The Schwa Was Here ab-1

by Нил Шустерман

  We had great seats—right smack in the middle. The handi­capped section. I have to admit I felt guilty—not only because I wasn’t handicapped, but because Lexie was the most unhandicapped handicapped person I’d ever laid eyes on.

  “Are you having fun?” she asked when the band took a break.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, sure,” I said, trying not to sound like I was having as much fun as I really was, because what if she took my real enthusiasm for fake enthusiasm?

  “I like this band,” Lexie said. “Their sound’s not all muddy. I can hear all seven musicians.”

  I thought about that. I had been watching them for more than half an hour, and now that they were off the stage, I couldn’t tell you how many musicians there had been.

  “Amazing,” I said. “You’re like one of those mentalists. You can see things with your mind.”

  She reached over to pet Moxie, who sat next to her in the aisle, content as long as he was petted every few minutes. “Some people are good at being blind, others aren’t,” and then she smiled. “I’m very good.”

  “Great. We’ll call you the Amazing Lexis.”

  “I like that.”

  “And now,” I announced, “the Amazing Lexis, through her supersonic skills of perceptive-ability”—she giggled—«will tell me how many fingers I am holding up.” I held up three fingers.

  “Um ... two!”

  “Wow!” I said. “You’re right! That’s amazing!”

  “You’re lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s only a one-in-four chance that I’d get it right—one-in-five if you counted your thumb as a finger—so the odds were against it. And besides, 'lie’ was written all over your voice.”

  I laughed, truly impressed. “The Amazing Lexis strikes again.”

  Lexie grinned for a moment, and I noticed how her smile fit with her half-closed eyes. It was like the face you make when you’re tasting something unbelievable, like my dad’s eggplant Parmesan, which is poison in anyone else’s hands.

  Lexie reached over to pet Moxie again. “Too bad Calvin couldn’t come with us.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, right.” I probably would have gone the whole night without thinking about him once, and now I felt a little guilty about that—and annoyed that I felt guilty—and ir­ritated that I was annoyed. “Why would you want the Schwa on a date with us, anyway?”

  “This isn’t a date,” Lexie said. “People don’t get paid to go on a date.”

  She thought she had me there. “Well, you’re not supposed to know I’m getting paid—and since you know and are still let­ting me take you out, it is a date.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. Maybe she just couldn’t argue with my logic.

  “There’s something ... unusual about Calvin,” she said.

  “He’s visibly impaired,” I told her. “Observationally chal­lenged.”

  “He thinks he’s invisible?”

  “He is invisible ... kind of.”

  Lexie screwed up her lips so they looked kind of like the red scrunchy she wore in her hair, then said, “No, it’s more than that. There’s something else about him that either you don’t know or you’re just not telling me.”

  “Well, his mother either disappeared in Waldbaum’s super­market or got chopped up by his father, who sent pieces to all fifty states. No one’s really sure which it is.”

  “Hmm,” Lexie said. “That’s bound to have an effect on a per­son, either way.”

  “He seems okay to me.”

  “He’s very sweet,” Lexie added.

  “Ripe is the word,” I said. “He’s gotta start wearing deodorant.”

  The lights in the amphitheater started to dim, and the crowd began cheering for the band to start.

  “Maybe you should walk the dogs,” Lexie said.

  “Huh?”

  “I said maybe you should walk the dogs, and Calvin should be my escort.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. It hit me in a place I didn’t know was there. All I could think of was one of those medical shows. They’re operating on some poor slob, they accidentally nick an artery, and he starts gushing. “We got a bleeder!” the surgeon yells, and everybody comes rushing to the operating table. No­body was rushing to me, though.

  “Sure,” I said. “If that’s what you want.”

  The band began to play, and I quickly wiped away the tears I was bleeding, even though I knew she couldn’t see them.

  ***

  Lexie confronted her grandfather the next morning, telling him she knew that he paid boys to hang around with her. I showed up at Crawley’s that afternoon, determined to quit before I got fired, but Crawley didn’t give me the satisfaction.

  “You are a miserable failure,” the old man told me. “You couldn’t even keep our financial arrangement a secret.”

  “She already knew,” I told him.

  “How could she already know? What do you take me for, an idiot?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  He grunted, then threw a chew toy at Fortitude, who was gnawing on his shoe. The toy bounced off the dog’s nose, and she went for it, trotting off happily with the toy in her jaws.

  “Apparently, whatever you did, it disgusted my granddaugh­ter enough that she’d rather be with that Schwa kid than with you. You are hereby demoted to dog walker again.”

  “Who said I’m doing anything for you anymore?”

  “You did,” Crawley said calmly. “You accepted twelve weeks of community service.”

  “Well, now I unaccept it.”

  “Hmmph. Too bad,” Crawley said. “I was actually beginning to think you had some personal integrity.”

  I grit my teeth. I don’t know why it mattered what he thought of me, but it did. He was right; I was a miserable failure—even at quitting.

  “Do you want me to walk the dogs now or later?”

  “Walk them at your leisure,” he said, and rolled off. For once he didn’t gloat over his little victory.

  I went to get the leashes and spent my afternoon trying to think of nothing but walking dogs.

  10. Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, and the End of Life as We Know It, over Linguini

  My parents had a fight on the day I got demoted to dog walker. Maybe it was no worse than other fights they had over the years, but I noticed it a whole lot more. Maybe because seeing the Schwa’s sorry home life made me more tuned in to my own.

  I heard them even before I walked in the door. They were screaming at each other like the Antonoviches two doors down, who would end our dependence on foreign oil if you could harness the sheer vocal energy of their fights.

  “It’s the Big One,” Frankie said when I came in the door. “I esti­mate eight-point-six on the Richter scale. Better hold on to some­thing.” He pretended to watch TV while listening to the fight.

  Christina crouched by the kitchen door, sticking her nose in, and writing in her diary. “It began at five-eleven pm,” she said. “Thirty-seven minutes straight, so far.”

  “Red sauce?” I heard Mom yell. “I’ll give you red sauce!”

  We all knew the Big One was a clear and present danger. For years we hoped the pressure could be released through smaller tremors, and for years it had worked. I was beginning to think maybe the Big One wouldn’t come at all.

  “If it wasn’t for me, you’d all starve!” Mom yelled.

  “At least we’d be out of our misery!” Dad shouted back.

  The Big One was all about food. Mom was no slouch when it came to cooking—but, like I said, Dad stood in a league by himself. No parent I know—mother or father—could whip up dishes the way my dad did, but he didn’t often get the chance, because the kitchen was Mom’s. Dad might have been the Vice-Vice-President of Product Development for Pisher Plastics, but Mom was the Empress of Bonano Food Productions, and I pity the fool who challenges her reign.

  Dad was that fool. It was his destiny.

  Well, if the Big One was tonight, t
hey picked the wrong day to have it. I had just walked fourteen dogs, been dumped by a blind girl, been dumped on by her grandfather, and right now I wanted a cold soda.

  “Antsy, don’t go in there,” Frankie warned. “We ain’t got any body bags.”

  I figured I could slip in and out unnoticed. The Antsy Effect was nowhere near as potent as the Schwa Effect, but in my own family, it worked just as well.

  I pushed my way past Christina, who was scribbling her life away in the diary, logging her impressions of the battle for fu­ture generations.

  The scene was weirdly dramatic. Like something out of Shakespeare. Dad waved a spatula in the air as he spoke, mak­ing him look like a swordsman, and Mom spoke with her hands so much, it looked like karate.

  “I’m tired of eating your family’s lousy, tasteless recipes,” Dad said.

  “Tasteless recipes? My grandmother’s rolling in her grave!”

  “It’s from indigestion.”

  She threw an artichoke at him, and he batted it away with the spatula.

  I went to the refrigerator, took out a Coke, and then some­thing very strange happened. I flashed to Howie and Ira play­ing “Three Fisted Fury,” ignoring the Schwa. Anger began to boil up inside me. Yeah, I could get in and out of that kitchen unnoticed, but suddenly I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to ever again. I had a right to be noticed.

  “Excuse me,” I said, loudly. “If you two are just going to argue all night, I’ll cook dinner; otherwise we’ll all be rolling in our graves from parental starvation.”

  “Don’t you open up a mout like that!” Mom said.

  “Go back to the living room,” Dad said. “This isn’t your problem.”

  “Bullpucky!” I said, which isn’t actually the word I used, but I’m in a much better mood now than I was then.

  When she heard that, Mom drew in a breath kind of like the way the ocean sucks back before a tidal wave. “What did you say?!”

  “I said it’s time to eat. If you wanna fight, why don’t you lose a few teeth and go on a daytime talk show?”

  Mom glared at me, and crossed her arms. “Do you hear this?” she says to Dad. “Where do you learn this disrespect, huh?”

  “You don’t learn disrespect,” I told her. “You’re born with it.”

  “Just keep digging that hole deeper, Antsy,” Dad said. So now all their anger had turned away from each other and was aimed at me. There was awesome power in being the center of fury.

  “You want to earn your dinner, smart mout?” Mom says. “You tell us—who makes a better fra diavolo sauce. Me or your father?”

  It was a stupid question, because who really cared, and yet I knew the answer was critical. The old Antsy would have found some way to distract them from the argument and, failing that, would have said something to keep the peace, like “Mom’s is better with pasta, Dad’s is better with meat” or “Dad’s is spicier, but Mom’s is heartier.” An answer would have held everything together and would have eventually gotten things back to normal.

  Then it occurred to me exactly what my place in this family was, and had always been. In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-neck ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unno­ticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, but I’d be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.

  “You gonna answer us or not?”

  “You want the truth?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay, then. Dad makes the best fra diavolo sauce.”

  Stunned silence from the both of them. They hadn’t wanted the truth. We all knew it. Suddenly I wasn’t playing by the rules. “And come to think of it, his alfredo sauce rocks, too. What else do you want to know?”

  Dad put his hand to his head like he had a headache. “That’s enough, Anthony.”

  Mom nodded and pursed her lips into a thin red line. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, that settles it, then.” I didn’t like the calmness of her voice. She walked over to the range, took the big pot of sauce she had made, and in one smooth motion dumped it down the drain. A cloud of steam rose and curled like a hydrogen bomb had gone off in the sink.

  “You make dinner, Joe.” She stormed out of the house, leav­ing us all in nuclear winter. Once she was gone, Frankie pulled me aside and glared at me. “You see what you did?”

  ***

  Dad did cook us dinner that night. He had to go to the grocery store to get his ingredients, so dinner wasn’t ready until nine. He made us veal rollatini, better than you’d get in the best Ital­ian restaurants. We all ate and said nothing to one another. Not a thing, not even “pass the salt,” because it didn’t need salt. It was, at the same time, the best and the worst meal I had ever sat down to.

  When it was done, we all did our own dishes and left the kitchen spotless. Dad made a plate of leftovers and put it in the fridge. I knew it was for Mom, but he wouldn’t say it.

  Frankie and Christina went to their rooms, but I hung around in the kitchen a bit more while Dad cleaned the pots.

  The clip is gone, I thought. The pages are flying like confetti. What a moron I am.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Antsy.”

  The fact that he didn’t know scared me more than anything else that night. Was our family so fragile that this could tear the foundations loose?

  “It seems like such a little thing,” I said.

  “The biggest things always seem like small things,” he told me.

  I stayed up as long as I could that night, waiting to hear the front door open and Mom walk in, but I fell asleep before I heard it. In the morning, I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before. Mom wasn’t in the bedroom, and Dad had al­ready left for work. I went downstairs slowly, afraid she might not be there. What would I do if she wasn’t? What would that mean?

  I don’t know, Antsy.

  Parents were supposed to know the answers, and even if they didn’t, they could usually fake it really well. I wanted to hate my dad for not knowing, but I couldn’t hate him. That made me want to hate him even more.

  I came downstairs, and Mom was in the kitchen. I had to hold on to the wall, as if the Big One was having an aftershock. I took a deep breath and went in. She was drinking coffee by herself, like they do on those commercials for fancy flavored coffee.

  “Are you having breakfast before you go to school?”

  “What is there?”

  “Cornflakes, Raisin Bran. There may be some Froot Loops left, if Christina didn’t make a pig of herself.”

  Most of the time Mom would get the bowl, or the box or the milk. She would always do something to be a part of the meal. Today I did the whole thing myself. It just didn’t feel right.

  When I got the milk from the refrigerator, I noticed that the plate of food Dad had left was gone. The plate had been washed by hand, and now sat in the drying rack. I knew it shouldn’t matter. I knew it was just a little thing—but the image of that plate on the rack stayed with me all day. Like Dad said, sometimes the little things are the biggest things of all.

  And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out whether Mom had eaten the food on that plate or had put it down the disposal.

  ***

  I sat by myself at lunch on Monday. I hadn’t been sitting with Howie and Ira for a couple of weeks now. Used to be we were inseparable, but cliques are like molecules: They bind together in Mr. Werthog’s little test tube until you add something new. Then they all break up and recombine into something else. Sometimes you get these things they call “free radicals,” which are atoms that aren’t bound to anything else, floating free. That was me now. I didn’t mind it at first, because it left open a whole lot of possibilities, but after this past weekend, radical freedom didn’t feel so good.

  I’m sure the Schwa was there, blending in with the Formica tables, but I wasn’t about to look for him. Right now I was hat­ing him the way you hate the other team when they
shout, “Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate?” after humiliating you in a shutout. The Schwa found me, though. He plopped his semi-invisible self down across the table from me.

  “Do you mind? I’m eating, and it’s hard enough to keep this crud down without having to look at you.”

  “I just wanted to thank you, Antsy. That’s all.”

  “Thank me for what?”

  “Lexie told me everything. She told me what you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” he said. “You told her you didn’t want to be her escort, and said that I’d be better at it. I can’t believe you’d do that for me. No one’s ever done anything like that for me.”

  I just sat there with gravy dripping down my chin. “She told you that?”

  The Schwa grinned. “She’s teaching me Braille,” he said proudly. “It’s really cool.” He glanced at my plate, noticing I had eaten my peach cobbler first, so he scooped his onto my plate. “If you ever want anything, all you have to do is ask.”

  Pamela O’Malley passed by just then, with a few friends walking so close it was a wonder they didn’t trip over one another’s feet. “Hey, Antsy,” she said, “how come you’re eating alone?”

  The Schwa gave me that “some people” look.

  “Maybe I like it that way,” I said. She twittered with her friends and walked off.

  “It’s okay,” the Schwa said. “Who needs to be seen when you can be felt?”

  11. The Youngest Doctor in Sheepshead Bay Gets Held Hostage When He Least Expects It

  Being felt.

  That means a lot of things, doesn’t it? And I’m not talking about the dirty stuff you probably think I mean. My mind isn’t in the sewer all the time, all right? I’m talking about having your presence felt. In that way, I guess I’m not all that different from the Schwa.

  Now I had made my presence felt in my own family by refus­ing to be the peacekeeper. If that was a good thing, it sure didn’t feel like it. The problem is, once you’ve made yourself felt, there’s no going back to being unnoticed, as much as you might want to. Instead of ignoring me, Frankie was suddenly noticing every little thing I did, wondering why I did it. Christina started asking me questions about things, like I was the smarter brother. Dad was now confiding in me about things that were really none of my business, and Mom started treating me like I was ac­tually a responsible human being. It was all very disturbing.