The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

Contents
EPIGRAPH
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean: “Conjoiner
rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising
down, taking everything with it.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Water,” the Dutchman said. “Well, and time.”
—
PETER VAN HOUTEN
, An Imperial Affliction

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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is not so much an author’s note as an author’s reminder of what was printed
in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.
Neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any
facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories
can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

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CHAPTER ONE
L
ate in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed,
presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read
the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my
abundant free time to thinking about death.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always
list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a
side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side
effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required
treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was
veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that
therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support
Group.
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states
of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every
Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a
cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards
would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.
I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person
over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking
meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in
Christ’s very sacred heart and whatever.
So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us
walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat
down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth
time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and
they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-
grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced,
addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by
exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s
degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the

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sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years
ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous
soul would call his life.
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we’re
doing today. I’m Hazel, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid
originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs.
And I’m doing okay.
Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to
share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting
and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Patrick, he let
us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren’t dying. Most would live into
adulthood, as Patrick had.
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with
everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the
room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have,
say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure
that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would:
I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a
long-faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.
And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye
cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind
of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one)
preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this
real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when
Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal
peril.
Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time
someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever,
he’d glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I’d shake my head
microscopically and exhale in response.
So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-
screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the
acquaintance of Augustus Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support
Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour
marathon of the previous season’s America’s Next Top Model, which admittedly
I had already seen, but still.

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Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”
Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need
to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group.
Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”
Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”
Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”
Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.”
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group
met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to
record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM I’d be missing.
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses
with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically
named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing
in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s
having a kid who bites it from cancer.
Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to
fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.
“Do you want me to carry it in for you?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few
pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered
two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that
split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my
nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.
“I love you,” she said as I got out.
“You too, Mom. See you at six.”
“Make friends!” she said through the rolled-down window as I walked
away.
I didn’t want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days
kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and
poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.
A boy was staring at me.

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I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he
dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany
hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with
his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand
half in a pocket of dark jeans.
I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was
wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places,
and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t even like anymore. Also my
hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn’t even bothered to, like, brush it.
Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of
treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a
head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet—I cut a glance
to him, and his eyes were still on me.
It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.
I walked into the circle and sat down next to Isaac, two seats away from the
boy. I glanced again. He was still watching me.
Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly
and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . .
well.
I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The
circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Patrick started us
out with the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I