There was this one Halloween, for instance, some of the neighborhood kids, including my brother, went on an egg patrol—and there are lots of windows to egg on that second floor of Crawley’s restaurant. We never did see Crawley himself looking out of the windows, but there were always Afghans poking their noses out. So, anyway, my brother and some of his friends, they go out on Halloween a few years back, toss a few eggs at Crawley’s upstairs windows, and run off. We heard nothing about it, except for one thing . . . from November 1 until New Year’s Day, not a single market in the neighborhood had eggs—not even the big supermarket chains. “It’s a local shortage,” people were told—but everyone knew that it was Old Man Crawley. He had pulled some strings and shut down the egg supply to the whole neighborhood. No one ever egged his windows again.

Which brings me to the biggest and potentially most profitable dare that our little invisibility enterprise with the Schwa took on. Like I said, it was Wendell Tiggor’s dare. It was a pretty clever one, which makes me think he didn’t actually come up with it, because Wendell Tiggor had about the intelligence of my mother’s meat loaf if you took out the onions. It was at the bus stop after school that Tiggor came up to me.

“So, I’ve been hearing about this Schwa kid.” (Tiggor begins every sentence with the word “so.”)

“Yeah?”

“So, I hear he goes invisible or something.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I say. “He’s standing right here.”

“Where?”

“Right in front of your face.”

“Hi,” said Schwa, who happened to be next to me and, I might add, directly in Tiggor’s line of sight.

“Oh.” Tiggor squinted his beady eyes and looked him over. “So, he doesn’t look invisible to me.”

“Then why didn’t you see him when you were staring straight at him?” Tiggor has to think about that one. You can almost hear rusty gears turning in his head, like one of those farm combines that sat out in the rain too long. I figured if I let those gears turn anymore, one might come flying out of his ear and kill some innocent bystander. “Never mind,” I say. “What can we do for you?” By now a few other kids have started to take notice of our conversation.

“So, I hear you do stuff,” he says to the Schwa.

“Talk to my manager,” says the Schwa. Tiggor’s lip curls in confusion.