The Fault in Our Stars

Without pain, we couldn’t know joy.”
I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus’s parents, arm in arm, hugged
each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.
After his sister Julie spoke, the service ended with a prayer about Gus’s union with God,
and I thought back to what he’d told me at Oranjee, that he didn’t believe in mansions and
harps, but did believe in capital-S Something, and so I tried to imagine him capital-S
Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I
would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would
now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room,
would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the
final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he’d once and for all
been demoted from haunted to haunter.
And then one of Gus’s brothers-in-law brought up a boom box and they played this
song Gus had picked out—a sad and quiet song by The Hectic Glow called “The New
Partner.” I just wanted to go home, honestly. I didn’t know hardly any of these people, and
I felt Peter Van Houten’s little eyes boring into my exposed shoulder blades, but after the
song was over, everyone had to come up to me and tell me that I’d spoken beautifully, and
that it was a lovely service, which was a lie: It was a funeral. It looked like any other
funeral.
His pallbearers—cousins, his dad, an uncle, friends I’d never seen—came and got
him, and they all started walking toward the hearse.
When Mom and Dad and I got in the car, I said, “I don’t want to go. I’m tired.”
“Hazel,” Mom said.
“Mom, there won’t be a place to sit and it’ll last forever and I’m exhausted.”
“Hazel, we have to go for Mr. and Mrs. Waters,” Mom said.
“Just . . .” I said. I felt so little in the backseat for some reason. I kind of wanted to be
little. I wanted to be like six years old or something. “Fine,” I said.
I just stared out the window awhile. I really didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see
them lower him into the ground in the spot he’d picked out with his dad, and I didn’t want
to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain, and I didn’t
want to see Peter Van Houten’s alcoholic belly stretched against his linen jacket, and I
didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of people, and I didn’t want to toss a handful of dirt
onto his grave, and I didn’t want my parents to have to stand there beneath the clear blue
sky with its certain slant of afternoon light, thinking about their day and their kid and my
plot and my casket and my dirt.
But I did these things. I did all of them and worse, because Mom and Dad felt we
should.
* * *

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After it was over, Van Houten walked up to me and put a fat hand on my shoulder and
said, “Could I hitch a ride? Left my rental at the bottom of the hill.” I shrugged, and he
opened the door to the backseat right as my dad unlocked the car.
Inside, he leaned between the front seats and said, “Peter Van Houten: Novelist
Emeritus and Semiprofessional Disappointer.”
My parents introduced themselves. He shook their hands. I was pretty surprised that
Peter Van Houten had flown halfway across the world to attend a funeral. “How did you
even—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I used the infernal Internet of yours to follow the Indianapolis obituary notices.” He
reached into his linen suit and produced a fifth of whiskey.
“And you just like bought a ticket and—”
He interrupted again while unscrewing the cap. “It was fifteen thousand for a first-
class ticket, but I’m sufficiently capitalized to indulge such whims. And the drinks are free
on the flight. If you’re ambitious, you can almost break even.”
Van Houten took a swig of the whiskey and then leaned forward to offer it to my dad,
who said, “Um, no thanks.” Then Van Houten nodded the bottle toward me. I grabbed it.
“Hazel,” my mom said, but I unscrewed the cap and sipped. It made my stomach feel
like my lungs. I handed the bottle back to Van Houten, who took a long slug from it and
then said, “So. Omnis cellula e cellula.”
“Huh?”
“Your boy Waters and I corresponded a bit, and in his last—”
“Wait, you read your fan mail now?”
“No, he sent it to my house, not through my publisher. And I’d hardly call him a fan.
He despised me. But at any rate he was quite insistent that I’d be absolved for my
misbehavior if I attended his funeral and told you what became of Anna’s mother. So here
I am, and there’s your answer: Omnis cellula e cellula.”
“What?” I asked again.
“Omnis cellula e cellula,” he said again. “All cells come from cells. Every cell is
born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life
begets life begets life begets life begets life.”
We reached the bottom of the hill. “Okay, yeah,” I said. I was in no mood for this.
Peter Van Houten would not hijack Gus’s funeral. I wouldn’t allow it. “Thanks,” I said.
“Well, I guess we’re at the bottom of the hill.”
“You don’t want an explanation?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m good. I think you’re a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to
get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super bad for you. But
yeah, no, you’re not the guy who wrote An Imperial Affliction anymore, so you couldn’t
sequel it even if you wanted to. Thanks, though. Have an excellent life.”
“But—”

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“Thanks for the booze,” I said. “Now get out of the car.” He looked scolded. Dad had
stopped the car and we just idled there below Gus’s grave for a minute until Van Houten
opened the door and, finally silent, left.
As we drove away, I watched through the back window as he took a drink and raised
the bottle in my direction, as if toasting me. His eyes looked so sad. I felt kinda bad for
him, to be honest.
We finally got home around six, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep, but Mom
made me eat some cheesy pasta, although she at least allowed me to eat in bed. I slept
with the BiPAP for a couple hours. Waking up was horrible, because for a disoriented
moment I felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed me anew. Mom took me off the
BiPAP, I tethered myself to a portable tank, and stumbled into my bathroom to brush my
teeth.
Appraising myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, I kept thinking there were two
kinds of adults: There were Peter Van Houtens—miserable creatures who scoured the
earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who
walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.
Neither of these futures struck me as particularly desirable. It seemed to me that I had
already seen everything pure and good in the world, and I was beginning to suspect that
even if death didn’t get in the way, the kind of love that Augustus and I share could never
last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“Occupada,” I said.
“Hazel,” my dad said. “Can I come in?” I didn’t answer, but after a while I unlocked
the door. I sat down on the closed toilet seat. Why did breathing have to be such work?
Dad knelt down next to me. He grabbed my head and pulled it into his collarbone, and he
said, “I’m sorry Gus died.” I felt kind of suffocated by his T-shirt, but it felt good to be
held so hard, pressed into the comfortable smell of my dad. It was almost like he was
angry or something, and I liked that, because I was angry, too. “It’s total bullshit,” he said.
“The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He
was such a bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?”
I nodded into his shirt.
“Gives you an idea how I feel about you,” he said.
My old man. He always knew just what to say.

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