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Now he stood in front of a science experiment featuring a large beaker filled with ice and a long thermometer. On the board he writes 34°, then turned to us. “The scientific method (kiss) is one of hypothesis, trial (kiss), results, and conclusion (kiss, kiss).”
Someone next to me taps my arm. “Hi, Antsy.”
I turn, actually surprised to see someone there. It’s like I never realized there was even a desk next to me in science. For an instant I don’t recognize the face—like no part of it is distinctive enough to stick to my memory—a face like mental Teflon.
“It’s me—Calvin Schwa.”
“Hey, Schwa—how ya doin?”
“Mr. Bonano, are you (kiss) with us today?”
“Uh ... yeah, I guess.” I don’t kiss back, on account of I once got dragged to the office for that. Mr. Werthog is sensitive that way.
“As I was saying, (kiss) can anyone give me the hypothesis leading to today’s experiment?”
The Schwa’s hand is up in an instant, before anyone else’s. We’re in the third row, right in the middle, but Werthog looks over his hand to Amy van Zandt, in the last row.
“Water at room temperature will boil if left in the sun.”
“Abominably incorrect!” He pours a packet of powder into the icy beaker, and stirs it. The water turns cloudly. “Anyone else?”
The Schwa’s hand is still up. Werthog calls on LoQuisha Peel.
“Lemonade reacts with ice to quench thirst?” LoQuisha says.
“Even more wrong (kiss, kiss).” He pours in a second packet of powder. The ice in the beaker begins to melt quickly. By now the Schwa is waving his hand back and forth across Werthog’s field of vision like a signal flare. Werthog calls on De
“Uh ...” De
The Schwa turns to me, grumbling beneath his breath. “He never calls on me.”
That’s when I raise my hand.
“Ah! Mr. Bonano. Do you have the answer?”
“No, but I’ll bet the Schwa does.”
He looks at me like I’m speaking Latin. “Excuse me?”
“You know: Calvin Schwa.”
Werthog turns his head slightly and his eyes refocus. “CalvinI” he says, like he’s surprised he’s even here. “Can you (kiss) give us the answer?”
“The reaction between reagents A and B is an exothermic reaction.”
“Excellent! And is our hypothesis proven, or disproven?”
“Proven. All the ice melted when you added reagent B, so it’s exothermic.”
Werthog pulls out the thermometer, marks down the temperature on the board, 89°, and continues his lesson.
The Schwa turns to me and whispers, “Thanks. At least now he won’t mark me absent today.”
I shake my head and laugh. “I swear, it’s like you’re invisible or something.” I say it like a joke, but then I catch the Schwa’s eyes—eyes that match the gray clouds outside the window. He doesn’t say anything, and I know I just stumbled onto something. He turns back to his notebook, but I can’t concentrate on my work. I feel like my foot is pressed down on a land mine that will blow the second I move.
Howie, Ira, and I got together the next Saturday morning to detonate Ma
The thing is, I can’t get past the feeling that there’s something... u
Not that the Schwa is anything like a spider, or a coal walker, or a pink tree, but he is u
So anyway, it’s seven on Saturday morning as we prepare Ma
“You’re a real pyrotechnic wizard, Antsy,” says Ira as he pulls off the tape and redoes it.
Behind me, Howie’s upturning lawn furniture, building a barricade for us to hide behind when Ma
“I’ve been thinking about the Schwa,” I said, loud enough for both Howie and Ira to hear.
“Yeah, so?” said Ira.
“I’ve been thinking there’s something wrong with him.”
“Like he’s retarded, you mean?”
Howie’s disgusted by this. “The proper term is ’mentally handicapped,’” he says. “Otherwise retards get offended.”
“No,” I tell them. “The Schwa’s not mentally handicapped— it’s something else—and don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“Hey, didn’t I say there was something weird about him?” Ira said. “I mean, like the way he always just appears, like he’s spying on you. He’s sneaky. Weaselly ...”
“I don’t think he means to be,” I told them. “It’s just . . . It’s just like he always happens to be standing in your blind spot.”
“Yeah, and when he’s around, every spot is a blind spot,” said Ira. “It’s friggin’ weird. It’s like he’s a ghost, or something.”
“You gotta be dead to be a ghost,” I reminded him. “No . . . It’s more like he’s ...” I search for the right word. “It’s like he’s functionally invisible”
“The proper term is ’observationally challenged,’” Howie says.
“Whadaya mean ’proper term’? How can there be a proper term for it when I just made it up?”
“Well, if you’re go
I keep trying to think this through. “It’s like when he’s in a room and doesn’t say anything, you could walk in, walk out, and never know he was there.”
“Like the tree falling in the forest,” says Ira.
“Huh?”
“You know, it’s the old question—if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it really make a sound?”
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 Ma