“It sounds logical,” says Howie. At this point his screen character sneaks up from behind and nails me with a dropkick from a leg I didn’t even know he had.

“Hey, no fair—you took an extra dose of radiation, didn’t you?”

I turned from Ira’s bruiser, who was still dazed, and began a few roundhouse kicks on Howie’s guy. “Maybe it’s just something simple,” I suggested, “like she’s got a peg leg or something.”

“Maybe two peg legs,” says Howie.

“Or a peg head,” says Ira. “I’d pay to see that.”

“You’re not the one paying—Crawley is.” I spun on Ira, gave his character a double-death blow, and he was finished. Ira dropped his controller in frustration. Now it was just Howie and me. I tore into him brutally. It wasn’t because I cared about beating him; I just wanted it done. Kind of like the way you finish that last piece of pizza, just because it’s there.

It only took a minute for the game to be over, and my character was raising all three of his arms in triumph to the sound of canned cheers. I sighed and put down my controller. “Hey, is it just me, or is this game less fun than it used to be?”

Ira and Howie don’t have an opinion. Somehow I didn’t expect them to. “The new version comes out in a month. It’ll be tons better,” says Howie.

I nodded in agreement because I didn’t want to talk about what was really going through my mind. I was thinking about bamboo. Last year, my science teacher said that when a bamboo plant is established enough, you can actually watch it growing before your eyes. I wondered if it was sometimes the same with humans—because I was feeling this weird vertigo, like I had suddenly sprouted far beyond Howie and Ira. I knew it just like I knew that no future version of “Three Fisted Fury” was going to interest me like it did a year ago.

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, but at first glance I didn’t see anybody there.

“Hey, Schwa,” I said.

The moment Howie and Ira realized who it was, they picked up their game controllers and quickly started a new game, ignoring him. It made me mad, but I didn’t say anything. For Howie and Ira, it was okay when the Schwa was just a plaything—just some weird object that had strayed into their airspace like a UFO—but once they lost interest in him, he was no longer welcome on their radar screen.

“I’ve solved at least part of the mystery,” the Schwa said, ignoring Ira and Howie just as well as they ignored him.

“Which mystery?”

“Crawley’s granddaughter.”

At this, Ira and Howie couldn’t help but show a little bit of interest.

“What did you find out?” I asked.