The Schwa Was Here

"Antsy!" the Schwa yells down from the giant screen. "Antsy—tell them to look! Make them look at me, Antsy!" I glance around, and even though there's like fourteen thousand people hurrying by, not one of them is looking at the bill­boards. "Make them look, Antsyl Make them lookl"

Then suddenly I'm standing inside the gondola of the Goodyear Blimp, and the New York Jets are there. So's Darth Vader. You know how dreams are.

I rode the bus to school that day, thinking about the dream. There were no advertisements featuring the Schwa on the bus to school, or on the bus home. But on the way home, I caught sight of something strange. It was snowing. Just a dusting, really. The kind of stuff that sticks, but doesn't hang around till morning. You might be able to scrape a snowball or two off a cold car hood, but it's not worth the effort.

So I'm looking out of the window of the bus, thinking about Lexie, and how her parents were due home any day, and won­dering if they might send her to some private school on an un­charted island to get her away from me, when all of a sudden I see a schwa drawn in the thin layer of snow on the back win­dow of a parked Chevy. I get out at the next stop and go back to find it, but by the time I get there, the car's gone.

"Hello, I'd like to speak to M. Taylor."

"Speaking. Who's this?"

"Sorry, sir. Wrong number."

My mother thought I was nuts, the way I spent an hour every evening making these calls. She thought I must have been driven temporarily insane by puberty, or something. In addi­tion to giving me zits and body odor, it made me a phone freak. The way I saw it, though, it was a kind of a penance. My per­sonal punishment for taking advantage of the Schwa the way I did when we first discovered the Schwa Effect, and for pushing him away because I wanted to be the one dating Lexie. And for not taking him to the Night Butcher before he blew all that money on the billboard. Picking up that phone and calmly dial­ing one stranger after another was like some weird badge of honor. It became a part of my daily routine—something I did without thinking—like the way I would look for schwas drawn in new places each time I went out. I was finding a lot of them. Christina must have seen them, too, because she drew one on her lunch box. I couldn't explain it any more than I could ex­plain why I felt compelled to make those calls every day.

"Hi, is this M. Taylor?"

"Yes."

"The 'M' doesn't stand for Margaret, does it?"

"Well, yes, it does. Can I help you?"

"Probably not. You're not selling a house in Brooklyn are you?"

"Why? Are you interested? It's in excellent conditionl"

I nearly had a coronary on the spot. I had never gotten this far before. I was so used to hanging up, I didn't even know what to say next.

"Hello?" she said. "Are you there?"

"Yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm looking for someone who lived there. A kid named Calvin Schwa."

"Oh, are you one of his friends?"

Again nothing but dead air on my end of the line. It then oc­curred to me that this was the infamous Aunt Peggy. Don't ask me what imbecile decided Peggy was short for Margaret. I was feeling kind of rubber-brained. It's like when you call the radio station when they ask for the ninth caller, but you're never the ninth caller, so when they actually pick up and talk to you, you figure it must be some mistake. Then they put you on the radio, you sound like a complete fool, and then you hang up before you can give them your address, so they can't mail you your concert tickets. Don't laugh—it happened.

"Yeah, I'm a friend," I told Aunt Peggy. "Is he there? Can I talk to him?"

"I'm afraid he isn't here. I could take a message, though."

"Well, could you tell me why he moved like that? And why you're selling his house?"

I heard Aunt Peggy sigh. "I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I suppose it's common knowledge by now. They were having trouble with finances," she told me. "And Calvin's father, well, he doesn't handle this sort of thing well. I put the house up for sale for him, and he moved in with me."

"Will Calvin be back later tonight? I really need to talk to him."

"Oh, he didn't come here with his father," Aunt Peggy said. "He stayed with a friend in Brooklyn so he could finish out the school year."

"Great—could you give me the number?"

"Of course. His name is Anthony Bonano. If you hold on, I'll get the number."

I pulled the phone away from my ear, and looked at it like it had suddenly turned into a banana.

"Hello?" said Aunt Peggy. "Are you still there? Do you want that number?"