"Yeah?"

"He was standing right in front of you all along."

I waved my hand like I'm shooing away a fly. "What are you talking about? He moved behind me. That's why I couldn't see him."

But Howie shook his head. "He never moved, Antsy."

I scowled at them like this is some conspiracy to make me look stupid.

"And I've heard things about him, too," Ira said. "Crazy stuff."

"Such as?"

Ira came in close enough so I could smell last night's garlic- whatever on his breath. "His eyes," Ira whispered. "They say his eyes change color to match the sky They say his shoes are al­ways the same color as the ground. They say if you stare at him long enough, you can read what's written on the wall behind him."

"That's called 'persistence of vision,'" Howie says, reminding us that behind his veil of idiocy is a keen analytical mind. "That's when your brain fills in the gaps of what it thinks ought to be there."

"He's not a gap," I reminded him. "He's a kid." "He's a freak," said Ira. "Ten-foot-pole material."

Well, I didn't know about Howie and Ira, but I've spent enough of my life keeping weird things at ten-foot-pole dis­tance.

"If any of this is true," I told them, "there are ways of finding out."

2 The Weird and Mostly Tragic History of the Schwa, Which Is Entirely True If You Trust My Sources

My family lives in a duplex—that's two homes attached like Siamese twins with one wall in common. On the other side of the wall is a Jewish family. Ira knows them from his temple, but we just know their names. Once a year we ex­change Christmas cookies and potato latkes. Funny how you can live six inches away from people and barely even know them. Our neighborhood is a Jewish-Italian neighborhood. Jews and Italians seem to get along just fine. I think it has something to do with the way both cultures have a high regard for food and guilt.