The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

CHAPTER FIVE
I
did not speak to Augustus again for about a week. I had called him on the
Night of the Broken Trophies, so per tradition it was his turn to call. But he
didn’t. Now, it wasn’t as if I held my phone in my sweaty hand all day, staring at
it while wearing my Special Yellow Dress, patiently waiting for my gentleman
caller to live up to his sobriquet. I went about my life: I met Kaitlyn and her
(cute but frankly not Augustinian) boyfriend for coffee one afternoon; I ingested
my recommended daily allowance of Phalanxifor; I attended classes three
mornings that week at MCC; and every night, I sat down to dinner with my mom
and dad.
Sunday night, we had pizza with green peppers and broccoli. We were
seated around our little circular table in the kitchen when my phone started
singing, but I wasn’t allowed to check it because we have a strict no-phones-
during-dinner rule.
So I ate a little while Mom and Dad talked about this earthquake that had
just happened in Papua New Guinea. They met in the Peace Corps in Papua New
Guinea, and so whenever anything happened there, even something terrible, it
was like all of a sudden they were not large sedentary creatures, but the young
and idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and their
rapture was such that they didn’t even glance over at me as I ate faster than I’d
ever eaten, transmitting items from my plate into my mouth with a speed and
ferocity that left me quite out of breath, which of course made me worry that my
lungs were again swimming in a rising pool of fluid. I banished the thought as
best I could. I had a PET scan scheduled in a couple weeks. If something was
wrong, I’d find out soon enough. Nothing to be gained by worrying between
now and then.
And yet still I worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry
is yet another side effect of dying.
Finally I finished and said, “Can I be excused?” and they hardly even
paused from their conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of Guinean
infrastructure. I grabbed my phone from my purse on the kitchen counter and
checked my recent calls. Augustus Waters.

---

I went out the back door into the twilight. I could see the swing set, and I
thought about walking out there and swinging while I talked to him, but it
seemed pretty far away given that eating tired me.
Instead, I lay down in the grass on the patio’s edge, looked up at Orion, the
only constellation I could recognize, and called him.
“Hazel Grace,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”
“Grand,” he said. “I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely
basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An
Imperial Affliction.” (He said “in re.” He really did. That boy.)
“And?” I said.
“I think it’s, like. Reading it, I just kept feeling like, like.”
“Like?” I asked, teasing him.
“Like it was a gift?” he said askingly. “Like you’d given me something
important.”
“Oh,” I said quietly.
“That’s cheesy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said. “No. Don’t apologize.”
“But it doesn’t end.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Torture. I totally get it, like, I get that she died or whatever.”
“Right, I assume so,” I said.
“And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author
and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling defensive of Peter Van Houten. “That’s part
of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die
in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence. But I do—God, I do really
want to know what happens to everyone else. That’s what I asked him in my
letters. But he, yeah, he never answers.”
“Right. You said he is a recluse?”
“Correct.”
“Impossible to track down.”
“Correct.”
“Utterly unreachable,” Augustus said.
“Unfortunately so,” I said.
“‘Dear Mr. Waters,’” he answered. “‘I am writing to thank you for your
electronic correspondence, received via Ms. Vliegenthart this sixth of April,
from the United States of America, insofar as geography can be said to exist in
our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity.’”

---

“Augustus, what the hell?”
“He has an assistant,” Augustus said. “Lidewij Vliegenthart. I found her. I
emailed her. She gave him the email. He responded via her email account.”
“Okay, okay. Keep reading.”
“‘My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition
of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and
0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I
apologize for any errors or omissions that may result.
“‘Given the entertainment bacchanalia at the disposal of young men and
women of your generation, I am grateful to anyone anywhere who sets aside the
hours necessary to read my little book. But I am particularly indebted to you, sir,
both for your kind words about An Imperial Affliction and for taking the time to
tell me that the book, and here I quote you directly, “meant a great deal” to you.
“‘This comment, however, leads me to wonder: What do you mean by
meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that
art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as
possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A
call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe,
this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human
and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds
you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all.
“‘I fear there is not, my friend, and that you would receive scant
encouragement from further encounters with my writing. But to answer your
question: No, I have not written anything else, nor will I. I do not feel that
continuing to share my thoughts with readers would benefit either them or me.
Thank you again for your generous email.
“‘Yours most sincerely, Peter Van Houten, via Lidewij Vliegenthart.’”
“Wow,” I said. “Are you making this up?”
“Hazel Grace, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a
letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like ‘our triumphantly digitized
contemporaneity’?”
“You could not,” I allowed. “Can I, can I have the email address?”
“Of course,” Augustus said, like it was not the best gift ever.
I spent the next two hours writing an email to Peter Van Houten. It seemed to get
worse each time I rewrote it, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Dear Mr. Peter Van Houten
(c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart),

---

My name is Hazel Grace Lancaster. My friend Augustus Waters, who
read An Imperial Affliction at my recommendation, just received an email
from you at this address. I hope you will not mind that Augustus shared that
email with me.
Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Augustus that you
are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed,
but I’m also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will
live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year
survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in
An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of
telling me what I’m feeling before I even feel it, and I’ve reread it dozens of
times.
I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I
have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book
ends because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I
would really like to know what happens to Anna’s mom—whether she
married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever has another child, and
whether she stays at 917 W. Temple, etc. Also, is the Dutch Tulip Man a
fraud or does he really love them? What happens to Anna’s friends—