The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

praying for you wall posts. She’d died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to
click through to some of her pictures. Augustus was in a bunch of the earlier
ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in

---

arm at Memorial Hospital’s playground, with their backs facing the camera;
kissing while Caroline held the camera out, so you could only see their noses
and closed eyes.
The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy,
uploaded postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped and curvy, with
long, straight deadblack hair falling over her face. My healthy self looked very
little like her healthy self. But our cancer selves might’ve been sisters. No
wonder he’d stared at me the first time he saw me.
I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine
months after she died, by one of her friends. We all miss you so much. It just
never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you.
I love you.
After a while, Mom and Dad announced it was time for dinner. I shut down
the computer and got up, but I couldn’t get the wall post out of my mind, and for
some reason it made me nervous and unhungry.
I kept thinking about my shoulder, which hurt, and also I still had the
headache, but maybe only because I’d been thinking about a girl who’d died of
brain cancer. I kept telling myself to compartmentalize, to be here now at the
circular table (arguably too large in diameter for three people and definitely too
large for two) with this soggy broccoli and a black-bean burger that all the
ketchup in the world could not adequately moisten. I told myself that imagining
a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on
inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life
composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell
myself to live my best life today.
For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why something a stranger had
written on the Internet to a different (and deceased) stranger was bothering me
so much and making me worry that there was something inside my brain—
which really did hurt, although I knew from years of experience that pain is a
blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.
Because there had not been an earthquake in Papua New Guinea that day,
my parents were all hyperfocused on me, and so I could not hide this flash flood
of anxiety.
“Is everything all right?” asked Mom as I ate.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I took a bite of burger. Swallowed. Tried to say
something that a normal person whose brain was not drowning in panic would
say. “Is there broccoli in the burgers?”
“A little,” Dad said. “Pretty exciting that you might go to Amsterdam.”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried not to think about the word wounded, which of course

---

is a way of thinking about it.
“Hazel,” Mom said. “Where are you right now?”
“Just thinking, I guess,” I said.
“Twitterpated,” my dad said, smiling.
“I am not a bunny, and I am not in love with Gus Waters or anyone,” I
answered, way too defensively. Wounded. Like Caroline Mathers had been a
bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded
shrapnel.
Dad asked me if I was working on anything for school. “I’ve got some very
advanced Algebra homework,” I told him. “So advanced that I couldn’t possibly
explain it to a layperson.”
“And how’s your friend Isaac?”
“Blind,” I said.
“You’re being very teenagery today,” Mom said. She seemed annoyed
about it.
“Isn’t this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?”
“Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I
are excited to see you become a young woman, making friends, going on dates.”
“I’m not going on dates,” I said. “I don’t want to go on dates with anyone.
It’s a terrible idea and a huge waste of time and—”
“Honey,” my mom said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point
I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”
My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.
“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and
read books and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do
about hurting you; you’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m
not depressed. I don’t need to get out more. And I can’t be a regular teenager,
because I’m a grenade.”
“Hazel,” Dad said, and then choked up. He cried a lot, my dad.
“I’m going to go to my room and read for a while, okay? I’m fine. I really
am fine; I just want to go read for a while.”
I started out trying to read this novel I’d been assigned, but we lived in a
tragically thin-walled home, so I could hear much of the whispered conversation
that ensued. My dad saying, “It kills me,” and my mom saying, “That’s exactly
what she doesn’t need to hear,” and my dad saying, “I’m sorry but—” and my
mom saying, “Are you not grateful?” And him saying, “God, of course I’m
grateful.” I kept trying to get into this story but I couldn’t stop hearing them.
So I turned on my computer to listen to some music, and with Augustus’s

---

favorite band, The Hectic Glow, as my sound track, I went back to Caroline
Mathers’s tribute pages, reading about how heroic her fight was, and how much
she was missed, and how she was in a better place, and how she would live
forever in their memories, and how everyone who knew her—everyone—was
laid low by her leaving.
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because
she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all
the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate—she seemed to be mostly
a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died
they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the
only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.
Anyway, eventually I started reading Caroline Mathers’s little notes, which
were mostly actually written by her parents, because I guess her brain cancer
was of the variety that makes you not you before it makes you not alive.
So it was all like, Caroline continues to have behavioral problems. She’s