I waved good-bye to some of the crew heaving cameras and equipment into the back of a primitive black van. For a moment I considered taking a picture of it, texting it to Nell with the caption “Rapiest rape van ever?” But I remembered the way she’d stared me down at dinner, the combination of disappointment and disgust ruining her perfect face, and decided against it. I plugged the Radnor Hotel into the Jeep’s GPS. I hadn’t come this way much in high school, and I’d been “home” so infrequently since then that the roads I used to frequently travel now gave me a vague sense of déjà vu. I’ve been here before, but when? This confusion swelled in me as pride. It meant this was no longer home. New York was. You didn’t reject me, I rejected you.

I backed out of the parking lot slowly. I was a tentative driver now that I didn’t do it often. Clutching the wheel like some blue-haired old lady, I maneuvered onto Monroe Street. I heard my phone buzz in my bag, but I wouldn’t check it until I could pull over. A few years ago, LoLo made us all sign a pledge, some partnership with Oprah, that we wouldn’t text and drive. It wasn’t my word that kept me from reaching for my phone but the stat I’d looped my name beneath: Texting and driving increases your risk of a fatal car crash by 2,000 percent. “That can’t be right,” I’d demanded of Martin, one of our fact-checkers. Martin is so strict we once got into a fight over a line I wrote, “You need this lip gloss in your life.”

“Maybe we should put this another way?” he suggested. “It’s not food or water, so technically you don’t ‘need’ it in your life.”

“You’re kidding me, right? It’s facetious.”

“Well, at least remove the emphasis on the word ‘need.’”

But when I’d questioned the accuracy of that 2,000 percent stat, he’d only nodded solemnly. “It’s right.”

There was a crack, and I started so intensely the car swerved. I swept my hand over the back of my head, a quick check for injury. Over the violent pulse of my heart, I realized it was only the construction workers on my left, slowly assembling what would be a sprawling McMansion. Sometimes, when I’m waiting for the subway, or crossing the street, a phantom pain will appear in my head, or shoulder, and I’ll touch my hand to it, pull it away expecting to see blood. The last person to realize he’s been shot is always the person who’s just been shot.

A Wawa loomed to my right. I wrenched the wheel, confusing the GPS woman as I pulled into the parking lot. “Continue to your left, continue to your left,” she berated me. I stabbed at the buttons until she went silent.

I reached into my bag and pulled out my phone. No texts from Luke. I opened my e-mail. Found the one from Mr. Larson—Andrew—about our lunch on Sunday. “Today was harder than I expected,” I wrote. “Any chance you could meet for a quick.” I paused. Knew I was pushing it, so I wrote, “slice at Peace A Pizza?” I would eat carbs for Andrew.

Peace A Pizza was the residential hangout when we were in high school. Headmaster Mah was such a fan he was always the customer of the month, giving the camera an embarrassing thumbs-up in the picture that hung next to the fountain soda machine. Dean once wrote, “Me love pizza long time” across Mr. Mah’s face. Of course he didn’t get into trouble for it, even though everyone knew he was the one who did it.

I hit send and waited five minutes, even though I doubted I’d get a response anytime soon. I decided to go back to my hotel. Maybe by the time I got there he would call.

The Radnor Hotel is one of those places that advertises itself as a boutiquey beauty in the heart of the Main Line—a wedding destination—when really it’s just an overworked Marriott with sprawling parking lots and the roar of the highway not far behind it.

Whoever had stayed in the room before me had smoked, and hadn’t been discreet about it. Our beauty director had wrung her hands over thirdhand smoke on the Today show—that’s the kind that’s embedded in ugly couch fabric and apparently does the most damage to your skin. Normally, I would call downstairs to the front desk and request to move like a demanding little bitch, but there was something about the room’s stale breath that I found soothing. I pictured a girl, an outlier like me, curled up in the floral armchair by the window, narrowing her eyes as she pulled on her cigarette, the tip blazing in response. She was back in town for a funeral, I decided. She didn’t get along with her parents either, and that’s why she was staying here instead of at home. I felt a delicious camaraderie with her that made me feel less alone. Which was exactly what I was, at six o’clock on a Friday evening, the last act of Never Been Kissed playing out on TBS. I held a coffee mug full of warm vodka between my hands, trying to ignore the M&M’s in the minibar beckoning me like a prostitute in the part of Philadelphia where Hilary once got a butterfly tattoo on her lower back.

It had been an hour since I’d written Andrew, and the only e-mails I’d received were from Groupon, alerting me to deals for liposuction, keratin, Swedish massage, fractional skin resurfacing, dating. There was another from Saks, which had selected a pair of snakeskin Jimmy Choo booties for $1,195 just for me. I wasn’t that flush.

I checked the call sheet for tomorrow, trying to calculate if I had enough time to go for a run before the hair and makeup people arrived. I never expected to sleep, but I certainly didn’t expect to here of all places. A thought suddenly dawned on me, and I set my coffee mug down. I dug around in the nightstand table, and—aha—there it was, a phone book, yellow and ancient in my hands.

Larsons, Larsons, Larsons, I thought, flipping to the L section, tracing an oxblood fingernail over the names once I got to “Lar.”

There were three Larsons, but only one lived on Grays Lane in Haverford. Andrew had once pointed out his folks’ house on a run, used that word, “folks,” which was such a sweet Andrew word, so I knew that was it.

I eyed the phone in its receiver. If I called from this number, I could just hang up if anyone but Andrew answered. Whitney might be there, his parents certainly would be. But, Christ, what were those systems where the caller ID shows up on the TV screen they have now? I’d told Andrew I was staying here. What if I called and the Radnor Hotel blinked in plain sight, interrupting whatever PBS program the family was probably watching? He’d know it was me who hung up on his mother, if she got to the phone before he did. I knew nothing about Andrew’s parents, but I pictured them as former academics, both with soft white tufts of hair, glasses of red wine in their hands as they discussed the energy crisis through the lens of the Obama administration in low, respectful tones. These kind intellectuals responsible for turning out a person like Andrew Larson, with all his emotional intelligence that drew me to him, desperate as a groupie.

The vodka opened up some clear channel of memory, because in an instant I recalled a trick from middle school sleepovers. *67 before the number and it blocks the caller’s identity. I decided to test it out with my cell phone first, punching in the secret code followed by my 917 area code. I worshiped my 917 area code. Not a PA girl anymore. A New Yorker.

My screen read “Unknown number” and I gasped a laugh. I couldn’t believe it actually worked.

I gathered a little more courage from my coffee cup. You know, maybe I didn’t even have to hang up if his parents answered. This was a perfectly innocent request. Production had changed my call time on Sunday and I couldn’t do lunch anymore, and I just wanted to try to catch him while we were both here. It wasn’t a lie yet. My call time would change, if I agreed to do what Aaron had asked me to do.

I punched in *67 first. There was a pause, and then the gentle purr of the dial tone in my ear, the shrill ring in the Larson household, several miles away.