Because that was what Grand Central did to you. It made you draw in a breath and look around, taking it all in. The expanse of it, how big it was. The vaulted ceiling with the constellations painted on it, the way they seemed to catch the light and twinkle. The massive American flag hanging vertically by the south entrance. The digital time boards along the right side, above the ticket windows, where you could still buy tickets from an actual person, like you were Ginger Rogers in a movie from the 1940s. The people, bustling through and walking, like all New Yorkers seemed to, a beat faster than anyone else.

There were the marble stairways on either end of the building—with the Apple Store and restaurants on the top story, and on the bottom level, bathrooms and more restaurants and the lower-level trains. There were the Metro-North ticket kiosks, the Hudson News with its overpriced gum, and the Starbucks on the first level that was almost a secret, tucked away over by track thirty.

But best of all was the clock in the center. The clock was brass, and it sat atop a round marble information desk, so big that you couldn’t see all the way around it. Someone sat in the middle and answered questions, and there were pamphlets all around it, with information about New York City and train timetables. The clock had always been my favorite part of Grand Central, and I had vague memories of getting chased around it by my parents when I was little, and then clearer memories of chasing Grady around it, until he turned six and got much too mature for such things.

I stood there for a moment, just taking it all in: the squeak of people’s shoes on the floor, the snatches of conversation as people passed by—“So I told him that he needed to call first. I told him!”—the maintenance workers in their orange vests, two besuited men running flat out for a train, their long coats streaming behind them, a little kid spinning around in the center, looking up.

As I stood there, occasionally getting jostled by someone in a hurry, I suddenly felt very clearly that I was seventeen, and in from the suburbs for the night. Everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going, and I hoped it wasn’t painfully obvious that I had never once been here on my own, without someone to lead the way and tell me where to go.

“Okay,” Stevie said, shaking me out of these thoughts. She looked down at her watch. I saw some tourists with suitcases walk by us, then pause, also stopping to look up at the ceiling. “So we have—what, three hours? Maybe a little less, since we need to get to this play. Where’s Mr. Campbell’s theater?”