Нил Шустерман: The Schwa Was Here

Howie considers this. “Is it a pine forest, or oak?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oak is a much denser wood; it’s more likely to be heard by someone on the freeway next to the forest where no one is.”

I know I’m in over my head here, because Howie’s logic is ac­tually starting to make sense. “What does a tree in the forest have to do with the Schwa?” I ask Ira.

And the Schwa says, “I know.”

We snapped our heads around so sharply, it’s like whiplash. The Schwa was there, leaning up against my backyard fence! It’s like we’re all too dumbfounded to speak.

“I know what it has to do with me,” he said. “I’m like that tree. If I stand in a room and no one sees me, it’s like I was never there at all. Sometimes I even wonder if I was there myself.”

“Wh-when did you get here?” I asked him.

“I got here before Howie and Ira did. I was hoping you’d notice. You didn’t.”

“So ... you heard everything?”

He nodded. I tried to run the whole conversation through my mind, to see if I had said anything bad about him. His feel­ings didn’t appear hurt, though—like he was used to people talking behind his back in front of his face.

“I’ve wondered about it myself,” he said. “You know—being observationally challenged ... functionally invisible.” He paused for a second, then looked at Manny all strung up like a scare­crow. “You ought to find a seam in the plastic, and tape the M-80 there.”

“Huh?” It took a few seconds for me to drag my mind back to the reason why we were all here. “Oh! Right.” I went to Manny, pulled off the duct tape, and felt around his bald head for the plastic seam. I retaped the fat firecracker on the back of his head, relieved not to have to look at the Schwa. Ira fiddled with his camera, and Howie finished up our protective barri­cade.

“How long will it take the fuse to burn?” I asked, as illegal fireworks are not my particular academic strength.

“Twelve point five seconds,” says Howie. “But that’s just an estimate.”

We let the Schwa light the fuse, as he seemed to be the only one not afraid of blowing up, and he quickly joined us behind the barricade.

“You know, there’s gotta be a way to quantify it,” Howie says while we wait for the fuse to burn down.

“What?”

“The Schwa Effect. It’s like Mr. Werthog says: ’For an experi­ment to be valid, the results must be quantifiable and repeatable (kiss, kiss).’”

“We should experiment on the Schwa?”

“Sounds good to me,” said the Schwa.

Then a blast knocks me to the ground. My ears pop and begin to ring. The blast echoes back and forth down the row of brick duplexes. When I look up, Manny’s body has flown six feet, and his head is gone again.

Ira zoomed in on the body. “Thus perished Manny Bullpucky.” He turned the camera off. Right about now every win­dow in Brooklyn is snapping up as people wonder what morons are setting off fireworks at seven in the morning.

We hurry inside so we don’t get caught. Once we’re in, I look at the Schwa. “After that, you really want us to experiment on you?”

“Sure,” he says. “What’s life without excitement?”

I had to hand it to the Schwa. Any other kid would have flipped us off if asked to be a lab rat, but the Schwa was a good sport. Maybe he was just as curious about his own weirdness as we were.

Hypothesis:The Schwa will be functionally invisi­ble in your standard classroom.

Materials:Nine random students, one classroom, the Schwa.

Procedure:We set nine students and the Schwa seated around an otherwise empty classroom (if you don’t count the hamsters and the guinea pig in the back). Then we dragged other students into the room, and asked them to do a head count.

Results:Three out of five students refused to go into the classroom on account of they thought there’d be a bucket of water over the door, or some­thing nasty like that, which is understandable be­cause we’ve been known to play practical, and less practical, jokes. Eventually we managed to round up twenty students to go into the room, count the people in the room, then report back to us. Fifteen students said that there were nine people in the room. Four students said there were ten. One stu­dent said there were seventeen (we believe he counted the hamsters and guinea pig).

Conclusion:Four out of five people do not see the Schwa in your standard classroom.

I don’t know what it was about the Schwa that kept getting to me. I can’t say I was always thinking about him—I mean, he was hard to think about—that was part of the problem. You start to think about him and pretty soon you find yourself thinking about a video game, or last Christmas, or fourteen thousand other things, and you can’t remember what you were thinking about in the first place. It’s like your brain begins to twist and squirm, directing your mind away from him. Of course that’s nothing new to me—I mean, it seems like my brain is always twitching in unexpected directions, especially when there are girls around. I’ve never been the smoothest guy around girls that I like. I’ll say stupid things, like pointing out they got mud on their shoes or mustard on the tip of their nose, like Mary Ellen MacCaw did once—but with a schnoz like hers, it’s hard not to get condiments on it, and maybe even a condiment bottle lodged up inside there once in a while. My awkwardness with girls did change, though, once I met Lexie. Lots of things changed after I met Lexie—but wait a second, I’m getting way ahead of myself here. What was I talking about? Oh yeah. The Schwa.

See? You start thinking about the Schwa, and you end up thinking about everything but. I guess this fascination I had with the Schwa was because in some small way I knew how he felt. See, I never stand out in a crowd either. I’m just your run-of-the-mill eighth-grade wiseass, which might get me some­where in, like, Iowa, but Brooklyn is wiseass central. No one ever has anything major to say about me, good or bad, and even in my own family, I’m kind of just “there.” Frankie’s God’s gift to Brooklyn, Christina gets all the attention because she’s the youngest, and me, well, I’m like an afterthought. “You’ve got middle-child syndrome,” I’ve been told. Well, seems to me more like middle-finger syndrome. Do you ever sit and play that game where you try to imagine yourself in the future? Well, whenever I try to imagine my future, all I can see are my classmates twenty years from now asking one another, “Hey, whatever happened to Antsy Bonano?” And even in that weird little daydream no one had a clue. But the Schwa—he was worse off than me. He wouldn’t be the “whatever-happened-to” kid—he’d be the kid whose picture gets accidentally left out of the yearbook and no one notices. Although I’m a bit ashamed to say it, it felt good to be around someone more in­visible than me.

Hypothesis:The Schwa will not be noticed even when dressed weird and acting freakishly.

Materials:The boys’ bathroom, a sombrero spray-painted Day-Glo orange, a costume from last year’s school production of Cats, and the Schwa.

Procedure:The Schwa was asked to stand in the middle of the boys’ bathroom wearing the cat cos­tume and the orange sombrero, and to sing “God Bless America” at the top of his lungs. We ask un­suspecting students coming out of the bathroom if they noticed anything unusual in there.