The Fault in Our Stars

Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”
Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make
friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a
fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”
Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”
Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”
Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.”
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the

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definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5
episodes of ANTM I’d be missing.
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere
eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I
wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting
it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.
Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle
with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.
“Do you want me to carry it in for you?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I
had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to
me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck,
wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary
because my lungs sucked at being lungs.
“I love you,” she said as I got out.
“You too, Mom. See you at six.”
“Make friends!” she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.
I didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of
activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some
lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.
A boy was staring at me.
I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the
molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and
short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge
of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.
I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old
jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt
advertising a band I didn’t even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut,
and I hadn’t even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat
chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned
person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And
yet—I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.
It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.
I walked into the circle and sat down next to Isaac, two seats away from the boy. I
glanced again. He was still watching me.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is,
at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.
I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle

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filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Patrick started us out with the
serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the