The Fault in Our Stars

courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The guy was
still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a
monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Patrick
acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring
contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When
he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.
He shrugged. Patrick continued and then finally it was time for the introductions.
“Isaac, perhaps you’d like to go first today. I know you’re facing a challenging time.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “I’m Isaac. I’m seventeen. And it’s looking like I have to get
surgery in a couple weeks, after which I’ll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I
know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My
girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Augustus.” He nodded toward the boy, who now
had a name. “So, yeah,” Isaac continued. He was looking at his hands, which he’d folded
into each other like the top of a tepee. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“We’re here for you, Isaac,” Patrick said. “Let Isaac hear it, guys.” And then we all,
in a monotone, said, “We’re here for you, Isaac.”
Michael was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He’d always had leukemia. He
was okay. (Or so he said. He’d taken the elevator.)
Lida was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy’s eye. She was a
regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known
existed. She said—as she had every other time I’d attended Support Group—that she felt
strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.
There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came.
His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m
seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here
today at Isaac’s request.”
“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.
“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller
coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
When it was my turn, I said, “My name is Hazel. I’m sixteen. Thyroid with mets in
my lungs. I’m okay.”
The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be
lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that
friends just didn’t get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Augustus Waters nor
I spoke again until Patrick said, “Augustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the
group.”
“My fears?”

---

“Yes.”
“I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial
blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
“Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile.
“Was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s
feelings.”
Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said, “Augustus,
please. Let’s return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?”
“I did,” Augustus answered.
Patrick seemed lost. “Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?”
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends.
My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person—
not the hand-raising type.
And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Patrick, his
delight evident, immediately said, “Hazel!” I was, I’m sure he assumed, opening up.
Becoming Part Of The Group.
I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see
through his eyes they were so blue. “There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are
dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to
remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no
one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and
built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured
encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe
it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not
survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there
will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you
to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
I’d learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van Houten, the
reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a
Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a)
understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.
After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread
all the way across Augustus’s face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be
sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. “Goddamn,” Augustus
said quietly. “Aren’t you something else.”
Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to
hold hands, and Patrick led us in a prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in
Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we
know ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for
Isaac’s eyes, for Michael’s and Jamie’s blood, for Augustus’s bones, for Hazel’s lungs, for
James’s throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your

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peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we
knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and
Abigail and Angelina and Taylor and Gabriel and . . .”
It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Patrick droned
on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my
eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name
would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped
listening.
When Patrick was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING OUR
BEST LIFE TODAY—and it was over. Augustus Waters pushed himself out of his chair
and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over me, but he
kept his distance so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. “What’s your
name?” he asked.
“Hazel.”
“No, your full name.”
“Um, Hazel Grace Lancaster.” He was just about to say something else when Isaac
walked up. “Hold on,” Augustus said, raising a finger, and turned to Isaac. “That was
actually worse than you made it out to be.”
“I told you it was bleak.”
“Why do you bother with it?”
“I don’t know. It kind of helps?”
Augustus leaned in so he thought I couldn’t hear. “She’s a regular?” I couldn’t hear
Isaac’s comment, but Augustus responded, “I’ll say.” He clasped Isaac by both shoulders
and then took a half step away from him. “Tell Hazel about clinic.”
Isaac leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. “Okay,
so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I’d rather be deaf than
blind. And he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ and I was, like, ‘Yeah, I realize it doesn’t
work that way; I’m just saying I’d rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I
realize I don’t have,’ and he said, ‘Well, the good news is that you won’t be deaf,’ and I
was like, ‘Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf. I feel
so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.’”
“He sounds like a winner,” I said. “I’m gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so I
can make this guy’s acquaintance.”
“Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Monica’s waiting for me. I gotta look at
her a lot while I can.”
“Counterinsurgence tomorrow?” Augustus asked.
“Definitely.” Isaac turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Augustus Waters turned to me. “Literally,” he said.
“Literally?” I asked.

---

“We are literally in the heart of Jesus,” he said. “I thought we were in a church
basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.”
“Someone should tell Jesus,” I said. “I mean, it’s gotta be dangerous, storing children
with cancer in your heart.”
“I would tell Him myself,” Augustus said, “but unfortunately I am literally stuck
inside of His heart, so He won’t be able to hear me.” I laughed. He shook his head, just
looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Augustus half smiled. “Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people,
and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.” A brief
awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: “I mean, particularly given that, as
you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.”
I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then
said, “I’m not beau—”
“You’re like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman.”
“Never seen it,” I said.
“Really?” he asked. “Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t help but
fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It’s your autobiography, so far as I can tell.”
His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn’t even know that
guys could turn me on—not, like, in real life.
A younger girl walked past us. “How’s it going, Alisa?” he asked. She smiled and
mumbled, “Hi, Augustus.” “Memorial people,” he explained. Memorial was the big
research hospital. “Where do you go?”
“Children’s,” I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded. The
conversation seemed over. “Well,” I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out
of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. He
limped beside me. “So, see you next time, maybe?” I asked.
“You should see it,” he said. “V for Vendetta, I mean.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”
“No. With me. At my house,” he said. “Now.”
I stopped walking. “I hardly know you, Augustus Waters. You could be an ax
murderer.”
He nodded. “True enough, Hazel Grace.” He walked past me, his shoulders filling
out his green knit polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly to the right as
he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg.
Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the

---

rest.
I followed him upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a
field of expertise for my lungs.
And then we were out of Jesus’s heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the
cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.
Mom wasn’t there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost always waiting
for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy brunette girl had Isaac pinned against
the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively. They were close enough to
me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him
saying, “Always,” and her saying, “Always,” in return.
Suddenly standing next to me, Augustus half whispered, “They’re big believers in
PDA.”
“What’s with the ‘always’?” The slurping sounds intensified.
“Always is their thing. They’ll always love each other and whatever. I would
conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in
the last year.”
A couple more cars drove up, taking Michael and Alisa away. It was just Augustus
and me now, watching Isaac and Monica, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning
against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it,
his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn’t seem
like it would, but I decided to forgive Isaac on the grounds that he was going blind. The
senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.
“Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital,” I said quietly. “The last time you’ll
ever drive a car.”
Without looking over at me, Augustus said, “You’re killing my vibe here, Hazel
Grace. I’m trying to observe young love in its many-splendored awkwardness.”
“I think he’s hurting her boob,” I said.
“Yes, it’s difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast
exam.” Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack
of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the