The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

struggling a lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are
frustrated about these things, too, of course, but we have more socially
acceptable ways of dealing with our anger). Gus has taken to calling Caroline
HULK SMASH, which resonates with the doctors. There’s nothing easy about
this for any of us, but you take your humor where you can get it. Hoping to go
home on Thursday. We’ll let you know . . .
She didn’t go home on Thursday, needless to say.
So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him—
inevitably. And that’s what I’d felt as he reached for me: I’d felt as though I
were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.
I decided to text him. I wanted to avoid a whole conversation about it.
Hi, so okay, I don’t know if you’ll understand this but I can’t kiss you or
anything. Not that you’d necessarily want to, but I can’t.
When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I’m going to put you
through. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you.
Anyway, sorry.
He responded a few minutes later.
Okay.

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I wrote back.
Okay.
He responded:

Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!
I just said:
Okay.
My phone buzzed moments later.
I was kidding, Hazel Grace. I understand. (But we both know that okay is a
very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)
I was very tempted to respond Okay again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and
that helped me text properly.
Sorry.
*
I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom
and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to
her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said,
“You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad,
Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie,
because you’ve never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side
interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater
than the sadness we feel about your illness.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Really,” my dad said. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. If you were
more trouble than you’re worth, we’d just toss you out on the streets.”
“We’re not sentimental people,” Mom added, deadpan. “We’d leave you at
an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.”
I laughed.

---

“You don’t have to go to Support Group,” Mom added. “You don’t have to
do anything. Except go to school.” She handed me the bear.
“I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight,” I said. “Let me remind you
that I am more than thirty-three half years old.”
“Keep him tonight,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
“He’s lonely,” she said.
“Oh, my God, Mom,” I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled
with him as I fell asleep.
I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four
in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable
center of my head.

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