See? You start thinking about the Schwa, and you end up thinking about everything but. I guess this fascination I had with the Schwa was because in some small way I knew how he felt. See, I never stand out in a crowd either. I’m just your run-of-the-mill eighth-grade wiseass, which might get me somewhere in, like, Iowa, but Brooklyn is wiseass central. No one ever has anything major to say about me, good or bad, and even in my own family, I’m kind of just “there.” Frankie’s God’s gift to Brooklyn, Christina gets all the attention because she’s the youngest, and me, well, I’m like an afterthought. “You’ve got middle-child syndrome,” I’ve been told. Well, seems to me more like middle-finger syndrome. Do you ever sit and play that game where you try to imagine yourself in the future? Well, whenever I try to imagine my future, all I can see are my classmates twenty years from now asking one another, “Hey, whatever happened to Antsy Bonano?” And even in that weird little daydream no one had a clue. But the Schwa—he was worse off than me. He wouldn’t be the “whatever-happened-to” kid—he’d be the kid whose picture gets accidentally left out of the yearbook and no one notices. Although I’m a bit ashamed to say it, it felt good to be around someone more invisible than me.

LAB JOURNAL

The Schwa Effect: Experiment #2

Hypothesis: The Schwa will not be noticed even when dressed weird and acting freakishly.

Materials: The boys’ bathroom, a sombrero spray-painted Day-Glo orange, a costume from last year’s school production of Cats, and the Schwa.

Procedure: The Schwa was asked to stand in the middle of the boys’ bathroom wearing the cat costume and the orange sombrero, and to sing “God Bless America” at the top of his lungs. We ask unsuspecting students coming out of the bathroom if they noticed anything unusual in there.

Results: We caught fifteen people willing to discuss their lavatory experience. When asked if there was anything strange going on, aside from the one kid who kept talking about a toilet that wouldn’t stop flushing, fourteen out of fifteen said there was someone acting weird in the bathroom. We thought the experiment was a failure until we asked them to describe the weirdo.

“He was wearing something strange, I think,” one person said.

“He wore like a pointed blue party hat, I think,” said another.

Not a single person identified the orange sombrero, or the cat costume, although one person was reasonably certain that he had a tail.

All agreed that he was singing something patriotic, but no one could remember what it was. Five people were sure it was “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Six people said it was “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Only four properly identified it as “God Bless America.”