He reached in and gingerly pulled out a little bag. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like this before!” The thing inside did not look like a paper clip. It might have once been a brass brad or something, but now it was broken, and all crusty black. The Schwa held the bag like the little thing inside would turn to dust in seconds.

“It looks like a bird turd.”

“It’s an old-fashioned paper fastener.” He smiled so wide, it was like his head was on hinges, like one of those ceramic cookie-jar heads. “It’s from the Titanic.”

I looked at him, sure he was about to burst out laughing, but he was serious.

“Where do you find a paper clip from the Titanic?”

“I wrote to the Nova Scotia Maritime Museum six times,” he said, “because I knew they had a ton of Titanic junk stored away—mounds of stuff that wasn’t interesting enough to put on display. Finally I faked a letter from my doctor, telling them I had a rare brain disorder—”

“—and your last brain-fried wish was for a paper clip from the Titanic?”

The Schwa nodded. “I can’t believe they bought it.”

“I don’t think they did. I think they sent it just to get rid of you.”

The smile kind of shrunk from his face, and he looked down. “So, do you want it?”

“Me? After all you went through to get it, why would you give it to me?”

“Well, if you don’t want this one, you can have another one.” He dug into his box and came up with one little bag after another. “How about this one from Michael Jordan’s first basketball contract—or this one? It’s rumored to have been clipped to the results of an alien autopsy. I got it on eBay.”

“Whoa, slow down.” I grabbed one of his hands, and the box flipped off his bed, dumping little packets all over the floor.

“Sorry, Schwa.”

“No problem.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s no free lunch—and no free paper clips either. We stood there looking at each other. “So what is it you want?” I asked him.

He sighed one of those breathy sighs like a convict does moments before his execution—not that I’ve ever seen that.

“You gotta let me have her, Antsy.”

“Her? Her who?”

“Lexie! Who else? Please, you gotta let me!”

He grabbed me, pleading. I shook him off. “She’s a person, she’s not a thing. I can’t ‘let you have her.’”

“You know what I mean.” He got up and started pacing in short U-turns, like a condemned man waiting for a pardon from a governor who was probably out playing golf. “We were made for each other! Don’t you see? Invisible guy/blind girl—it’s perfect. I even read it in a book once.”