The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  “Your salary will depend on how well you perform your duties.”

  “What’s the job?”

  Sloth came sniffing at Crawley’s pocket for treats, and the old man pushed him away. “My granddaughter will be spending the next few months with me. You will spend time with her. You will entertain her. You will pretend to like her.”

  I was sensing this haircut was going to be one nasty Mohawk. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Why does something have to be wrong with her?” he snapped.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something in your tone of voice.”

  Crawley wheeled himself around, banging his knee on a little end table. I knew it must have hurt, but he refused to give me the satisfaction of a groan. “As it happens, my granddaughter does have a handicap.”

  “So she’s in a wheelchair, too?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  I waited for more details, but Crawley gave none. So now I was moved from walking dogs to babysitting for some spoiled Veruca Salt-ish little girl.

  “You will be here at ten o’clock sharp tomorrow. But first you will introduce yourself to the shower in your house, and you will dress in something presentable. You will also refrain from calling me Chuckles in front of her.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ve got stuff to do on Saturday.”

  Which was actually just a whole lot of lying around, and I guess he figured that out, because he said: “Don’t force me to make your life more miserable than it already is.”

  I finally realized who he reminded me of: the Emperor in Star Wars. “Fine. But right now I’m gonna walk dogs so the Schwa doesn’t have to do all the work.”

  “You’re such a Boy Scout.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Enough with the insults!” I hooked Gluttony to a leash, and left.

  “Maybe she’s like the Elephant Man.”

  Howie, Ira, and I hung out in my unfinished basement later that night, for the first time in a few weeks. We didn’t find much to say to one another, so we resorted to our old standby, playing video games. Our current choice was “Three Fisted Fury,” in which steroid-pumped opponents, having been exposed to radiation, have grown more than the usual number of arms and must battle for ultimate dominance of the world. You know—just like the movie.

  It was Howie who suggested the Elephant Man theory. We had all been trying to figure out what condition Crawley’s granddaughter suffered from that was bad enough for him to pay me to spend time with her.

  “I mean, she’s got to be ugly in some basic, unnatural way to make it worth money,” says Howie.

  “Maybe not,” said Ira. “Maybe it’s Tourette’s syndrome.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It’s where you have these little seizures and can’t stop cursing people out.”

  “Sounds like most people I know.” I swung at his character on the screen with my left and right arms, then caught him off guard with an uppercut from my third arm. He lost ten points of life.

  “Hey,” says Ira, “what if she’s the surviving half of Siamese twins connected at the head, but separated at birth. Only one of them could survive, because there was only one brain between them.”

  “It sounds logical,” says Howie. At this point his screen character sneaks up from behind and nails me with a dropkick from a leg I didn’t even know he had.

  “Hey, no fair—you took an extra dose of radiation, didn’t you?”

  I turned from Ira’s bruiser, who was still dazed, and began a few roundhouse kicks on Howie’s guy. “Maybe it’s just something simple,” I suggested, “like she’s got a peg leg or something.”

  “Maybe two peg legs,” says Howie.

  “Or a peg head,” says Ira. “I’d pay to see that.”

  “You’re not the one paying—Crawley is.” I spun on Ira, gave his character a double-death blow, and he was finished. Ira dropped his controller in frustration. Now it was just Howie and me. I tore into him brutally. It wasn’t because I cared about beating him; I just wanted it done. Kind of like the way you finish that last piece of pizza, just because it’s there.

  It only took a minute for the game to be over, and my character was raising all three of his arms in triumph to the sound of canned cheers. I sighed and put down my controller. “Hey, is it just me, or is this game less fun than it used to be?”

  Ira and Howie don’t have an opinion. Somehow I didn’t expect them to. “The new version comes out in a month. It’ll be tons better,” says Howie.

  I nodded in agreement because I didn’t want to talk about what was really going through my mind. I was thinking about bamboo. Last year, my science teacher said that when a bamboo plant is established enough, you can actually watch it growing before your eyes. I wondered if it was sometimes the same with humans—because I was feeling this weird vertigo, like I had suddenly sprouted far beyond Howie and Ira. I knew it just like I knew that no future version of “Three Fisted Fury” was going to interest me like it did a year ago.

  I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, but at first glance I didn’t see anybody there.

  “Hey, Schwa,” I said.

  The moment Howie and Ira realized who it was, they picked up their game controllers and quickly started a new game, ignoring him. It made me mad, but I didn’t say anything. For Howie and Ira, it was okay when the Schwa was just a plaything—just some weird object that had strayed into their airspace like a UFO—but once they lost interest in him, he was no longer welcome on their radar screen.

  “I’ve solved at least part of the mystery,” the Schwa said, ignoring Ira and Howie just as well as they ignored him.

  “Which mystery?”

  “Crawley’s granddaughter.”

  At this, Ira and Howie couldn’t help but show a little bit of interest.

  “What did you find out?” I asked.

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  He hands me this printout of a page he must have gotten from some old Internet newspaper archive. An old society page from the Daily News. It shows a picture of a baby with the caption: Mr. and Mrs. Charles Crawley III announce the birth of a daughter, Lexis Lynn Crawley.

  As Ira and Howie huddled around me to look at the picture, Schwa got shouldered out of the way.

  “Lexis?” said Ira. “She’s named after a car?”

  “Spelled differently,” I pointed out.

  “Well,” says Howie, “it looks like she didn’t have a peg head at birth.”

  In fact, it didn’t look like there was anything wrong with baby Lexis at all. “Hey, wait a second,” I said. “Look at the date on that article—she’s not a little kid at all. She’s our age.”

  “Hmm,” said Ira. “Whatever’s wrong with her, maybe she wasn’t born with it.”

  “Maybe she developed leprosy at puberty,” says Howie. “I hear that happens.”

  “Yeah, maybe in Calcutta or something, but not in Brooklyn.”

  “Maybe she traveled,” says Howie, “and brought it back with her, like the flu or mad cow.”

  “Well,” says Ira, “whatever’s up with her, you’ll find out soon enough.” He and Howie returned to their spot on the floor and picked up their game controllers.

  “C’mon, Antsy, you playing or what?”

  The Schwa may have been used to being treated like he wasn’t there, but it didn’t mean he had to like it. I could see an anger beginning to rise in him, simmering like beef stew in my mother’s Crock-Pot, which meant indigestion and heartburn were only moments away.

  “Hey!” he shouted to Howie and Ira. “The ice cream man’s giving out free Popsicles,” he said. If they heard him, they ignored him. He got louder. “Did you hear Martians invaded Long Island?” No response. His Crock-Pot began to boil. “Tidal wave’s headed for Brooklyn,” the Schwa shouted at them. “We have five minutes to live.”

  Howie and Ira just kept on playing.

  I could see what was about to happen here. It was what you call �
�en passant.” It’s a move in chess. One pawn gives an enemy pawn the cold shoulder as it moves two squares ahead. So the ignored pawn has the right to kick the rude pawn’s sorry butt off the board, just because it wants to. It’s the only move I know where you get busted just for ignoring the enemy.

  So here I am standing in my own basement, watching Howie and Ira walking straight into an en passant. It was their way of putting our friendship to the test. We’ve had enough of the Schwa, is what they were silently saying. Are you our friend, or are you his?

  I should have done what I always do when I’m losing a chess match: accidentally knock over the board. But the Schwa made his move before I could do a thing, cutting in front of me and advancing on Howie and Ira. I stood back and let him do it. It was his right, and I wasn’t going to rob him of it. He got in front of them, blocking their view of their video game. “Hey, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m here.”

  Ira paused the game to keep his character from getting mauled by Howie’s mutant. “We know you’re here,” Ira says. “Now do us all a favor and stop being here.”

  Then the Schwa reached over and ejected the game from the system. The screen went black.

  “Let’s see if you notice me now!” And he cracked the game disc in half.

  This was the unthinkable. All three of us stared at the Schwa in shock. The Schwa dropped the broken disc and stormed upstairs. Howie and Ira looked at me, still in denial that the game had indeed been destroyed.

  “You gonna let him get away with that?” Ira asked.

  “Shut up! Just shut up, okay?” I ran upstairs after the Schwa, taking three steps at a time, not even sure what I was gonna do when I caught him. He broke my game, so a pounding was in order, right? But I didn’t feel like pounding him. I felt more like pounding Ira and Howie. By the time I got upstairs, the Schwa was already out the front door. I didn’t catch up with him until he was halfway to the corner, and I practically had to wrestle him until he stopped.

  “What, are you totally psycho?” I shouted.

  “Maybe I am!” he screamed back at me. “Maybe that’s just what I am. Maybe I’m that quiet guy who suddenly goes nuts and then you find half the neighborhood in his freezer.”

  I gotta admit, that one stumped me for a second—but only for a second. “Which half?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Which half of the neighborhood? Could you make it the people on the other side of Avenue T, because I never really liked them anyway.”

  I could see him trying to force down a grin. “You’re not funny.”

  “So you gonna tell me why you trashed my game?”

  “You said I’d be a legend.”

  “What?”

  “Going into Old Man Crawley’s—surviving to talk about it. ‘You’ll be a legend,’ you said. But I’m not. Not even Tiggor and the Tiggorhoids care. They’ve already forgotten I exist.”

  “Why do you even care about those boneheads?”

  “It’s not just them,” he says. “It’s everyone. I’m sick of being looked over. Shut out. And now even Crawley’s forgetting about me, and picking you for granddaughter duty.”

  “So what? It doesn’t look like it’s gonna be much fun.”

  He took a deep breath. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I’m just afraid I’ll end up like . . .”

  But he refused to finish the thought. He left and I didn’t follow him, because I knew he didn’t want me to. Instead I just went back home. Dump the board. End the game. Nobody loses.

  When I got back home, Howie and Ira were playing another video game.

  “That guy’s one egg short of a full deck,” Howie says.

  “You should sue,” says Ira.

  I tried to say something, but words failed me. I understood why the Schwa did what he did. He had stood in front of them, and still he wasn’t visible. He broke the game, and even then it didn’t change anything. By tomorrow Howie and Ira will have forgotten about it.

  Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll end up just like . . .

  Just like who? And suddenly I could hear the Schwa’s voice in my head. Just like my mother. That’s what he was going to say!

  “Are you gonna play, Antsy, or just stand there?”

  I wanted to talk to them about what the Schwa had said, but I knew it was pointless. It was like Howie and Ira were now on the other side of thick soundproof glass.

  “I’m not feeling too good,” I told them. “Maybe you guys should go.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I feel a case of leprosy coming on.”

  They stood and said their good-byes. It took a bit longer and was a bit more awkward than the usual “see ya.” Maybe because somewhere deep down we all knew that this wasn’t “see ya.” This was more like “so long.”

  8. Are Those Your Fingers in My Mouth, or Are You Just Happy to Not See Me?

  I put the Schwa out of my mind, which is not hard to do, as you already know. Even with his meltdown, even with the broken game disc, I woke up in the morning without him crossing my mind once. My thoughts were occupied with the mystery of Lexie Crawley. She was fourteen, not four. I wish Crawley would have told me that up front. It put a whole new spin on the situation.

  “What are you all dressed up for?” my mother asked as she peered into my bedroom that morning.

  “Funeral,” I told her.

  She studied me, trying to decide if I was telling the truth or just being my normal nuisance. “Who died?” she asked.

  “Your sense of humor,” I told her.

  She frowned at me, and made like she was going to match wisecracks, but instead she just came into my room and straightened the knot on my tie. “You got someone to impress at nine in the morning?” she asked.

  “Ten,” I told her. I lifted my neck so she could get the tie just right.

  “Is she pretty?”

  I just hope she’s human, I wanted to say, but instead I just shrugged.

  Mom stepped back to admire me. “You look handsome,” she said. “Just don’t make an idiot of yourself.”

  Unless I wanted to climb on the roof again, the only way into Crawley’s apartment was through the restaurant, which was closed this time of the morning. After knocking a few times on the front entrance, I went around back, where a custodian let me in. The restaurant was creepy in the off-hours. Chairs were stacked on top of tables, the floor was still wet from the custodian’s mop.

  I climbed the stairs to the old, unused part of the restaurant and the big wooden door of the apartment toward the back. Even before I got to the door, the dogs began to bark.

  “Get out of the way, you mutts,” I could hear Crawley gripe on the other side of the door. “Get back, or I swear I’ll put you in the gumbo!” Then I heard all the dead bolts snap open and he pulled the door just wide enough for me to squeeze in without letting the dogs out. I was attacked by fourteen tongues before Crawley grabbed a handful of treats from his vest pocket and hurled them back toward the living room. The dogs, who knew the drill well, took off.

  “Who’s there, Grandpa?” I heard a girl’s voice call from deeper in the apartment.

  “Just the dog walker,” Crawley said.

  “Dog walker?” I said. “But I thought—” Crawley rapped me hard in the arm to shut me up. “Ow!”

  “It’s the dog walker,” Crawley said again. “He’s here to walk the dogs.” Then he turned to me. “Where’s your friend?”

  Usually I was pretty quick to catch on to things, but today I was a bit behind the curve. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say. “Uh . . . he had to go to a funeral.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” I heard Lexie say. At least her voice sounded nice. I could see her stepping out of the kitchen now, but Crawley kept the place so dark I couldn’t see her face.

  Crawley looked at me. “I guess you’ll have to walk the dogs all by yourself, then,” he said. And repeated, “All by yourself.”

  “Uh . . . sure, I guess,” I sai
d.

  And then Lexie said, “I could help.”

  Finally I figured out what was going on here, and I felt like a moron for not catching on sooner. As soon as Lexie offered to help, Crawley smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. This was a setup. “I don’t know, Lexie . . . these dogs might be too strong for you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous—they’re no stronger than Moxie, and if I go with your dog walker, I won’t even have to take Moxie along.”

  Lexie finally stepped out of the shadows. I didn’t see anything wrong with her at all. Tourette’s syndrome, I thought. Any second she’s gonna start cursing me out.

  Actually, she was kind of pretty. Not perfect, of course, but then I wasn’t one to judge. There was something strange about her eyes. They were half closed, like she just spent an hour in Mr. Gandler’s social studies class, which, by the way, is a torture I wouldn’t even wish on my worst enemy.

  Lexie stuck out her hand for me to shake. I had to move a few steps forward to grab her hand, and the moment I did, I figured the whole thing out.

  “You’re blind!” I hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, but well, there it was.

  Crawley gave me a look of disgust that could spoil milk. “How very observant of you.”

  “Sorry,” I said to Lexie, “but your grandfather had me thinking you were a mutant or something.”

  “Grandpa thinks everyone’s a mutant.” She kissed him on top of the head.

  “Everyone is,” he grumbled.

  A golden retriever much calmer than the other dogs paced out from the kitchen, wearing a harness and a rigid halter. A Seeing Eye dog. “This is Moxie,” she said, and I knelt down to pet him as he came to me. “He’ll be jealous when we walk the other dogs,” Lexie said, “but he’ll get over it.”

  We put two dogs on leashes. Moxie whined a bit, as Lexie predicted, and I led her out.

  “Shouldn’t I help you down the stairs or something?” I asked.

  “Why?” she answered. “Five paces, turn right, twelve paces, turn left, twenty-two steps down, then nine paces to the door.”