Нил Шустерман - The Schwa Was Here

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?”

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.

“There’s no future in plastic,” Dad said to me one day out of the blue.

“Sure there is,” I told him. “People will always need a plastic something or other.”

“We can only hope,” he said.

“What does Mom think?”

“Mom doesn’t work for Pisher.”

I was fishing for news from the battlefront, but he gave me none. The battlefront had become more like a demilitarized zone. They kept this chilly emotional distance. I think I liked it better when they fought.

The thing is, Dad might have built Manny to be indestructible, but he himself was not. Neither was Mom. This was a stress test I wished would just end.

I didn’t know what I’d say to Lexie. I was sure to run into her at Crawley’s apartment eventually, but I hoped maybe she would just leave the room and pretend she didn’t know I was there until I had leashed up the dogs and left.