As for what I did next, it came, as most of the world’s great ideas do, while I was on the can. Maybe the shock of the Schwa’s vanishing act did something to my insides, but whatever it was, there was no way I was making it home on a bicycle without a pit stop. So there I am in the stall at Fuggettaburger, trying not to look at the Pisher toilet-paper dispenser, and I catch sight of the things people have scrawled into the wall. The stuff you usually find on the walls of a bathroom is about as Neanderthal as you can get—which is why we often call the boys’ bathroom at school the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. The Fuggettaburger bathroom had its share of unreadable phone numbers, and poems that started, Here I sit, brokenhearted. Then, suddenly, as I’m looking at all this drivel, I get an uncontrollable urge to put something up there myself. I take a pen from my jacket pocket, and I start scratching a picture onto the wall. I’m not on the short list when it comes to artistic talent, but I can do faces okay. So I draw this face. Just a few simple lines, wispy hair. Then beneath it I write, The Schwa Was Here. And, for a final touch, right on his forehead, I draw an upside down e—you know, like a schwa in the dictionary.

Just like that.

By the time I leave Fuggettaburger, I’m a man with a mission. I went down the street to the pharmacy and bought myself one of those black permanent markers. Not the skinny kind, but the real thick ones. I drew the same thing right over a bus-stop billboard, only this time it was with much thicker lines. I did it on a park bench. I got on the subway and put Schwas inside as many cars as I could. A few people made noises. Mumbled words like “vandal” and stuff like that, but I just ignored them, because I knew this wasn’t graffiti. This wasn’t tagging. That’s all about making your mark and labeling territory. I was making someone else’s mark. The Schwa Was Here. I didn’t care if people saw me, I didn’t care if I got caught, because what I was doing was noble, and God help anyone who tried to stop me.

That day I must have put up maybe a hundred Schwas all over Brooklyn, and when I finally got home, my hand was covered in black ink. I felt like I had run a marathon—that feeling of exhaustion and incredible accomplishment all rolled together.

It was past eleven, and my mother was waiting at the door. “Where were you?” she yelled. “We almost called the police.”

“I was vandalizing bus stops and public restrooms,” I said. She grounded me until the fall of civilization, and I took it like a man.