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 condition!”

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?”