The Schwa Was Here

rigid halter. A Seeing Eye dog. “This is Moxie,” she said, and I knelt down to pet him as he came to me. “He’ll be jealous when we walk the other dogs,” Lexie said, “but he’ll get over it.”

We put two dogs on leashes. Moxie whined a bit, as Lexie predicted, and I led her out.

“Shouldn’t I help you down the stairs or something?” I asked.

“Why?” she answered. “Five paces, turn right, twelve paces, turn left, twenty-two steps down, then nine paces to the door.”

She navigated the stairs with confidence.

We crossed the street and walked the sidewalk that lined the bay so we wouldn’t have to cross any more streets. Lexie held my arm as we walked a slow measured pace, with Prudence and Envy tugging on their leashes, and I silently wished I had lifted weights more, because she was holding on to my nearly nonexistent left bicep. I kept waiting for her to make a crack about it.

“So, how much is my grandfather paying you to entertain me?” she asked.

“Paying me? Why would he be paying me? I’m the dog walker. I walk the dogs.”

“Nice try, but I know my grandfather. How much is he pay­ing you to spend time with me?”

I was going to continue denying it, but I figured this blind girl could see through anything.

“Enough,” I said.

“Whatever it is, he’s ripping you off,” she said. “Ask for more.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Why not? Your time is worth at least minimum wage, isn’t it? And what about an expense account? Make sure he pays when you take me out to lunch, and when you take me dancing.”

“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.”

I let her continue, closing my eyes as she gently pressed her thumbs against my sockets, perhaps testing to see whether or not there was a brain behind my eyeballs.

“You have very nice eyes,” she said.

Her fingers slipped down the side of my nose and began to travel the rim of my nostrils, which, I have to tell you, felt just a little too familiar. Then, before I could say anything about it, her fingers were brushing gently across my lips. It tickled. I was glad she couldn’t see how much I was blushing, but I wondered if she could feel the heat rising to my face.

“Seen enough?”

“Almost.” And then—God’s honest truth—she pushed her fingers just the slightest bit between my lips, and started to move them back and forth across my teeth.

“I fink oo sood shtop now,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said, ignoring me. “You’ve got braces.”

This was not going well. I wanted to be anywhere but there at that moment. Then she said, “I like braces. It gives a person texture.”

Having a girl’s fingers explore the texture of my dental work was uncharted territory for me. What did this mean? Did it mean we were going out? Was this like the blind version of “first base”? Or was this some other sport altogether—a sport I didn’t know how to play? What if this was like cricket, which I watched once and it made no sense to me. So here’s this girl with her fingertips on my teeth, which I guess is first base in a cricket match, and I’m wondering what happens if she wants to find other textures in there.

Then she took her hands away. I took a deep breath of relief. “So,” I said, “do you like what you see?”

She smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

I wondered if I would get a turn now, but I was afraid to ask.

“Hi, Antsy!”

The Schwa caught me totally by surprise and I jumped. I had no idea how long he had been standing there watching. “Jeez— do you have to do that?”

“I was wondering when you’d say something,” Lexie said.

I turned to Lexie. “You knew he was there?”

“Of course. I could hear him breathing. What did he call you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a nickname.”

“She saw me!” said the Schwa. “She actually saw me!”

“She didn’t see you, she’s blind.”

“But she knew I was here!” The Schwa was getting all excited now. “Hey, Antsy, maybe we can do another set of experiments with Lexis. See if she’s immune to the Schwa Effect. Maybe it’s genetic—her grandfather usually notices me, too.”

Lexie smiled. “Antsy? He called you Antsy?”

I threw up my hands. This was the classic three’s-a-crowd scenario, and right now three felt more like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. “Schwa, could you just go and walk some dogs?”

“I got all day.”

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” asked Lexie.

I sighed. “Lexie, meet the Schwa. Schwa, meet Lexie.”

“Calvin,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

By now Prudence and Envy were both getting restless. We walked them back home, and I took them upstairs alone. When I came back outside, Lexie was touching the Schwa’s face.

“Hey!” I shouted, running back to them.

“I wanted Lexie to see me,” the Schwa said, “like she saw you.”

“What if she doesn’t want to see you?”

Lexie’s eyebrows furrowed as she keyboarded across the Schwa’s face. “Hmm ... that’s interesting.”