I should have done what I always do when I’m losing a chess match: accidentally knock over the board. But the Schwa made his move before I could do a thing, cutting in front of me and advancing on Howie and Ira. I stood back and let him do it. It was his right, and I wasn’t going to rob him of it. He got in front of them, blocking their view of their video game. “Hey, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m here.”

Ira paused the game to keep his character from getting mauled by Howie’s mutant. “We know you’re here,” Ira says. “Now do us all a favor and stop being here.”

Then the Schwa reached over and ejected the game from the system. The screen went black.

“Let’s see if you notice me now!” And he cracked the game disc in half.

This was the unthinkable. All three of us stared at the Schwa in shock. The Schwa dropped the broken disc and stormed upstairs. Howie and Ira looked at me, still in denial that the game had indeed been destroyed.

“You gonna let him get away with that?” Ira asked.

“Shut up! Just shut up, okay?” I ran upstairs after the Schwa, taking three steps at a time, not even sure what I was gonna do when I caught him. He broke my game, so a pounding was in order, right? But I didn’t feel like pounding him. I felt more like pounding Ira and Howie. By the time I got upstairs, the Schwa was already out the front door. I didn’t catch up with him until he was halfway to the corner, and I practically had to wrestle him until he stopped.

“What, are you totally psycho?” I shouted.

“Maybe I am!” he screamed back at me. “Maybe that’s just what I am. Maybe I’m that quiet guy who suddenly goes nuts and then you find half the neighborhood in his freezer.”

I gotta admit, that one stumped me for a second—but only for a second. “Which half?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Which half of the neighborhood? Could you make it the people on the other side of Avenue T, because I never really liked them anyway.”

I could see him trying to force down a grin. “You’re not funny.”

“So you gonna tell me why you trashed my game?”

“You said I’d be a legend.”

“What?”

“Going into Old Man Crawley’s—surviving to talk about it. ‘You’ll be a legend,’ you said. But I’m not. Not even Tiggor and the Tiggorhoids care. They’ve already forgotten I exist.”

“Why do you even care about those boneheads?”

“It’s not just them,” he says. “It’s everyone. I’m sick of being looked over. Shut out. And now even Crawley’s forgetting about me, and picking you for granddaughter duty.”