“Oh man!” Scott exclaims again. “We’re totally unprepared for real life, mon ami. I mean, rent, insurance, death and that. We have no idea.” He is holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, sketching shapes in the air. “And instead they send us into exams about vector geometry and amino acids. You, my accidental rebel, are the only one they can’t force to go. Are you planning to take the tests sometime soon, or are you going to whistle while your immediate future disappears down the drain?”

I don’t answer. I haven’t missed all the entrance tests for St. Paul’s. Only the ones I don’t consider essential—although my mother would presumably have a different opinion. I couldn’t care less, though. I can’t stay at school while my father is fighting for his life and Maddie is perhaps only waiting for someone to discover what she likes.

“Wait a second,” I mumble. We stop on Hammersmith Bridge. I’m standing on the very spot where my father was rammed by a car. Not far away, a man in a threadbare tuxedo is sitting on a piece of cardboard and leaning back against the railings. He’s the beggar in the video.

There are thousands of places in the world like this strip of asphalt. Thousands of places where something ends—a life, a belief, a feeling—and none of them resembles a graveyard.

The man in the tuxedo is keeping a close eye on us.

Scott leans on the green cast-iron railings next to me. They’re warm with stored-up heat from the sun. My thoughts turn to Maddie, and the resulting sensation is exactly like this spot: full of warmth and fear.

I peer over the railing. It’s a hell of a long way down to the water.

Scott is still talking. “Everything they teach us is one huge distraction. Binomial formulae, the citric acid cycle, French grammar, perspective drawing, ovulation, triple jump, continental drift, haplotype analysis . . . all so that none of us gets it into his head to ask, ‘So what’s it like to die?’ ‘How do you find a flat?’ ‘How do you find the right woman?’ ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ or ‘Would you jump from here if it really mattered, and how do we know when it really matters?’ ” Scott removes his shades and looks at me earnestly. “You know, mon ami, they never mention the most important thing in life.”

“And what might that be?” I ask.

“How to be happy.”

I screw up my eyes against the sun and feel the railing against my back and simultaneous convulsions all over the world. I study the Thames, which doesn’t seem to be a mixture of the Atlantic and the North Sea, just as it isn’t clear what most things and most people consist of. Worry, nostalgia, grief, desire, childishness, or tenderness.