The Schwa was Here

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Authors: Neal Shusterman
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yellow Post-it notes, it looked like Big Bird. The notes were all written by the Schwa.
Half day at school on Wednesday
, one said.
Back-to-School night on Friday
, said another.
FRIEND COMING OVER FOR DINNER TONIGHT
, said one in big bold letters.
    “Was he always like that, or was it, like, from breathing paint fumes?” I asked after Mr. Schwa went back to playing guitar.
    “He fell off a ladder a few years ago, and suffered head trauma. He’s okay now, but he’s like a little kid in some ways.”
    “Wow,” I said. “So who takes care of who?”
    “Exactly,” says the Schwa. “But it’s not so bad. And my aunt Peggy comes over a few times a week to help out.”
    Apparently this wasn’t one of Aunt Peggy’s nights. There was a raw chicken in a big pan on top of the oven. I poked the chicken. It was room temperature. Who knew how long it had been sitting out.
    “Maybe we should call in for pizza.”
    “Naah,” said the Schwa, turning on the oven to preheat. “Cooking it should kill any deadly bacteria.”
    The Schwa took me on the grand tour. The walls of the house were white, except one wall in each room was painted a different color. The effect was actually pretty cool. There was one forest green wall in the living room, a red wall in the kitchen, a blue wall in the dining room. The colored wall in the Schwa’s room was beige. I wasn’t surprised.
    “So,” I asked about as delicately as I could, “how long have you and your father been . . . on your own?”
    “Since I was five,” he said. “You wanna see my paper-clip collection?”
    I replayed in my mind what he had said, certain I had somehow heard it wrong. “You’re . . . kidding me, right?”
    Then he reached under his bed and pulled out a box. Inside were little plastic zipper bags—at least a hundred of them—and in each one there was . . . yes, you guessed it, a paper clip.Little ones, big ones, those fat black ones that hold whole stacks of paper together.
    “Pretty cool, huh?”
    I just stared, dumbfounded. “Exactly when did they release you from the nuthouse, Schwa?”
    He reached into the box and pulled out a little baggie that held a silver clip. “This clip held together pages of the Nuclear Arms Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev.”
    “No way.”
    I looked at it closely. It looked just like an ordinary paper clip.
    He pulled out another one. It was tarnished bronze. “This one held together the original lyric sheets of ‘Hey Jude.’” He pulled out another one with a blue plastic coating. “This one was clipped to a mission manual for the space shuttle.”
    “You mean it’s been in space?”
    The Schwa nodded.
    “Wow!”
    He showed me clip after clip, each one more exciting than the last. “Where did you get them?”
    “I wrote to famous people, asking them for a paper clip from something important. You’d be amazed how many of them wrote back.”
    It was genius! Most of the time people are looking for the letters and documents and people that make history, but no one thinks about the little things that hold history together. Leave it to the Schwa to think of such a thing. It was, at the same time, the dullest and most interesting collection I had ever seen in my life.
    Dinner wasn’t ready until after nine, and it was the secondworst chicken I’d ever tasted, beaten only by a dish at a friend’s birthday party that tasted more like it was made from the piñata. Even so, I was glad I had dinner with the Schwa and his father, who continued to play guitar during the meal, greasy chicken fingers and all.
    “It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world,” I commented to the Schwa while his dad did the dishes.
    “Yeah, brain damage’ll do that to you,” the Schwa said as he went to rewash the dishes his father didn’t quite get clean. “But I wouldn’t advise it.”

    The next night I ended up alone with my own father for dinner. Mom was off shopping with Christina, and Frankie was off

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