The Fault in Our Stars

were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.

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After a while, Mom and Dad announced it was time for dinner. I shut down the
computer and got up, but I couldn’t get the wall post out of my mind, and for some reason
it made me nervous and unhungry.
I kept thinking about my shoulder, which hurt, and also I still had the headache, but
maybe only because I’d been thinking about a girl who’d died of brain cancer. I kept
telling myself to compartmentalize, to be here now at the circular table (arguably too large
in diameter for three people and definitely too large for two) with this soggy broccoli and
a black-bean burger that all the ketchup in the world could not adequately moisten. I told
myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible
reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in
a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to
live my best life today.
For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why something a stranger had written on
the Internet to a different (and deceased) stranger was bothering me so much and making
me worry that there was something inside my brain—which really did hurt, although I
knew from years of experience that pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.
Because there had not been an earthquake in Papua New Guinea that day, my parents
were all hyperfocused on me, and so I could not hide this flash flood of anxiety.
“Is everything all right?” asked Mom as I ate.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I took a bite of burger. Swallowed. Tried to say something that a
normal person whose brain was not drowning in panic would say. “Is there broccoli in the
burgers?”
“A little,” Dad said. “Pretty exciting that you might go to Amsterdam.”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried not to think about the word wounded, which of course is a way
of thinking about it.
“Hazel,” Mom said. “Where are you right now?”
“Just thinking, I guess,” I said.
“Twitterpated,” my dad said, smiling.
“I am not a bunny, and I am not in love with Gus Waters or anyone,” I answered, way
too defensively. Wounded. Like Caroline Mathers had been a bomb and when she blew up
everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.
Dad asked me if I was working on anything for school. “I’ve got some very advanced
Algebra homework,” I told him. “So advanced that I couldn’t possibly explain it to a
layperson.”
“And how’s your friend Isaac?”
“Blind,” I said.
“You’re being very teenagery today,” Mom said. She seemed annoyed about it.
“Isn’t this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?”
“Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I are excited

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to see you become a young woman, making friends, going on dates.”
“I’m not going on dates,” I said. “I don’t want to go on dates with anyone. It’s a
terrible idea and a huge waste of time and—”
“Honey,” my mom said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going
to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.
“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books
and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re
too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out
more. And I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.”
“Hazel,” Dad said, and then choked up. He cried a lot, my dad.
“I’m going to go to my room and read for a while, okay? I’m fine. I really am fine; I
just want to go read for a while.”
I started out trying to read this novel I’d been assigned, but we lived in a tragically
thin-walled home, so I could hear much of the whispered conversation that ensued. My
dad saying, “It kills me,” and my mom saying, “That’s exactly what she doesn’t need to
hear,” and my dad saying, “I’m sorry but—” and my mom saying, “Are you not grateful?”
And him saying, “God, of course I’m grateful.” I kept trying to get into this story but I
couldn’t stop hearing them.
So I turned on my computer to listen to some music, and with Augustus’s favorite
band, The Hectic Glow, as my sound track, I went back to Caroline Mathers’s tribute
pages, reading about how heroic her fight was, and how much she was missed, and how
she was in a better place, and how she would live forever in their memories, and how
everyone who knew her—everyone—was laid low by her leaving.
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been
with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there
didn’t seem to be much to hate—she seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like
me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except
that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.
Anyway, eventually I started reading Caroline Mathers’s little notes, which were
mostly actually written by her parents, because I guess her brain cancer was of the variety
that makes you not you before it makes you not alive.
So it was all like, Caroline continues to have behavioral problems. She’s struggling a
lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are frustrated about these
things, too, of course, but we have more socially acceptable ways of dealing with our
anger). Gus has taken to calling Caroline HULK SMASH, which resonates with the
doctors. There’s nothing easy about this for any of us, but you take your humor where you
can get it. Hoping to go home on Thursday. We’ll let you know . . .
She didn’t go home on Thursday, needless to say.

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So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him—
inevitably. And that’s what I’d felt as he reached for me: I’d felt as though I were
committing an act of violence against him, because I was.
I decided to text him. I wanted to avoid a whole conversation about it.
Hi, so okay, I don’t know if you’ll understand this but I can’t kiss you or anything.
Not that you’d necessarily want to, but I can’t.
When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I’m going to put you through.
Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you.
Anyway, sorry.
He responded a few minutes later.
Okay.
I wrote back.
Okay.
He responded:

Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!
I just said:
Okay.
My phone buzzed moments later.
I was kidding, Hazel Grace. I understand. (But we both know that okay is a very
flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)

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I was very tempted to respond Okay again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and that
helped me text properly.
Sorry.
* * *
I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad
came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and
my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, “You are not a grenade, not
to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are
amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant
young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is
so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Really,” my dad said. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble
than you’re worth, we’d just toss you out on the streets.”
“We’re not sentimental people,” Mom added, deadpan. “We’d leave you at an
orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.”
I laughed.
“You don’t have to go to Support Group,” Mom added. “You don’t have to do
anything. Except go to school.” She handed me the bear.
“I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight,” I said. “Let me remind you that I am
more than thirty-three half years old.”
“Keep him tonight,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
“He’s lonely,” she said.
“Oh, my God, Mom,” I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled with him as
I fell asleep.
I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four in the
morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head.

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