The Schwa Was Here

“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 Ma

“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, Ma

Ira zoomed in on the body. “Thus perished Ma

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.

Results: We caught fifteen people willing to dis­cuss their lavatory experience. When asked if there was anything strange going on, aside from the one kid who kept talking about a toilet that wouldn’t stop flushing fourteen out of fifteen said there was someone acting weird in the bathroom. We thought the experiment was a failure until we asked them to describe the weirdo.

“He was wearing something strange, I think,” one person said.

“He wore like a pointed blue party hat, I think,” said another.

Not a single person identified the orange som­brero, or the cat costume, although one person was reasonably certain that he had a tail.

All agreed that he was singing something patri­otic, but no one could remember what it was. Five people were sure it was “The Star-Spangled Ban­ner.” Six people said it was “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Only four properly identified it as “God Bless America.”

Conclusion: Even when acting weird and dressed like a total freak, the Schwa is only barely noticed.

The basketball courts in our neighborhood parks have steel chain-link nets. I like that better than regular string net because when you make a basket, you don’t swish—you clank. That heavy, hearty rattle is more satisfying. More macho than a swish. It’s powerful, like the roar of a crowd—something invisi­ble kids like the Schwa and semi-invisible kids like me never get to hear except in our own heads.

It was on the basketball court that I came up with the Big Idea.