I roll my eyes. “We don’t have any of that here, sorry. Do you even know where you are? There is nothing.”

She spreads her hands out as though she’s reading a name in lights, and pausing for effect first, she says in an awestruck voice, “Niagara. Falls.”

I laugh hollowly but agree to go down, deep down toward one of the wonders of the world because there is literally nothing wonderful here.

Maybe it’s not the seventh wonder. Maybe Niagara Falls is on a list of the top fifteen, or the top two hundred, but it pulls us in some reversed tidal force, and the idea appeals to me, and soon I forget myself. I am sucked into the promise of its tacky, drooling mouth, full of gum wrappers and chewed-up garbage and tinfoil, the sun glinting off its trashy gob like the best kind of star. We park our bikes at the bus station, and I feel my heart lift. We ready ourselves for our voyage, prepare to ride the waves on a Greyhound bus.

There are a lot of people going to Niagara Falls. Tourists and locals. Some kids, some teenagers, a woman who wears lots of perfume and a man who tells everyone that he worked on a movie with Tom Cruise. Right before we get on, I see a young woman empty a cloth sack full of brown and bruised bananas into the garbage. One after another after another, like a beat-up magic trick.

“Imagine all the banana bread she could have made,” Dee says in my ear.

It isn’t a long ride to Niagara Falls from our town. We watch the outlets and parking lots rise and fall from the window. Dee is on the other side of the aisle from me, snapping her gum and jiggling her leg. She looks like a little girl, and I’m reminded that it wasn’t that long ago that she was, that any of us were. When we were innocent and didn’t know that people would zero in on us, make it their mission to ruin us. But we know now: there are so many assholes looking to put cracks in the windows of our lives. I feel that burn that started when I first met Dee, that feeling that we can take our fate into our hands and change the landscape.

We pass signs for helicopter rides and stores that specialize in sex toys, giant realtor billboards and theme restaurants trying to outdo one another’s crazy names and characters. People look small, wandering between these deliciously crazy eyesores. The whole dirty, cheesy town is trying too hard and kind of failing, but that makes it even better.

“This is awesome,” Dee says, turning to me, eyes glittering. We are going to have the best day. Something to push away the worst ones.