The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

Don’t worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.
We burned rubber, roaring away from a stop sign before turning left onto
the misnomered Grandview (there’s a view of a golf course, I guess, but nothing
grand). The only thing I could think of in this direction was the cemetery.
Augustus reached into the center console, flipped open a full pack of cigarettes,
and removed one.
“Do you ever throw them away?” I asked him.
“One of the many benefits of not smoking is that packs of cigarettes last
forever,” he answered. “I’ve had this one for almost a year. A few of them are
broken near the filters, but I think this pack could easily get me to my eighteenth
birthday.” He held the filter between his fingers, then put it in his mouth. “So,
okay,” he said. “Okay. Name some things that you never see in Indianapolis.”
“Um. Skinny adults,” I said.
He laughed. “Good. Keep going.”
“Mmm, beaches. Family-owned restaurants. Topography.”
“All excellent examples of things we lack. Also, culture.”
“Yeah, we are a bit short on culture,” I said, finally realizing where he was
taking me. “Are we going to the museum?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Oh, are we going to that park or whatever?”

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Gus looked a bit deflated. “Yes, we are going to that park or whatever,” he
said. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”
“Um, figured what out?”
“Nothing.”
There was this park behind the museum where a bunch of artists had made big
sculptures. I’d heard about it but had never visited. We drove past the museum
and parked right next to this basketball court filled with huge blue and red steel
arcs that imagined the path of a bouncing ball.
We walked down what passes for a hill in Indianapolis to this clearing
where kids were climbing all over this huge oversize skeleton sculpture. The
bones were each about waist high, and the thighbone was longer than me. It
looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton rising up out of the ground.
My shoulder hurt. I worried the cancer had spread from my lungs. I
imagined the tumor metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes into my
skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent. “Funky Bones,” Augustus said.
“Created by Joep Van Lieshout.”
“Sounds Dutch.”
“He is,” Gus said. “So is Rik Smits. So are tulips.” Gus stopped in the
middle of the clearing with the bones right in front of us and slipped his
backpack off one shoulder, then the other. He unzipped it, producing an orange
blanket, a pint of orange juice, and some sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap
with the crusts cut off.
“What’s with all the orange?” I asked, still not wanting to let myself
imagine that all this would lead to Amsterdam.
“National color of the Netherlands, of course. You remember William of
Orange and everything?”
“He wasn’t on the GED test.” I smiled, trying to contain my excitement.
“Sandwich?” he asked.
“Let me guess,” I said.
“Dutch cheese. And tomato. The tomatoes are from Mexico. Sorry.”
“You’re always such a disappointment, Augustus. Couldn’t you have at
least gotten orange tomatoes?”
He laughed, and we ate our sandwiches in silence, watching the kids play
on the sculpture. I couldn’t very well ask him about it, so I just sat there
surrounded by Dutchness, feeling awkward and hopeful.
In the distance, soaked in the unblemished sunlight so rare and precious in
our hometown, a gaggle of kids made a skeleton into a playground, jumping
back and forth among the prosthetic bones.

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“Two things I love about this sculpture,” Augustus said. He was holding the
unlit cigarette between his fingers, flicking at it as if to get rid of the ash. He
placed it back in his mouth. “First, the bones are just far enough apart that if
you’re a kid, you cannot resist the urge to jump between them. Like, you just
have to jump from rib cage to skull. Which means that, second, the sculpture
essentially forces children to play on bones. The symbolic resonances are
endless, Hazel Grace.”
“You do love symbols,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation back
toward the many symbols of the Netherlands at our picnic.
“Right, about that. You are probably wondering why you are eating a bad
cheese sandwich and drinking orange juice and why I am wearing the jersey of a
Dutchman who played a sport I have come to loathe.”
“It has crossed my mind,” I said.
“Hazel Grace, like so many children before you—and I say this with great
affection—you spent your Wish hastily, with little care for the consequences.
The Grim Reaper was staring you in the face and the fear of dying with your
Wish still in your proverbial pocket, ungranted, led you to rush toward the first
Wish you could think of, and you, like so many others, chose the cold and
artificial pleasures of the theme park.”
“I actually had a great time on that trip. I met Goofy and Minn—”
“I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if
you interrupt me I will completely screw it up,” Augustus interrupted. “Please to
be eating your sandwich and listening.” (The sandwich was inedibly dry, but I
smiled and took a bite anyway.) “Okay, where was I?”
“The artificial pleasures.”
He returned the cigarette to its pack. “Right, the cold and artificial pleasures
of the theme park. But let me submit that the real heroes of the Wish Factory are
the young men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot
and good Christian girls wait for marriage. These young heroes wait stoically
and without complaint for their one true Wish to come along. Sure, it may never
come along, but at least they can rest easily in the grave knowing that they’ve
done their little part to preserve the integrity of the Wish as an idea.
“But then again, maybe it will come along: Maybe you’ll realize that your
one true Wish is to visit the brilliant Peter Van Houten in his Amsterdamian
exile, and you will be glad indeed to have saved your Wish.”
Augustus stopped speaking long enough that I figured the soliloquy was
over. “But I didn’t save my Wish,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. And then, after what felt like a practiced pause, he added,
“But I saved mine.”

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“Really?” I was surprised that Augustus was Wish-eligible, what with being
still in school and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies
to hook you up with a Wish.
“I got it in exchange for the leg,” he explained. There was all this light on
his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably.
“Now, I’m not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an
interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it wouldn’t make sense to meet him
without the girl who introduced me to his book.”
“It definitely wouldn’t,” I said.
“So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said
Amsterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed leaving May third
and returning May seventh.”
“Augustus, really?”
He reached over and touched my cheek and for a moment I thought he
might kiss me. My body tensed, and I think he saw it, because he pulled his hand
away.
“Augustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”
“God, you’re the best,” I told him.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he
answered.

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