I e-mailed my mother at 2 AM the night before my flight to ask her to look for the small pieces of the envelopes.

When I'd searched my letters that I kept in a shoebox in Brooklyn, I saw that the return addresses had been cut off. Then I remembered my old house, the corkboard, all the scraps of my friends, and packing them up before we moved. A small ziplock bag buried away in Boston, that's where her address was.

Today I walked around Berkeley with Sophie. I asked her about the things Holly mentioned in her letters. 924 Gilman and The Phenomenauts. Where was the high school in town, and did most kids go there?

I texted my mother while we were getting ready to drive back north to El Cerrito. She had found the bag, not in my old bedroom where I told her it would be, but buried in a box in the loft of her garage. I was a little embarrassed trying to think of what else she might've found in there, but eventually she located the scraps, and texted that she was taking out her contact lenses so she could read the tiny, faded writing on the yellowed paper.

The address was in Berkeley, high up in the hills, as high as you can go. So far out of town that Sophie said it must have been a pain in the ass to be a 15-year-old kid trying to have fun there. We drove up what she said was the steepest hill in the town. We passed over the top and into a maze of right-angle roads, shaded by some tall evergreens.

We drove past the house after we found it, Sophie turned around in a cul-de-sac and and stopped so I could see it out the passenger window. It was a house made of dark wood, overlooking a canyon.

I didn't go in, didn't get out of the car. We just idled there for five minutes while I looked at the street. Sophie said, "This is where she used to write you letters from," like she was trying to cheer up one of the children she babysits.

I teared up a little but it was fine. Sophie asked if I was good, then pulled away and drove us back down the hill.