The Schwa Was Here

by Neal Shusterman

  She navigated the stairs with confidence.

  We crossed the street and walked the sidewalk that lined the bay so we wouldn’t have to cross any more streets. Lexie held my arm as we walked a slow measured pace, with Prudence and Envy tugging on their leashes, and I silently wished I had lifted weights more, because she was holding on to my nearly nonexistent left bicep. I kept waiting for her to make a crack about it.

  “So, how much is my grandfather paying you to entertain me?” she asked.

  “Paying me? Why would he be paying me? I’m the dog walker. I walk the dogs.”

  “Nice try, but I know my grandfather. How much is he paying you to spend time with me?”

  I was going to continue denying it, but I figured this blind girl could see through anything.

  “Enough,” I said.

  “Whatever it is, he’s ripping you off,” she said. “Ask for more.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Why not? Your time is worth at least minimum wage, isn’t it? And what about an expense account? Make sure he pays when you take me out to lunch, and when you take me dancing.”

  “Dancing? I’m taking you dancing?”

  Lexie laughed. “Well, not if you don’t want to. The boy last year couldn’t dance at all.”

  So now I was really beginning to stutter and sputter and make all those stupid noises a guy makes when his brain slips out of gear. “He’s done this before?”

  “I spent the summer with Grandpa. He figures if he owns all my dates, he can keep me safe from the big bad world.”

  It was news to me that Crawley considered me safe. In fact, it annoyed me. What had I gotten myself into here? I had never spent quality time with a blind girl before. I had never spent quality time with any girl. My experiences had been mostly Kmart quality, if you know what I mean. Parties were usually just Ira, Howie, and me standing on the sidelines, drinking punch and cracking jokes about the guys who actually had dates. As for the girls I had gone out with, well, it usually felt more like the hot seat on a game show. One bad answer sends you out on your butt, and the whole world’s laughing at you by eight o’clock, seven o’clock Central Time.

  Lexie turned toward the bay the way most people would when they wanted to take in the view, but she was taking in the salty breeze against her face. Then she said something freaky.

  “Can I see what you look like?”

  I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not. “How would you do that?”

  “Like this.” She handed me Prudence’s leash, then reached up suddenly and pressed her hand to my face. I pulled back just as suddenly. Girls generally didn’t touch my face, unless slapping counts.

  “Sorry,” she said. “If you don’t want me to . . .”

  “No, it’s okay. I just wasn’t expecting it. Go ahead. Try again.” She brought her right hand to my face again—this time more slowly. Then her left hand came up. She began rubbing both of my cheeks in little circles.

  “Are my zits giving you messages in Braille?”

  She giggled at that, and I prayed to God that the whitehead I’d been nursing with Clearasil didn’t decide it was time to blow.

  Now she moved her fingers up to my eye sockets, brushing both of my brows with her thumb before checking out the bridge of my nose. “You have good bone structure,” she said, which is fine for dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History, but not exactly the compliment you want to hear.

  “That’s the best you can say, huh?”

  “Good bone structure is important,” she said. “No matter how handsome or pretty you think you are, without bone structure to back it up, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  I let her continue, closing my eyes as she gently pressed her thumbs against my sockets, perhaps testing to see whether or not there was a brain behind my eyeballs.

  “You have very nice eyes,” she said.

  Her fingers slipped down the side of my nose and began to travel the rim of my nostrils, which, I have to tell you, felt just a little too familiar. Then, before I could say anything about it, her fingers were brushing gently across my lips. It tickled. I was glad she couldn’t see how much I was blushing, but I wondered if she could feel the heat rising to my face.

  “Seen enough?”

  “Almost.” And then—God’s honest truth—she pushed her fingers just the slightest bit between my lips, and started to move them back and forth across my teeth.

  “I fink oo sood shtop now,” I said.

  “Hmm,” she said, ignoring me. “You’ve got braces.”

  This was not going well. I wanted to be anywhere but there at that moment. Then she said, “I like braces. It gives a person texture.”

  Having a girl’s fingers explore the texture of my dental work was uncharted territory for me. What did this mean? Did it mean we were going out? Was this like the blind version of “first base”? Or was this some other sport altogether—a sport I didn’t know how to play? What if this was like cricket, which I watched once and it made no sense to me. So here’s this girl with her fingertips on my teeth, which I guess is first base in a cricket match, and I’m wondering what happens if she wants to find other textures in there.

  Then she took her hands away. I took a deep breath of relief. “So,” I said, “do you like what you see?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  I wondered if I would get a turn now, but I was afraid to ask.

  “Hi, Antsy!”

  The Schwa caught me totally by surprise and I jumped. I had no idea how long he had been standing there watching. “Jeez—do you have to do that?”

  “I was wondering when you’d say something,” Lexie said.

  I turned to Lexie. “You knew he was there?”

  “Of course. I could hear him breathing. What did he call you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just a nickname.”

  “She saw me!” said the Schwa. “She actually saw me!”

  “She didn’t see you, she’s blind.”

  “But she knew I was here!” The Schwa was getting all excited now. “Hey, Antsy, maybe we can do another set of experiments with Lexis. See if she’s immune to the Schwa Effect. Maybe it’s genetic—her grandfather usually notices me, too.”

  Lexie smiled. “Antsy? He called you Antsy?”

  I threw up my hands. This was the classic three’s-a-crowd scenario, and right now three felt more like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. “Schwa, could you just go and walk some dogs?”

  “I got all day.”

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” asked Lexie.

  I sighed. “Lexie, meet the Schwa. Schwa, meet Lexie.”

  “Calvin,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  By now Prudence and Envy were both getting restless. We walked them back home, and I took them upstairs alone. When I came back outside, Lexie was touching the Schwa’s face.

  “Hey!” I shouted, running back to them.

  “I wanted Lexie to see me,” the Schwa said, “like she saw you.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to see you?”

  Lexie’s eyebrows furrowed as she keyboarded across the Schwa’s face. “Hmm . . . that’s interesting.”

  “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 maître 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. Sunday 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.

  “Always. And besides, you’re only half invisible, so, I dunno, maybe you should look for a girl who’s blind in one eye.”

  He punched me hard in the arm, and I punched him back, matching his force. We both refused to rub our aching arms, even though they hurt. For a second I wondered whether this would swell into a full-on fight.

  “Hey,” I said, “Lexie does what she wants—and besides, I was the one Crawley hired to hang with her, not you.”

  “But, but . . .” The Schwa’s mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish. “But she said I’m sweet-cream . . .”

  “Big deal. I’m Italian gelato, and there’s only room for one scoop on the cone.” Which technically isn’t true, but he got the point.

  Then the Schwa invokes the friendship clause.

  “Antsy, you’re my best friend,” he says. “I’m asking you as a friend. Please . . .”

  Like I said, I was in hot water, because whether I like it or not, I got a conscience. But I also got a selfish streak, and once in a while it kicks in before the water starts to boil.

  “Forget it,” I told him.

  Then Mr. Schwa burst happily into the room. “Okay, boys, lunch is ready. It’s franks and beans!”

  He left, never noticing our argument, or the paper clips on the floor. I knelt down to pick up the bags of clips. “Do these go in any order?”

  “Put them in any way you want.” He left for the kitchen, letting
me pick up all the clips.

  We didn’t talk much over lunch, and said nothing about Lexie. The Schwa cleaned his plate, but if you ask me, he looked like a man eating his last meal.

  The Schwa was not giving up. For a guy famous for not being noticed, he was suddenly everywhere. Somehow he managed to walk Crawley’s dogs three at a time without being dragged down the street like a human dogsled. That meant he was done with the job quick enough to barge in on anything Lexie and I were doing.

  I was coming up with all this clever stuff to do with her—it amazed me how clever I could be when a girl was involved. It actually gave me hope that maybe I had latent superintelligence that was activated by girls, like the way the Incredible Hulk was activated by anger.

  One afternoon, I had this bright idea of playing “Name That Texture,” which consisted of us challenging each other to identify unusual objects just by feeling them.

  “In school we do a lot of tactile learning,” she warned me. “I know the whole world by touch.”

  Because she had an advantage, I chose really weird things for her, like a geode, and a Pisher Plastic replacement kneecap. She chose normal household things for me, because the only thing I knew by touch was my bathroom light switch in the middle of the night. And even then I turned on the fan half the time by mistake.

  As soon as the Schwa showed up to walk the dogs, Lexie invited him to play, too. I didn’t move to give him a place to sit, but he made room anyway, so I glared at him.

  “Why the dirty look, Antsy?”

  He knew why. He had only said it to inform Lexie I was mad-dogging him.

  “Come on,” said Lexie, “we’re all friends.”

  I put my blindfold on, and the game quickly became an exercise in embarrassment. I had just mistaken a corkscrew for a Swiss Army knife when I heard Crawley roll by. I peeked out from under my blindfold to catch him sizing me up in his own disapproving way. “The boy cannot correctly identify a corkscrew,” he said. “Don’t let this moron dull your intelligence, Lexis.”

  I grinned at him and said, “Send in the clowns!”

  Old Chuckles was not amused.