Outside the van, the hedgerows were clouded with cow parsley and hogweed. Peter, Em, and I were eighteen. Marcus, my boyfriend, was nineteen. I was sitting wedged under Marcus’s arm with a toolbox sticking into my back. His other hand held the ashtray, an empty paper coffee cup, and rested lightly on my thigh. Sometimes I wished we could stay in the van forever. I couldn’t remember meeting any of them. We had gone to the same schools, right from when we were five, all the way through. We had a common language and a shared reference library of teachers, landmarks, and local legends. It was as if they had always been on the edges of my vision: Peter in a stripy scarf, aged six, hopping across the playground; Em arriving at junior school each day with a red teapot slung over her shoulder on a string; Marcus, a good-looking boy in the year above, endlessly chasing a football across a field. While we had always known him—because everyone knew everyone, because of who his uncle was—Marcus had been the last to join our tight-knit group. He had left school at sixteen but come back in to retake his English GCSE on his Uncle Darren’s orders. There had been an empty chair next to Peter and Marcus took it, and at lunchtime trailed after him, looking awkward and asking questions about King Lear, and then about what we might all be doing later on or at the weekend, and scowling at anyone else who came near us. I was tempted to tell him to get lost, but Em said, “He’s all right, Andy. I mean, he’s not doing any harm.” Until suddenly we were four. And four was enough for me. Four was plenty.

“So no exam results then?” Em was sitting beside Peter on a rolled-up bit of carpet; Em kneeling, her fringe over her eyes, Peter—all ankle, knee, and elbow—with his long skinny legs drawn up under his chin.

“No Oxford?”

“No, Peter,” I said. “After the apocalypse there will be no Oxford. No more school of any kind.”

“And Reading?” Marcus had his eye on a ticket to the festival.

“Canceled due to the sun turning black and the heavens being rolled back like a scroll.”

Peter reached in and plucked the joint from my fingertips. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” he intoned. Sometimes it was almost like having the vicar in the van with us.

“But if the apocalypse is coming,” I went on, “we can do exactly what we want, and only what we want. Until June twentieth, that is.”