So he called a guy named Parker he’d met a few times playing pickup basketball at Chelsea Piers, and took him out to lunch, and two weeks later Parker had brought him on at a private equity firm called Perini Capital, an outfit with a shitload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone’s name by the end of his first day. The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he’d been making at Morgan, but it wasn’t about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man’s work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. No hierarchies or job descriptions; there was the boss and then there was everyone else, and the boss, Barry Sanford, loved Adam from day one. Sanford was a white-haired libertine who was on his fourth wife and had named the company after his boat. It was obvious to everyone that he saw something of his young self in Adam, and though Adam didn’t personally see the resemblance, he was unoffended by it. The job’s only drawback was that it required some travel-the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk’s finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.

His Perini colleagues, Parker included, were all still single; he’d go out for a few drinks with them after work but then the evening would start to turn into another kind of evening and he’d excuse himself and go home. Still, the new environment-the informality and irreverence, the clubby decor, the foosball table, the sense that they were bound not by any sort of dull corporate ethos but only by the limits of their own creativity-fit him perfectly; he felt he belonged there. Its best amenity, though he wouldn’t have said so to anyone but Cynthia, was that in the basement of the building, which was on Ninth Avenue, there was a swimming pool. Whenever he didn’t have a lunch, Adam would take the elevator all the way down, hang his suit in the changing room, and swim laps until he wore himself out. Sometimes there was a group of kids wearing floaties in the shallow end-one of the other, bigger companies in the building had its own day care-but most days he had the water completely to himself, his every stroke echoing off the walls, his heartbeat loud in his ears. It felt like stealing. Then he’d shower, put his suit on, and go back upstairs to his desk. Sometimes he’d have Liz the receptionist order him something to eat, or sometimes he’d just skip it and let the adrenaline carry him through until dinner. He was in the best shape of his life, and it was a boon to his job performance too, because he always thought more clearly when he was a little exhausted.

At school April’s first task was to esteem herself. They began with self-portraits, huge-headed, in which the bodies were an afterthought, apportioned roughly the same space on the page as a nose or an ear. The portraits smiled widely with crooked teeth, not because the children’s teeth were crooked but because teeth were hard to draw. They made lists of the reasons they liked themselves, lists of the things they were good at and the things at which they were determined to improve. They named the comforts of their homes-pets, siblings, favorite toys, or favorite places. One girl said her favorite place was Paris, but April took this to mean the imaginary Paris of the Madeline books. Her own favorite place was her parents’ bed, with her parents not in it, just her and a few stuffed animals and a juice box and a Disney movie on TV. She dreamed of this situation often, though in practice she usually had to be sick to attain it. Something told her, though, that it would be seen as babyish, and so she said the Central Park Carousel instead.

Less auspicious was the name project. A name, the students were told, had a secret history; it might connect you to the country from which your family had first emigrated, or to the language or the religion of that country, or even just to the family itself and the loved ones who had gone before. It let you know that you were not just some one-time phenomenon but an outcome, a culmination, the top branch of a majestic tree. Told to go home and conduct some research on why she was named April Morey, she saw her parents exchange a quick look before her mother answered.

“Well,” Cynthia said, muting the TV, “Dad and I talked about a lot of different names. We would sit on the couch in our old apartment and try them out on each other back when I was pregnant with you, say them out loud to see how they sounded. And there were a few we liked, but we kept coming back to April. April Morey. It just sounded the most beautiful to us.”

Her dad smiled, and patted her mom’s leg.

“That’s it?” April said.

They looked as confused as she was. “Also,” her father said, sitting forward on the couch, “it’s a pretty unusual name. Not a lot of other Aprils in the world. We wanted a name as special as you are.”

They’d given her her name not because somebody else had had it, but because nobody had? “Was there ever another April in our family?” she asked. They looked at each other again, and shook their heads. “Why didn’t you name me after a loved one?”

“A loved one?” Adam said.

April nodded. “A dead loved one. That’s what a lot of people do. Or somebody from the old country.” Her mother punched her father in the thigh, and that, it shocked April to realize, was because he had been about to laugh.

“Where do we come from?” she demanded of them. “What country?”

Stunningly, they seemed less than sure. Adam knew his father’s family had come from England, but he didn’t know where in England specifically, nor how many generations ago that had been; his mother’s family was part German and part Dutch. Cynthia knew her father’s ancestors were Russian, unless he’d been lying about that too, and as for her maternal grandparents, her mother had always refused to discuss them.

“Was there something special about the month of April?” April asked. There wasn’t. No historic event had taken place then, no anniversary or birthday, though they did offer that if April’s birthday had actually fallen in April, they would have named her something else.

“What would you have named me instead?” she persisted. The revelation that she, April, might just as plausibly have been Samantha or Josephine or Emma, that only chance was behind the whole solemn question of her identity, made her feel worse than ever. She could see that her parents were now upset, but she was angry at them and didn’t care. They kept coming back to beauty, but it was a beauty she couldn’t comprehend and that she wasn’t at all sure her teacher would consider a satisfactory completion of the assignment.

Ms. Diaz was nice about it, of course, but there was nothing to be done about the jealousy engendered by the other, longer name-essays that went up on the walls above their lockers, stories of honored relatives and cool languages and religious rituals tended through the generations. April felt as if her family came from nowhere, and, more puzzlingly, that this suited her parents just fine.

The next unit was family traditions. The teacher took pains to define this idea as broadly as possible; still, what traditions did April’s family have? They hardly ever did the same thing even twice. They had no ancestral home they returned to, no church they attended (her mom had gone to church as a child but April had heard her say that she hated it and was glad she never had to go again), no special place they liked to travel to-indeed, having been someplace on vacation once, like Nantucket or Vail or Disney World, even if they’d had a good time there, was usually cited as a reason not to go there again. Even their Christmas tree wasn’t in the same spot every year. April knew her own grandparents so little that she sometimes mixed them up in her head and was shy about talking to them on the phone. She had one uncle and no aunts, just something her mother called a step-aunt, whom she’d only ever seen in a photo in her parents’ wedding album.