“I think a room just opened up for you at Bellevue’s mental ward,” I told him. “Do you want me to call or fax in your reservation?”

“Okay, so maybe it’s not such a great place, but you can’t beat the view.”

He led me over to one of the broken windows. I looked out. To the left I could see the spires of Manhattan, and below was a stretch of the expressway, which ran right past the building. There were a couple of crumbling industrial streets, and past that, Greenwood Cemetery, the size of a small city itself.

“What am I supposed to see?”

The Schwa looked out of the window. The sun was already beneath the horizon, and the twilight was quickly becoming night.

“Shh,” said the Schwa. “Any second now.”

Those few minutes of waiting made me worry even more. I started to babble. “Schwa, I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but whatever it is, things aren’t so bad, right?”

“Here it comes,” he said. “Watch this.”

I pulled him back from the window, afraid he might be preparing to jump, but he shook me off.

My heart was pounding a hip-hop beat in my chest as I stared out of the window. That’s when the streetlights began to flicker on.

“They never come on exactly at sunset,” the Schwa said. “You’d think they’d figure out that the time of sunset is different every day, but they never seem to change the streetlights until daylight savings.”

More and more lights came on, then spotlights came on, lighting up the billboards overlooking the expressway. One giant billboard advertised a Spanish TV station. A second one advertised an expensive car, and a third one had a big smiling Schwa face staring out at us.

“Oh, wow!”

There was no question about it. The huge billboard was covered in Schwa. His face was the size of a hot-air balloon looming over the expressway, and next to his picture were words in red block letters:

CALVIN

SCHWA

WAS

HERE

“Oh, wow,” I said again. He was right; the view from the seventh floor was wild.

“I will be seen,” he proclaimed. “Nobody can make that disappear. I’ve rented it for a whole month!”

“It must have cost a fortune!”

“Half a fortune,” he told me. “The company rented me the billboard at half the usual rate. They were really nice about it.”

“It still must have been a lot.”

The Schwa shrugged like it didn’t matter. “My dad had money put aside for me. A college fund.”

“You blew your college fund?!” I didn’t like the sound of this at all, but he still acted like it didn’t matter. “Weren’t they suspicious about a kid renting a billboard?”