Нил Шустерман - The Schwa Was Here

“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.

After Crawley rolled away and I had handed Lexie her next mystery object, she whispered so her eagle-eared grandfather couldn’t hear. “Sometimes I think my grandfather died long be­fore I was born.”

“Huh?” I said. It was such a weird thing to say.

“You want me to think this is a quarter,” Lexie said of the object in her hand, “but it’s a Sacagawea dollar.” She was, of course, right.