Нил Шустерман: The Schwa Was Here

“It is more correct to say that he ran away with her . . . but yes, this is what happened.”

His head kept on hobbling. “My mother ran away with the BUTCHER?”

Gunther looked at me, as if I should explain why the Schwa kept repeating the question.

The Schwa was borderline ballistic. “What kind of sick per­son runs off with a butcher, and leaves her five-year-old kid in the frozen-food section?”

“These are questions I cannot answer,” Gunther said.

“The important thing,” I told him, “is that she didn’t disap­pear.”

“THIS IS WORSE!” he screamed so suddenly it made Gun­ther jump. “THIS IS WAY WORSE! THE BUTCHER?’

He stood up and his chair flew out behind him, hitting a stainless-steel table that rang out like a bell. “I hate her! I hate her guts! I hate her hate her hate her!”

Gunther stood and backed away. “Maybe I go finish clean­ing.” Since emotional customers weren’t his thing, he disap­peared into the meat locker to hide.

Now it wasn’t just the Schwa’s head that was shaking, it was his whole body. His fists were clenched and quivering, turning white as his face turned red.

“She left me there, and I thought ... I thought it was my fault.”

“Calvin, it’s all right!” said Lexie.

“No, it’s not! It’s never going to be all right! How could it ever be? How could you even say that?”

And suddenly I began to wonder if maybe knowing the truth was the worst thing for him. Maybe I had made the mother of all mistakes, letting him find out. Which is worse, the friend who keeps the truth secret, or the friend that spills the beans? As Gunther would say, “These are questions I cannot answer.” Anyway, I didn’t want to think about those questions just then. I knew I’d think about them after I got home, and stay up all night thinking about what a moron I was, and maybe I oughta be made of Pisher Plastic myself, for all the sense I have.

Lexie clasped the Schwa’s hands, trying to comfort him, and he just broke down like the five-year-old he once was in that shopping cart. “I hate her,” he wailed, but his wails were grow­ing softer. “I hate her ...”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and squeezed until I felt his shaking begin to fade. “Welcome to the visible world,” I told him, gently. “I’m really glad you’re here.”

We barely spoke once we got back into the car, and although the silence was miserable and uncomfortable, breaking it was harder than you might think. We had the driver drop the Schwa off first, then Lexie, then me, leaving me lots of quality time with myself in the backseat to feel lousy about the whole thing. How could I live with myself if I totally ruined the Schwa’s life? What kind of person did that make me? Why did I have to put myself smack in the middle of all of this?

My parents, whose favorite line whenever I showed up late was, “We were about to call the police,” had called the police. When Lexie’s driver pulled up to my house, there was an NYPD cruiser out front, its lights spinning, sending kaleido­scope flashes around the street, where neighbors all peered out from behind their blinds. Great, I thought. The perfect way to end this night. I thanked the driver, then took a deep breath and strode into the house, hoping to come up with something clever to say. But no brilliance introduced itself at the time, so I just walked in, playing clueless, and said, “What’s going on?”

The look of despair on my parents’ faces was not replaced by fury when they saw me. I wondered why. A cop stood with them between the foyer and the living room. The cop didn’t start to wrap everything up when he saw me, either. I won­dered about this, too, and began to get that vague, uneasy feel­ing that maybe they hadn’t called the police. Maybe the police came on their own. Then it began to dawn on me that maybe this had nothing to do with me. Suddenly I started to feel my throat begin to tighten, and my skin begin to get hot and squirmy.

“It’s Frankie ...” Mom said.

I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. Suddenly I was seeing all the things my mother imagines when one of us is late. I saw Frankie lying in a ditch, I saw him splattered over Nos8trand Avenue, I saw him stabbed in an alley. But my parents weren’t offering information, so I had to ask.

“What happened to Frankie?”

My parents just looked to each other rather than telling me, so the policeman spoke up instead. “Your brother’s been ar­rested for drunk driving.”

I let out a gust of air, just then realizing that I hadn’t been breathing.

“He wasn’t actually driving,” added Mom, talking more to the cop than to me. “He backed the car into a duck pond.”

“That’s driving,” the cop reminded her.

I wanted to tell them that it was impossible—that Frankie didn’t drink—I mean, he was the good brother, the A student, the perfect son. That’s what I wanted to say, but my brain got locked on “stupid,” and I said, “Where’s there a duck pond in Brooklyn?”

“Is he going to prison?” Christina asked. “Do we have to talk to him through glass?”

“It’s his first offense,” Dad said. “He’ll lose his license for a year, and have to do community service. That’s what they gave me when I was his age.”

I did a major double take. “You? You mean you got arrested for drunk driving? You never drink and drive!”

“Exactly,” Dad said.

Then my mother looked at me, suddenly realizing something. “Where were you? Why are you coming home so late?”

So they hadn’t even noticed I was gone. But that was okay. I could live without being the center of attention. I didn’t need my face on a billboard, or on a mug shot. And it occurred to me that going unnoticed sometimes meant that you were trusted to do the right thing.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told them. “You go take care of Frankie.”

The way I see it, truth only looks good when you’re looking at it from far away. It’s kind of like that beautiful girl you see on the street when you’re riding past in the bus, because beautiful people never ride the bus—at least not when I’m on it. Usually I get the people with so much hair in their nose, it looks like they’re growing sea urchins in there—or those women with gray hair all teased out so you can see their scalp underneath, making me wonder if I blew on their hair, would it all fly away like dandelion seeds? So you’re sitting on the bus and you look out through the dandelion heads, and there she is, this amazing girl walking by on the street, and you think if you could only get off this stupid bus and introduce yourself to her, your life would change.

The thing is, she’s not as perfect as you think, and if you ever got off the bus to introduce yourself, you’d find out she’s got a fake tooth that’s turning a little bit green, breath like a race­horse, and a zit on her forehead that keeps drawing your eyes toward it like a black hole. This girl is truth. She’s not so pretty, not so nice. But then, once you get to know her, all that stuff doesn’t seem to matter. Except maybe for the breath, but that’s why there’s Altoids.

The Schwa wanted to know the truth more than anything else in his life. So now he was looking at bad teeth, bad skin, and a funky smell.

I know what happened in my house that night, but what happened in the Schwa’s house after he got home I can only imagine. All I know is what happened after. The radioactive fallout, you might say. But I’ve had plenty of time to imagine it, and I’m pretty sure it went something like this: