The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  Walking dogs also meant there was less time to hang out with my other friends. Namely, Howie and Ira. It’s not like they made any extra effort to see me anyway.

  During our second week of canine slavery, however, Howie did join the Schwa and me for a few minutes one afternoon while we walked Hope and Lust.

  “I can’t hang out long,” says Howie. “I gotta walk my little brother to tae kwan do.”

  “Is he a sin or a virtue?” the Schwa asked, but it goes right over Howie’s head.

  I thought he might offer to help us walk the dogs, at least for a minute, but his hands stayed firmly shoved in his pockets. “Is Crawley as crazy as they say?”

  I tugged on the leash to keep Lust from going after a passing poodle. “Well, let’s put it this way: If he’s got bats in his belfry, he nails them to the wall to watch them wriggle.”

  The Schwa laughed.

  “He’s real mean, huh?” says Howie.

  “He hates the world and the world hates him right back.” What I didn’t say was how much the nasty old guy was growing on me. I actually looked forward to seeing him, just so I could irritate him.

  Right about now Howie looks over his shoulder like the FBI might be reporting his activities to his parents, who have recently begun a policy of preemptive grounding. “Listen, I gotta go. So long, Antsy,” and he takes off.

  It would have been all fine and good, except for one thing. He didn’t say good-bye to the Schwa. It seemed to slip his mind that the Schwa was even there. I could tell the Schwa didn’t like this, but he didn’t say anything about it—he just looked down at Hope, who was happily sniffing gum spots on the sidewalk.

  We were heading back to Crawley’s for the next two dogs when the Schwa broke the silence. “They didn’t even notice it was orange?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The sombrero. Not a single person noticed it was orange? Not a single person even noticed it was a sombrero?”

  It was the first time he had mentioned the experiments. When we were doing them, he seemed fine. He took a scientific interest in the results. It had never occurred to me that they might have bothered him.

  “Not one.”

  “Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “Go figure.”

  “Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” I told him. “This Schwa Effect. It’s a natural ability—you know, like those people who can memorize the phone book and stuff—‘idiot savants.’” This was just getting worse by the minute. “Anyway, it’s a skill you oughta be proud of.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell me how proud you feel when you don’t get a report card because the teacher forgot to make you one. Or when the bus doesn’t stop for you because the driver doesn’t notice you’re at the stop. Or when your own father makes dinner for himself but not for you because it slipped his mind that you were there.”

  “You’re making that up,” I finally said. “That doesn’t happen.”

  “Oh yeah? Come to my house for dinner sometime.”

  The Schwa hadn’t really meant it as an invitation, but I took it as one. I was curious. I had to know just what kind of home environment could turn out an invisible-ish kid. That, and I wanted to know more about his mysteriously missing mother, but I didn’t dare tell him that. I figured his reluctance to talk about his home life must have been because he was embarrassed about it—like maybe he lived in a broken-down shack, or something.

  The Schwa lived at the edge of our neighborhood, on a street I never had been on before. When I arrived there, I have to say I was disappointed by what I saw. It was a row of small two-story homes, packed in tight, with driveways in between. His house wasn’t invisible. It wasn’t even unnoticeable. In fact, it stood out. All the other homes on the street had fake plastic siding. You know the stuff—plastic that’s supposed to look like aluminum that’s supposed to look like wood. While the rest of the homes were white, eggshell, or light blue, the Schwa’s house was canary yellow. I had to double-check the address to make sure I had the right place. The front yard was well cared for. There was even a little bubbling rock fountain in the corner that appeared to actually be made of rock and not Pisher Plastic. It was exemplary, to borrow a word I missed on my last vocabulary test: the perfect example of what a front yard should be.

  There was a doormat that said: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW, AND I’D HAVE NO MORTGAGE. I could hear music playing somewhere inside. Guitar. I rang the bell, and in a moment the door opened and no one appeared to be standing there.

  “Hi, Schwa.”

  “Hi, Antsy.” The shadows fell just the right way to camouflage him against the rest of the room. I blinked a few times, and he came into focus. He didn’t sound particularly pleased that I was there. It was more like he was resigned to the fact. He showed me in and introduced me to his father.

  They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but looking at the Schwa and his father, I would say the apple rolled clear into an orange grove. The man was about as un-Schwa-like as could be. He wore white overalls with paint stains all over them—the Schwa had said he was a housepainter. Right now he wasn’t painting, he was sitting in the living room playing a twelve-string guitar—I mean really playing, not just strumming. He had a ponytail with a few strands of gray, the same color as his guitar strings.

  Not only was he visible, but he actually stood out.

  “Are you sure you’re not adopted?” I asked. But I could tell there was enough of a resemblance to make DNA testing unnecessary.

  “I look like him,” Schwa said, “but in most other ways I take after my mother.”

  At the mention of his mother, I casually looked around for any sign of her, but there were no pictures, no feminine touches.

  “Hey, Dad, this is my friend Antsy.”

  Mr. Schwa continued to play, not noticing.

  “Dad,” said the Schwa, a bit louder this time. Still he just played his guitar. The Schwa sighed.

  “Mr. Schwa?” I said.

  He stopped playing immediately and looked around, a bit bewildered. “Oh—you must be Calvin’s friend,” he said. “I’ll go get him.”

  “I’m right here, Dad.”

  “Did you offer your friend something to drink?”

  “You want something to drink?” the Schwa asked.

  “No.”

  “He says no.”

  “Is your friend staying for dinner?”

  “Yeah,” I said, then whispered to the Schwa, “I thought you told him I was coming.”

  “I did,” said the Schwa. “Twice.”

  It turns out the Schwa’s father was terminally absentminded. There were little notes everywhere to remind him of things. The refrigerator was so full of yellow Post-it notes, it looked like Big Bird. The notes were all written by the Schwa. Half day at school on Wednesday, one said. Back-to-School night on Friday, said another. FRIEND COMING OVER FOR DINNER TONIGHT, said one in big bold letters.

  “Was he always like that, or was it, like, from breathing paint fumes?” I asked after Mr. Schwa went back to playing guitar.

  “He fell off a ladder a few years ago, and suffered head trauma. He’s okay now, but he’s like a little kid in some ways.”

  “Wow,” I said. “So who takes care of who?”

  “Exactly,” says the Schwa. “But it’s not so bad. And my aunt Peggy comes over a few times a week to help out.”

  Apparently this wasn’t one of Aunt Peggy’s nights. There was a raw chicken in a big pan on top of the oven. I poked the chicken. It was room temperature. Who knew how long it had been sitting out.

  “Maybe we should call in for pizza.”

  “Naah,” said the Schwa, turning on the oven to preheat. “Cooking it should kill any deadly bacteria.”

  The Schwa took me on the grand tour. The walls of the house were white, except one wall in each room was painted a different color. The effect was actually pretty cool. There was one forest green wall in the living room, a red wall in the kitchen, a blue wall in the dinin
g room. The colored wall in the Schwa’s room was beige. I wasn’t surprised.

  “So,” I asked about as delicately as I could, “how long have you and your father been . . . on your own?”

  “Since I was five,” he said. “You wanna see my paper-clip collection?”

  I replayed in my mind what he had said, certain I had somehow heard it wrong. “You’re . . . kidding me, right?”

  Then he reached under his bed and pulled out a box. Inside were little plastic zipper bags—at least a hundred of them—and in each one there was . . . yes, you guessed it, a paper clip. Little ones, big ones, those fat black ones that hold whole stacks of paper together.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  I just stared, dumbfounded. “Exactly when did they release you from the nuthouse, Schwa?”

  He reached into the box and pulled out a little baggie that held a silver clip. “This clip held together pages of the Nuclear Arms Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev.”

  “No way.”

  I looked at it closely. It looked just like an ordinary paper clip.

  He pulled out another one. It was tarnished bronze. “This one held together the original lyric sheets of ‘Hey Jude.’” He pulled out another one with a blue plastic coating. “This one was clipped to a mission manual for the space shuttle.”

  “You mean it’s been in space?”

  The Schwa nodded.

  “Wow!”

  He showed me clip after clip, each one more exciting than the last. “Where did you get them?”

  “I wrote to famous people, asking them for a paper clip from something important. You’d be amazed how many of them wrote back.”

  It was genius! Most of the time people are looking for the letters and documents and people that make history, but no one thinks about the little things that hold history together. Leave it to the Schwa to think of such a thing. It was, at the same time, the dullest and most interesting collection I had ever seen in my life.

  Dinner wasn’t ready until after nine, and it was the second worst chicken I’d ever tasted, beaten only by a dish at a friend’s birthday party that tasted more like it was made from the piñata. Even so, I was glad I had dinner with the Schwa and his father, who continued to play guitar during the meal, greasy chicken fingers and all.

  “It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world,” I commented to the Schwa while his dad did the dishes.

  “Yeah, brain damage’ll do that to you,” the Schwa said as he went to rewash the dishes his father didn’t quite get clean. “But I wouldn’t advise it.”

  The next night I ended up alone with my own father for dinner. Mom was off shopping with Christina, and Frankie was off with his friends, doing whatever it was honor students did on their higher plane of existence. I couldn’t help but think about the Schwa, and how he came home every day to a father who might or might not feed him. That wasn’t my dad. I might go unnoticed, but never unfed. And I never had to be the one taking care of him.

  Dad secretly loved when Mom wasn’t around for dinner, because he got the kitchen all to himself—and although none of us kids would admit it out loud, Dad was the better cook. Tonight Dad whipped up Fettucine al Bonano—his own special dish that magically transformed whatever leftovers were in the fridge into a killer pasta dish. The problem today wasn’t in the cooking, it was in the eating. Dad and I never have problems talking to each other when there are other people around, but when it’s just the two of us, it’s like we’re together on a stage and we’ve forgotten our lines.

  “Did you break Manny yet?” he asked after a few silent minutes into the meal.

  I shrugged, fettucine dangling down to my chin. “I’m not sure. His body survived detonation, but his head is missing. It could be in orbit for all we know.”

  “If he really turns out to be unbreakable, your old man gets a raise and a promotion.”

  I nodded and sucked in some more fettucine. The silence returned. I like being with my dad, but sitting across from him with nothing but food between us makes me uncomfortable. I guess I’m so used to being semivisible at home I don’t know how to handle being the only available focus of attention. And now as I sat with Dad, avoiding eye contact, it hit me that maybe he felt the same way.

  “They won’t do both,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “They give you a promotion so they don’t have to give you a raise. They give you a raise just so they don’t have to give you a promotion. They don’t do both.”

  He looked at me, grinning and nodding like I just quoted Shakespeare. “You’re right,” he said. “How do you know that?”

  I shrugged and thought about what the Schwa had once said about me having business savvy. “I don’t know. It just makes sense.” And then I added, “I probably heard it on TV or something.”

  We chowed down more food, barely looking at each other.

  “Mom tells me you’re walking dogs for that old guy who owns Crawley’s.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I’m being a good Philistine.”

  “Samaritan,” he said. “I didn’t even know you liked dogs.”

  “Neither did I.”

  I toyed with telling him about Old Man Crawley’s threat to get him fired if I didn’t walk the dogs . . . but didn’t. Crawley and his dogs were my problem.

  I finished up my fettucine and began thinking about what the Schwa’s dinner was like tonight. Did he have to cook it himself? Did he cook for himself and his dad? Or was this one of the lucky nights when the Schwa could relax and Aunt Peggy did the cooking? Then I wondered if Aunt Peggy ever forgot to set a plate for him, like his dad.

  “Listen, I was thinking about having a friend over for dinner.”

  “Someone new, or the usual suspects?”

  “New.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No such luck.”

  “Who?”

  “They call him the Schwa.”

  My dad piled some more fettucine onto his plate. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Does something have to be wrong with him for him to be my friend? Is that what you mean?”

  “Take it easy. I just thought I heard something funny in your voice.”

  I didn’t think my dad had it in him to tune into someone’s tone. He never seemed to be able to tell when Mom was about to get mad at him, and he usually needed one of us kids to tell him what brainless, insensitive thing he had done. But this time he called it right.

  I decided to be direct. “He’s invisible,” I said.

  To my dad’s credit, he took this in stride, although he did stop chewing for a few seconds. “Does he become visible again when he takes off his ring?” Dad asked. “Does he hang out with elves and dwarfs?”

  It took me a few seconds, then I got it, and laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s got hairy feet, too.”

  “Well, make sure he wipes them on the doormat, or your mother will brain him.”

  7. The Lowest-Paid Male Escort on the Entire Eastern Seaboard, Except for Maybe the Bronx

  Life is like a bad haircut. At first it looks awful, then you kind of get used to it, and before you know it, it grows out and you gotta get another haircut that maybe won’t be so bad, unless of course you keep going to SuperClips, where the hairstylists are so terrible they oughta be using safety scissors, and when they’re done you look like your head got caught in a ceiling fan. So life goes on, good haircut, bad haircut, until finally you go bald, and it don’t matter no more.

  I told this wisdom to my mother, and she said I oughta put it in a book, then burn it. Some people just can’t appreciate the profound.

  Anyway, the deal with Crawley and his dogs was like a bad haircut I was beginning to get used to. I wasn’t expecting to get clipped again by a hit-and-run barber.

  “Let Mr. Schwa go ahead. I want to talk to you alone.”

  Crawley always called us “Mr. Schwa” and “Mr. Bonano.” At first it annoyed me on account of my teachers call us “Mr.”
when they were mad at us. But then, since Crawley was always mad at us, it kind of had some logic to it.

  This was the third week of our dog days. Until now, Crawley had little to say to us except to comment on our unacceptable wardrobe, how unpleasant my acne was, and couldn’t we find some better deodorant, because according to him, after a day of school we smelled worse than fourteen dogs. It was always an adventure with him, never knowing what he was going to gripe about when we showed up. He was usually much more on my case than the Schwa’s. I assumed it was just the Schwa Effect at work. Little did I know he was sizing me up for a higher position in the Crawley Universe.

  “Mr. Schwa, I said you could go.”

  The Schwa looked at me and shrugged. “Fine. I’ll notify your next of kin, Antsy.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate it. If I live, I’ll call you.”

  Once the Schwa was gone, Crawley stared at me from his wheelchair across the room for way too long.

  “So what’s up, Chuckles?” I had stopped calling him “sir” or Mr. Crawley. The way I figured it, those were terms of respect, and he really hadn’t earned mine. Chuckles was my little nickname for him. It started as Chuck, but Chuckles seemed so much more appropriate—especially because of the way he frowned when I said it.

  “I am not a clown,” he said. “Kindly refrain from calling me that.”

  I just grinned. He frowned some more. “From now on, Mr. Schwa will walk the dogs alone.”

  “That’s not fair,” I told him. “It’ll take him till nighttime.”

  “I will pay him,” Crawley said. “Ten cents per dog per day.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “What are you, his attorney?”

  “His manager.”

  “I see. All right. Twenty-five.”

  “And that’s only if he agrees.”

  Crawley didn’t answer that—maybe because it was a fact of life that no one ever disagreed with him. “As for you, I have another task for you.”

  “Do I get paid, too?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. This scared me, because Crawley gave money like bulls gave milk: not at all, and you got gored for asking. If he had already decided this was a paying job, it must be horrible beyond words.