“Dancing? I’m taking you dancing?”

Lexie laughed. “Well, not if you don’t want to. The boy last year couldn’t dance at all.”

So now I was really beginning to stutter and sputter and make all those stupid noises a guy makes when his brain slips out of gear. “He’s done this before?”

“I spent the summer with Grandpa. He figures if he owns all my dates, he can keep me safe from the big bad world.”

It was news to me that Crawley considered me safe. In fact, it annoyed me. What had I gotten myself into here? I had never spent quality time with a blind girl before. I had never spent quality time with any girl. My experiences had been mostly Kmart quality, if you know what I mean. Parties were usually just Ira, Howie, and me standing on the sidelines, drinking punch and cracking jokes about the guys who actually had dates. As for the girls I had gone out with, well, it usually felt more like the hot seat on a game show. One bad answer sends you out on your butt, and the whole world’s laughing at you by eight o’clock, seven o’clock Central Time.

Lexie turned toward the bay the way most people would when they wanted to take in the view, but she was taking in the salty breeze against her face. Then she said something freaky.

“Can I see what you look like?”

I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not. “How would you do that?”

“Like this.” She handed me Prudence’s leash, then reached up suddenly and pressed her hand to my face. I pulled back just as suddenly. Girls generally didn’t touch my face, unless slapping counts.

“Sorry,” she said. “If you don’t want me to . . .”

“No, it’s okay. I just wasn’t expecting it. Go ahead. Try again.” She brought her right hand to my face again—this time more slowly. Then her left hand came up. She began rubbing both of my cheeks in little circles.

“Are my zits giving you messages in Braille?”

She giggled at that, and I prayed to God that the whitehead I’d been nursing with Clearasil didn’t decide it was time to blow.

Now she moved her fingers up to my eye sockets, brushing both of my brows with her thumb before checking out the bridge of my nose. “You have good bone structure,” she said, which is fine for dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History, but not exactly the compliment you want to hear.

“That’s the best you can say, huh?”

“Good bone structure is important,” she said. “No matter how handsome or pretty you think you are, without bone structure to back it up, it doesn’t mean a thing.”