The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER EIGHT
W
e had a big Cancer Team Meeting a couple days later. Every so often, a bunch of
doctors and social workers and physical therapists and whoever else got together around a
big table in a conference room and discussed my situation. (Not the Augustus Waters
situation or the Amsterdam situation. The cancer situation.)
Dr. Maria led the meeting. She hugged me when I got there. She was a hugger.
I felt a little better, I guess. Sleeping with the BiPAP all night made my lungs feel
almost normal, although, then again, I did not really remember lung normality.
Everyone got there and made a big show of turning off their pagers and everything so
it would be all about me, and then Dr. Maria said, “So the great news is that Phalanxifor
continues to control your tumor growth, but obviously we’re still seeing serious problems
with fluid accumulation. So the question is, how should we proceed?”
And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. “Um,” I said, “I
feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?”
She smiled. “Right, I was waiting for Dr. Simons. Dr. Simons?” He was another
cancer doctor of some kind.
“Well, we know from other patients that most tumors eventually evolve a way to
grow in spite of Phalanxifor, but if that were the case, we’d see tumor growth on the scans,
which we don’t see. So it’s not that yet.”
Yet, I thought.
Dr. Simons tapped at the table with his forefinger. “The thought around here is that
it’s possible the Phalanxifor is worsening the edema, but we’d face far more serious
problems if we discontinued its use.”
Dr. Maria added, “We don’t really understand the long-term effects of Phalanxifor.
Very few people have been on it as long as you have.”
“So we’re gonna do nothing?”
“We’re going to stay the course,” Dr. Maria said, “but we’ll need to do more to keep
that edema from building up.” I felt kind of sick for some reason, like I was going to
throw up. I hated Cancer Team Meetings in general, but I hated this one in particular.
“Your cancer is not going away, Hazel. But we’ve seen people live with your level of
tumor penetration for a long time.” (I did not ask what constituted a long time. I’d made
that mistake before.) “I know that coming out of the ICU, it doesn’t feel this way, but this
fluid is, at least for the time being, manageable.”
“Can’t I just get like a lung transplant or something?” I asked.
Dr. Maria’s lips shrank into her mouth. “You would not be considered a strong
candidate for a transplant, unfortunately,” she said. I understood: No use wasting good
lungs on a hopeless case. I nodded, trying not to look like that comment hurt me. My dad

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started crying a little. I didn’t look over at him, but no one said anything for a long time,
so his hiccuping cry was the only sound in the room.
I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth
is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my
parents’ suffering.
Just before the Miracle, when I was in the ICU and it looked like I was going to die and
Mom was telling me it was okay to let go, and I was trying to let go but my lungs kept
searching for air, Mom sobbed something into Dad’s chest that I wish I hadn’t heard, and
that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, “I won’t be a mom anymore.” It
gutted me pretty badly.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that during the whole Cancer Team Meeting. I couldn’t
get it out of my head, how she sounded when she said that, like she would never be okay
again, which probably she wouldn’t.
Anyway, eventually we decided to keep things the same only with more frequent fluid
drainings. At the end, I asked if I could travel to Amsterdam, and Dr. Simons actually and
literally laughed, but then Dr. Maria said, “Why not?” And Simons said, dubiously, “Why
not?” And Dr. Maria said, “Yeah, I don’t see why not. They’ve got oxygen on the planes,
after all.” Dr. Simons said, “Are they just going to gate-check a BiPAP?” And Maria said,
“Yeah, or have one waiting for her.”
“Placing a patient—one of the most promising Phalanxifor survivors, no less—an
eight-hour flight from the only physicians intimately familiar with her case? That’s a
recipe for disaster.”
Dr. Maria shrugged. “It would increase some risks,” she acknowledged, but then
turned to me and said, “But it’s your life.”
Except not really. On the car ride home, my parents agreed: I would not be going to
Amsterdam unless and until there was medical agreement that it would be safe.
* * *
Augustus called that night after dinner. I was already in bed—after dinner had become my
bedtime for the moment—propped up with a gajillion pillows and also Bluie, with my
computer on my lap.
I picked up, saying, “Bad news,” and he said, “Shit, what?”
“I can’t go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it’s a bad idea.”
He was quiet for a second. “God,” he said. “I should’ve just paid for it myself.
Should’ve just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam.”
“But then I would’ve had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam,
and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane,” I said.

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“Well, yeah,” he said. “But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally
gotten me laid.”
I laughed pretty hard, hard enough that I felt where the chest tube had been.
“You laugh because it’s true,” he said.
I laughed again.
“It’s true, isn’t it!”
“Probably not,” I said, and then after a moment added, “although you never know.”
He moaned in misery. “I’m gonna die a virgin,” he said.
“You’re a virgin?” I asked, surprised.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, “do you have a pen and a piece of paper?” I said I did.
“Okay, please draw a circle.” I did. “Now draw a smaller circle within that circle.” I did.
“The larger circle is virgins. The smaller circle is seventeen-year-old guys with one leg.”
I laughed again, and told him that having most of your social engagements occur at a
children’s hospital also did not encourage promiscuity, and then we talked about Peter Van
Houten’s amazingly brilliant comment about the sluttiness of time, and even though I was
in bed and he was in his basement, it really felt like we were back in that uncreated third
space, which was a place I really liked visiting with him.
Then I got off the phone and my mom and dad came into my room, and even though
it was really not big enough for all three of us, they lay on either side of the bed with me
and we all watched ANTM on the little TV in my room. This girl I didn’t like, Selena, got
kicked off, which made me really happy for some reason. Then Mom hooked me up to the
BiPAP and tucked me in, and Dad kissed me on the forehead, the kiss all stubble, and then
I closed my eyes.
The BiPAP essentially took control of my breathing away from me, which was
intensely annoying, but the great thing about it was that it made all this noise, rumbling
with each inhalation and whirring as I exhaled. I kept thinking that it sounded like a
dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to
me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine. I was thinking about that as I
sank into sleep.
I got up late the next morning. I watched TV in bed and checked my email and then after a
while started crafting an email to Peter Van Houten about how I couldn’t come to
Amsterdam but I swore upon the life of my mother that I would never share any
information about the characters with anyone, that I didn’t even want to share it, because I
was a terribly selfish person, and could he please just tell me if the Dutch Tulip Man is for
real and if Anna’s mom marries him and also about Sisyphus the Hamster.
But I didn’t send it. It was too pathetic even for me.
Around three, when I figured Augustus would be home from school, I went into the
backyard and called him. As the phone rang, I sat down on the grass, which was all
overgrown and dandeliony. That swing set was still back there, weeds growing out of the

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little ditch I’d created from kicking myself higher as a little kid. I remembered Dad
bringing home the kit from Toys “R” Us and building it in the backyard with a neighbor.
He’d insisted on swinging on it first to test it, and the thing damn near broke.
The sky was gray and low and full of rain but not yet raining. I hung up when I got
Augustus’s voice mail and then put the phone down in the dirt beside me and kept looking
at the swing set, thinking that I would give up all the sick days I had left for a few healthy
ones. I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting
factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn’t let it kill me before it
kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and
over again until the sound unhinged from its meaning. I was still saying it when he called
back.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hazel Grace,” he said.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Are you crying, Hazel Grace?”
“Kind of?”
“Why?” he asked.
“’Cause I’m just—I want to go to Amsterdam, and I want him to tell me what
happens after the book is over, and I just don’t want my particular life, and also the sky is
depressing me, and there is this old swing set out here that my dad made for me when I
was a kid.”
“I must see this old swing set of tears immediately,” he said. “I’ll be over in twenty
minutes.”
I stayed in the backyard because Mom was always really smothery and concerned when I
was crying, because I did not cry often, and I knew she’d want to talk and discuss whether
I shouldn’t consider adjusting my medication, and the thought of that whole conversation
made me want to throw up.
It’s not like I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father pushing
a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other metaphorically
resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there, abandoned, the two little swings
hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of wood, the outline of the seats like a kid’s
drawing of a smile.
Behind me, I heard the sliding-glass door open. I turned around. It was Augustus,
wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve plaid button-down. I wiped my face with my
sleeve and smiled. “Hi,” I said.
It took him a second to sit down on the ground next to me, and he grimaced as he
landed rather ungracefully on his ass. “Hi,” he said finally. I looked over at him. He was
looking past me, into the backyard. “I see your point,” he said as he put an arm around my
shoulder. “That is one sad goddamned swing set.”

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I nudged my head into his shoulder. “Thanks for offering to come over.”
“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection
for you,” he said.
“I guess?” I said.
“All efforts to save me from you will fail,” he said.
“Why? Why would you even like me? Haven’t you put yourself through enough of
this?” I asked, thinking of Caroline Mathers.
Gus didn’t answer. He just held on to me, his fingers strong against my left arm. “We
gotta do something about this frigging swing set,” he said. “I’m telling you, it’s ninety
percent of the problem.”
Once I’d recovered, we went inside and sat down on the couch right next to each other, the
laptop half on his (fake) knee and half on mine. “Hot,” I said of the laptop’s base.
“Is it now?” He smiled. Gus loaded this giveaway site called Free No Catch and
together we wrote an ad.
“Headline?” he asked.
“‘Swing Set Needs Home,’” I said.
“‘Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,’” he said.
“‘Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,’” I said.
He laughed. “That’s why.”
“What?”
“That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who
creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you
have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
I took a deep breath through my nose. There was never enough air in the world, but
the shortage was particularly acute in that moment.
We wrote the ad together, editing each other as we went. In the end, we settled upon
this: