They don’t teach you that at school either. How’s it even possible that all these different worlds can exist simultaneously? School. The city. My father in a coma. This bridge, from which my father jumped to save a girl’s life. This street, where a car crashed into him. All over the world there are places where people’s lives are ripped apart.

“Are the very places to blame? Do they hurl you into a different dimension if you happen to walk past them? Or might it be that you read or think some words one day and all at once you’ve left your own life, as if you’d stepped off a bus at an unscheduled stop?”

“Wow,” says Scott. “I have absolutely no idea, but thanks all the same for answering. Maybe next time your answers will bear some relation to my questions and existential reflections.”

Both of us gaze down at the river in silence.

I have nothing of my father’s. No coffee cups, no watches, not even any memories. I don’t know what I should cling to.

It’s unfair to be thirteen. It’s unnecessary. It’s the moment when life reveals its fifth and sixth cardinal points—error and despair. How am I supposed to know what’s right and what’s important?

I’m no longer a boy, but I’m not yet a man. I’m in between. I don’t know what makes you wake up one morning, see some girls, and suddenly not find them quite so bad. Well, one particular girl anyway. I don’t know why I’ve begun to worry about my appearance and what I should do with my life. I’m quite sure that I’ll never be able to kiss another girl without thinking of Maddie. I press my lips together; I know it looks stupid, but it’s always been my way to stop myself from crying.

The torment, the joy, and the pounding heart. The happiness of thinking of a girl and missing her without really knowing her. The pain of not knowing if she even notices I’m there. The sweet tickle in my heart when I think of her. All of those things, simultaneously.

“No,” I say, finally responding to Scott’s remarks about how teachers, grown-ups, and the whole world keep quiet about the most important issue there is—how to be happy. “No, that’s not it. What they keep secret is how we notice we’re happy.”

Here and now I’m happy, and at the same time I’m not. Fear and warmth. Happiness and despair.

We came onto this bridge as inquirers, but we’re leaving it as something else, taking our first steps toward finding answers, knowing that we’ll no longer accept what other people say as we once did. We must now learn to recognize things on our own.