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Then the doorbell rang. The finger pushing that doorbell belonged to Marcus Flutie. Marcus Flutie was ringing my doorbell just as if he were any other boy. I thought for sure he’d honk and wait in the driveway. But he was actually going to meet and greet my parents. Jesus Christ. This really couldn’t be happening. I fumbled my hairbrush into the toilet.

"I’ve never seen you this nervous before," my mom said, reaching under the sink to pull out a pair of rubber gloves so she could fish it out.

I’d never decided to have sex before.

I went to the top of the landing and saw Marcus shaking hands with my dad. I felt like I was wearing a cast again—on both legs this time. I couldn’t move. My mother nudged me from behind and I almost tumbled head-over-ass down the staircase. As I gripped the railing, and gingerly took each step, I prayed Marcus wouldn’t ask one of his bizarre questions before I got to the bottom: Mr. Darling, did you know that the Japanese have a word to describe the hysterical belief that one’s penis is shrinking?

"Jessica!" my dad exclaimed, as though the last time he’d seen me had been on the back of a milk carton.

Marcus looked me up and down.

"Ain’t you jus’ darlin’?" he drawled, exactly like the first time in the principal’s office last year. So long ago.

"She is, isn’t she?" my mom said, not getting the joke. "I told her she was!"

I think I got out the th of thanks through my stifled giggles, but the other letters got stuck in my throat.

Good-byes are a blur. The next thing I knew, Marcus and I were in the Caddie.

"Your parents love me," he said. "They obviously don’t know who I am."

"Obviously," I said.

Marcus popped in an eight-track. It took a few seconds of snare drum and bass to figure out what it was.

"This is Kind of Blue," I said.

"Yes."

"Hy said it was the essential jazz recording," I said.

"Hy was right," Marcus said.

"I hate that she was right," I said. "It would be so much easier to hate her if she were wrong about everything."

I listened to the music, wondering how and where my devirginization would take place. Would we go back to his house? To mine? My parents were going to a party, but their return time was unpredictable. How about right here in his car? The Caddie had a big enough backseat.…

"Aren’t you even curious about where we’re going tonight?" He didn’t wait for my answer. "Well, tonight, I’m going to take you on a tour. A tour of what I like to call The Five Wonders of Pineville, the strangest landmarks our town has to offer."

I snorted. "There are five? I find that hard to believe."

He turned the car into an abandoned parking lot. "Behold," he said, waving his arm with a flourish. "The Champagne of Propane."

The Champagne of Propane is a twenty-five-foot high cement structure in the shape of a wine bottle. When we were kids, it advertised a liquor store. But when the liquor store became a gas station, the clever owners repainted the label, tweaking it to suit their needs.

"You probably pass by the Champagne of Propane every day of your life," he said. "From the road, it’s kind of tacky. But have you ever looked at it up close before?"

I admitted that I hadn’t.

"It’s been painted over so many times that each color that chips or wears away reveals a whole new layer of color. Modern art."

He pointed to a section where green popped through pink, speckled with aqua, flecked with red. He was right. Inch by inch, it was kind of pretty.

"I know how much you hate Pineville," he said. "I thought tonight I’d show you what you miss when you don’t look hard enough."

For the next hour, we visited the other "Wonders" of the town in which we were both born and raised: the fiberglass purple dinosaur inexplicably erected outside Magic Carpets and Remnants that predates Barney by about twenty years and has been beheaded by out-of-control automobiles no less than six times; Der Wunder Wiener, the tiny hot-dog-shaped shop-on-wheels that has been parked across the street from the abandoned Woolworth’s for as long as we remember,