“I don’t know. A fast car, maybe.”

“To go where?”

She stumped me for a second, until I sidestepped the question with this: “It’s the road that matters, not the destination.”

I gotta admit, I impressed myself with how well I could pretend to be clever, until she said, “You’re so full of crap!”

I laughed so hard practically my whole Coke sprayed out of my nose.

“Tell me something about you that I don’t know,” she asked.

“Okay, let’s see . . .” I scanned through all the things she didn’t know about me, which was about everything.

“I got two webbed toes on each foot.”

“Ooh! A mutant!”

“Yeah, and if you ask to feel them, I’m out of here.”

“Well, maybe when we go swimming someday.”

“Okay, your turn.”

“I’ll tell you about Moxie,” she said. “Most people think it’s for ‘moxie,’ the word that means ‘gutsy,’ but it’s not. You see, when I was little and I got sick, that’s what I used to say to my parents—‘Moxie! Moxie!’ Because they always gave me amoxicillin, and I knew it was supposed to make me feel better. So when they brought me a Seeing Eye dog, I called him Moxie, because from the moment I had him, I felt better about being blind.”

“That’s nice,” I said, avoiding the more common “that’s cool,” because her story deserved more respect than that.

“You know, I wasn’t born blind,” she said. “I fell out of my stroller when I was a year old, and hit the back of my head on the curb.”

Just imagining it made me grimace. “The back of your head?”

“That’s where the visual cortex is. It’s kind of like a movie screen at the back of your brain. Without it your eyes can work just fine, but there’s no place to show the movie.”

“Wow,” I said, wishing I knew a more respectful word for wow.

“I’m lucky. It happened early enough that I was able to compensate and adjust. It’s harder the older you are.”

“Do you remember seeing at all?”

It took a while for her to answer that one. “I remember . . . remembering. But that’s as close as I can get.”

“Do you miss it?”

She shrugged. “How can you miss what you don’t remember?”

Whether she liked it or not, Lexie had a bit of her grandfather in her when it came to bending the world to suit her. She could wrap the world around her finger like a yo-yo string and play with it to her heart’s content. She definitely toyed with me on a regular basis, but that was only because she knew I liked being her yo-yo.

She also knew all the right strings to pull once she finally settled on how to give her grandfather “trauma therapy.”