” Toby interrupted. “You’d just show off your ignorance.”
    “Come on, Tobe,” Ken said. “We’re getting left behind.”
    “Yeah, you little kids ought to keep up with the group better,” Toby said, as he started off up the sidewalk. “You’re liable to get hurt.”
    “Little kids!” Melanie yelled after him. “Look who’s talking!”
    Marshall ran after Toby and gave him a shove on the rear of his biggest box. “We’re not little kids,” he said. “We’re Egyptians.”
    Toby swiveled his T.V. head around and surveyed the damage. “Hey, watch it!” he said. “You just bent my Jockey shorts ad.”
    April and Melanie didn’t believe in encouraging Toby by laughing at him, but that was too much. By the time the Egyptians got over their convulsions of giggles, Ken and Toby had disappeared around the corner, and the lady whose walk they were on was calling to ask if they wanted some candy or not.
    After that Melanie suggested that maybe they’d better stay up with the group a little better or the fathers would notice and start watching them. But even when they were trying, it wasn’t easy to catch up because their costumes were such a success. At almost every house they had to be admired and questioned and other members of the family had to be called to see them-particularly Elizabeth and Marshall. Everyone thought Elizabeth and Marshall were just “darling,” and “adorable,” and they had to be admired and fussed over before the Egyptians could take their candy and leave.
    At last, at one house they had to wait while the man got his flash camera out to take