The Schwa Was Here

“What?” the Schwa asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s like . . . It’s like I can’t get a clear impres­sion. Your face feels...”

“Invisible,” I suggested.

“No,” said Lexie, searching for the right word. Now she moved her fingers across his face more intently than she had searched mine. And although she touched his lips, she didn’t check out his teeth. If she did, I would have thrown a hemor­rhage, although I can’t really say why.

“His face is ... pure,” she said. “Flavorless—like sweet-cream ice cream.”

The Schwa smiled. “Yeah? My face is like ice cream?”

“Sweet cream,” I reminded him. “It has no taste.”

“Yes, it does,” said Lexie. “It’s just very subtle.”

“Nobody likes it,” I said.

“It’s my favorite,” Lexie answered.

The Schwa only grinned, and threw a disgustingly happy glance in my direction.

Now let’s be clear on something here. I had only just met Lexie, and she wasn’t really my type. I mean, I’m Italian, she’s blind. It was a mixed relationship. But seeing her fingers on Schwa’s face ... I don’t know, it did something to me.

The two of us had lunch down in Crawley’s restaurant. Lob­ster on the house. Schwa, in his slippery way, appeared at the table and tried to squeeze in, but I was ready for him. I quickly brought down two dogs for him to walk, and no sooner had I put the leashes in his hands than the maitre d’ threw a connip­tion fit about health codes, and quickly shooed Schwa and the dogs out the back way.

“Your friend’s funny,” Lexie said after he was gone.

“Yeah,” I said, “Funny in the head.” Right away I felt this un­pleasant stab of guilt for turning on the Schwa like that.

Lexie smirked, and for a moment, I forgot she was blind, be­cause I knew she was seeing everything.

9. Maybe They Had It Right in France Because Getting My Head Lopped Off by a Guillotine Would Have Been Easier

Life went from being a bad haircut to being an algebra exam. In algebra, things only make sense once you’re done, there are no shortcuts, and you always have to show your work. The problem becomes more complicated the second you add a new variable. I mean, solving for x was hard enough, but with me, Lexie, and the Schwa, too, I had to solve for x, y, and z. When things get that complicated, you might as well just put down your pencil and admit defeat.

The thing is, the Schwa was not just your typical variable—he was like i, the imaginary number. The square root of nega­tive one, which doesn’t exist, yet does in its own weird way. The Schwa was on the cusp of being there and not being there, which I guess is why he clung so tightly to Lexie and me.

The Schwa called me the next morning to invite me over for lunch. I was busy working on my social studies report, the his­tory of capital punishment—which wasn’t a bad topic, since it involved beheadings and electrocutions—but it was Sunday. iSunday and homework go together like oil and water, which, by the way, is what they boiled criminals in during the early Middle Ages. Oil, not water, although I didn’t realize the hot water I would find myself in by accepting the Schwa’s lunch invitation.

Mr. Schwa wasn’t wearing his painter’s clothes when he an­swered the door, but the jeans and shirt he wore did have little paint splotches all over them. He also held a butcher knife.

“Can I help you?”

If those paint splatters on his clothes had been red, I proba­bly would have run off screaming.

“I’m Calvin’s friend. Antsy.”

“Of course you are. I think Calvin’s at school. . . but then, if he were at school you’d be at school, too, so maybe he’s not.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Of course it is! Come on in.”

I took another look at the knife, and went in against my bet­ter judgment.

The Schwa was in the kitchen, rearranging the Post-it notes on the fridge. “Hi, Antsy,” he said in such good spirits I won­dered if he had won the Lottery or something.

“Have a Coke,” he said, shoving the can into my hand. “My dad’s making franks and beans for lunch.”

Now that he had been reminded of what he had been doing, Mr. Schwa returned to the kitchen.

“C’mon,” said the Schwa, “there’s something I want to show you.” The Schwa dragged me to his room, where his box of zip-locked paper clips sat on his bed.

He reached in and gingerly pulled out a little bag. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this before!” The thing inside did not look like a paper clip. It might have once been a brass brad or something, but now it was broken, and all crusty black. The Schwa held the bag like the little thing inside would turn to dust in seconds.

“It looks like a bird turd.”

“It’s an old-fashioned paper fastener.” He smiled so wide, it was like his head was on hinges, like one of those ceramic cookie-jar heads. “It’s from the Titanic.”

I looked at him, sure he was about to burst out laughing, but he was serious.

“Where do you find a paper clip from the Titanic?”

“I wrote to the Nova Scotia Maritime Museum six times,” he said, “because I knew they had a ton of Titanic junk stored away—mounds of stuff that wasn’t interesting enough to put on display. Finally I faked a letter from my doctor, telling them I had a rare brain disorder—”

«—and your last brain-fried wish was for a paper clip from the Titanic?”

The Schwa nodded. “I can’t believe they bought it.”

“I don’t think they did. I think they sent it just to get rid of you.”

The smile kind of shrunk from his face, and he looked down. “So, do you want it?”

“Me? After all you went through to get it, why would you give it to me?”

“Well, if you don’t want this one, you can have another one.” He dug into his box and came up with one little bag after an­other. “How about this one from Michael Jordan’s first basket­ball contract—or this one? It’s rumored to have been clipped to the results of an alien autopsy. I got it on eBay.”

“Whoa, slow down.” I grabbed one of his hands, and the box flipped off his bed, dumping little packets all over the floor.

“Sorry, Schwa.”

“No problem.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s no free lunch—and no free paper clips either. We stood there looking at each other. “So what is it you want?” I asked him.

He sighed one of those breathy sighs like a convict does mo­ments before his execution—not that I’ve ever seen that.

“You gotta let me have her, Antsy.”

“Her? Her who?”

“Lexie! Who else? Please, you gotta let me!”

He grabbed me, pleading. I shook him off. “She’s a person, she’s not a thing. I can’t ?let you have her.’”

“You know what I mean.” He got up and started pacing in short U-turns, like a condemned man waiting for a pardon from a governor who was probably out playing golf. “We were made for each other! Don’t you see? Invisible guy/blind girl— it’s perfect. I even read it in a book once.”

“You read too many books. Go see some movies. In the movies invisible guys never get the girl. Instead they usually turn evil and die horrible, painful deaths.”

“Not always,” he said.