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CHAPTER EIGHT
W
e had a big Cancer Team Meeting a couple days later. Every so often, a
bunch of doctors and social workers and physical therapists and whoever else
got together around a big table in a conference room and discussed my situation.
(Not the Augustus Waters situation or the Amsterdam situation. The cancer
situation.)
Dr. Maria led the meeting. She hugged me when I got there. She was a
hugger.
I felt a little better, I guess. Sleeping with the BiPAP all night made my
lungs feel almost normal, although, then again, I did not really remember lung
normality.
Everyone got there and made a big show of turning off their pagers and
everything so it would be all about me, and then Dr. Maria said, “So the great
news is that Phalanxifor continues to control your tumor growth, but obviously
we’re still seeing serious problems with fluid accumulation. So the question is,
how should we proceed?”
And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. “Um,” I
said, “I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that
question?”
She smiled. “Right, I was waiting for Dr. Simons. Dr. Simons?” He was
another cancer doctor of some kind.
“Well, we know from other patients that most tumors eventually evolve a
way to grow in spite of Phalanxifor, but if that were the case, we’d see tumor
growth on the scans, which we don’t see. So it’s not that yet.”
Yet, I thought.
Dr. Simons tapped at the table with his forefinger. “The thought around
here is that it’s possible the Phalanxifor is worsening the edema, but we’d face
far more serious problems if we discontinued its use.”
Dr. Maria added, “We don’t really understand the long-term effects of
Phalanxifor. Very few people have been on it as long as you have.”
“So we’re gonna do nothing?”
“We’re going to stay the course,” Dr. Maria said, “but we’ll need to do

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more to keep that edema from building up.” I felt kind of sick for some reason,
like I was going to throw up. I hated Cancer Team Meetings in general, but I
hated this one in particular. “Your cancer is not going away, Hazel. But we’ve
seen people live with your level of tumor penetration for a long time.” (I did not
ask what constituted a long time. I’d made that mistake before.) “I know that
coming out of the ICU, it doesn’t feel this way, but this fluid is, at least for the
time being, manageable.”
“Can’t I just get like a lung transplant or something?” I asked.
Dr. Maria’s lips shrank into her mouth. “You would not be considered a
strong candidate for a transplant, unfortunately,” she said. I understood: No use
wasting good lungs on a hopeless case. I nodded, trying not to look like that
comment hurt me. My dad started crying a little. I didn’t look over at him, but no
one said anything for a long time, so his hiccuping cry was the only sound in the
room.
I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the
inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the
alpha and the omega of my parents’ suffering.
Just before the Miracle, when I was in the ICU and it looked like I was going to
die and Mom was telling me it was okay to let go, and I was trying to let go but
my lungs kept searching for air, Mom sobbed something into Dad’s chest that I
wish I hadn’t heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said,
“I won’t be a mom anymore.” It gutted me pretty badly.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that during the whole Cancer Team Meeting.
I couldn’t get it out of my head, how she sounded when she said that, like she
would never be okay again, which probably she wouldn’t.
Anyway, eventually we decided to keep things the same only with more frequent
fluid drainings. At the end, I asked if I could travel to Amsterdam, and Dr.
Simons actually and literally laughed, but then Dr. Maria said, “Why not?” And
Simons said, dubiously, “Why not?” And Dr. Maria said, “Yeah, I don’t see why
not. They’ve got oxygen on the planes, after all.” Dr. Simons said, “Are they just
going to gate-check a BiPAP?” And Maria said, “Yeah, or have one waiting for
her.”
“Placing a patient—one of the most promising Phalanxifor survivors, no
less—an eight-hour flight from the only physicians intimately familiar with her
case? That’s a recipe for disaster.”
Dr. Maria shrugged. “It would increase some risks,” she acknowledged, but
then turned to me and said, “But it’s your life.”

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Except not really. On the car ride home, my parents agreed: I would not be going
to Amsterdam unless and until there was medical agreement that it would be
safe.
*
Augustus called that night after dinner. I was already in bed—after dinner had
become my bedtime for the moment—propped up with a gajillion pillows and
also Bluie, with my computer on my lap.
I picked up, saying, “Bad news,” and he said, “Shit, what?”
“I can’t go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it’s a bad idea.”
He was quiet for a second. “God,” he said. “I should’ve just paid for it
myself. Should’ve just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam.”
“But then I would’ve had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in
Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of
an airplane,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “But before that, my grand romantic gesture would
have totally gotten me laid.”
I laughed pretty hard, hard enough that I felt where the chest tube had been.
“You laugh because it’s true,” he said.
I laughed again.
“It’s true, isn’t it!”
“Probably not,” I said, and then after a moment added, “although you never
know.”
He moaned in misery. “I’m gonna die a virgin,” he said.
“You’re a virgin?” I asked, surprised.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, “do you have a pen and a piece of paper?” I said I
did. “Okay, please draw a circle.” I did. “Now draw a smaller circle within that
circle.” I did. “The larger circle is virgins. The smaller circle is seventeen-year-
old guys with one leg.”
I laughed again, and told him that having most of your social engagements
occur at a children’s hospital also did not encourage promiscuity, and then we
talked about Peter Van Houten’s amazingly brilliant comment about the
sluttiness of time, and even though I was in bed and he was in his basement, it
really felt like we were back in that uncreated third space, which was a place I
really liked visiting with him.
Then I got off the phone and my mom and dad came into my room, and
even though it was really not big enough for all three of us, they lay on either

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side of the bed with me and we all watched ANTM on the little TV in my room.
This girl I didn’t like, Selena, got kicked off, which made me really happy for
some reason. Then Mom hooked me up to the BiPAP and tucked me in, and Dad
kissed me on the forehead, the kiss all stubble, and then I closed my eyes.
The BiPAP essentially took control of my breathing away from me, which
was intensely annoying, but the great thing about it was that it made all this
noise, rumbling with each inhalation and whirring as I exhaled. I kept thinking
that it sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon
who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths
to mine. I was thinking about that as I sank into sleep.
I got up late the next morning. I watched TV in bed and checked my email and
then after a while started crafting an email to Peter Van Houten about how I
couldn’t come to Amsterdam but I swore upon the life of my mother that I
would never share any information about the characters with anyone, that I
didn’t even want to share it, because I was a terribly selfish person, and could he
please just tell me if the Dutch Tulip Man is for real and if Anna’s mom marries
him and also about Sisyphus the Hamster.
But I didn’t send it. It was too pathetic even for me.
Around three, when I figured Augustus would be home from school, I went
into the backyard and called him. As the phone rang, I sat down on the grass,
which was all overgrown and dandeliony. That swing set was still back there,
weeds growing out of the little ditch I’d created from kicking myself higher as a
little kid. I remembered Dad bringing home the kit from Toys “R” Us and
building it in the backyard with a neighbor. He’d insisted on swinging on it first
to test it, and the thing damn near broke.
The sky was gray and low and full of rain but not yet raining. I hung up
when I got Augustus’s voice mail and then put the phone down in the dirt beside
me and kept looking at the swing set, thinking that I would give up all the sick
days I had left for a few healthy ones. I tried to tell myself that it could be worse,
that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not
dying of it, that I mustn’t let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started
muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the
sound unhinged from its meaning. I was still saying it when he called back.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hazel Grace,” he said.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Are you crying, Hazel Grace?”
“Kind of?”

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“Why?” he asked.
“’Cause I’m just—I want to go to Amsterdam, and I want him to tell me
what happens after the book is over, and I just don’t want my particular life, and
also the sky is depressing me, and there is this old swing set out here that my dad
made for me when I was a kid.”
“I must see this old swing set of tears immediately,” he said. “I’ll be over in
twenty minutes.”
I stayed in the backyard because Mom was always really smothery and
concerned when I was crying, because I did not cry often, and I knew she’d want
to talk and discuss whether I shouldn’t consider adjusting my medication, and
the thought of that whole conversation made me want to throw up.
It’s not like I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father
pushing a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other
metaphorically resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there,
abandoned, the two little swings hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of
wood, the outline of the seats like a kid’s drawing of a smile.
Behind me, I heard the sliding-glass door open. I turned around. It was
Augustus, wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeve plaid button-down. I wiped my
face with my sleeve and smiled. “Hi,” I said.
It took him a second to sit down on the ground next to me, and he grimaced
as he landed rather ungracefully on his ass. “Hi,” he said finally. I looked over at
him. He was looking past me, into the backyard. “I see your point,” he said as he
put an arm around my shoulder. “That is one sad goddamned swing set.”
I nudged my head into his shoulder. “Thanks for offering to come over.”
“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my
affection for you,” he said.
“I guess?” I said.
“All efforts to save me from you will fail,” he said.
“Why? Why would you even like me? Haven’t you put yourself through
enough of this?” I asked, thinking of Caroline Mathers.
Gus didn’t answer. He just held on to me, his fingers strong against my left
arm. “We gotta do something about this frigging swing set,” he said. “I’m telling
you, it’s ninety percent of the problem.”
Once I’d recovered, we went inside and sat down on the couch right next to each
other, the laptop half on his (fake) knee and half on mine. “Hot,” I said of the
laptop’s base.
“Is it now?” He smiled. Gus loaded this giveaway site called Free No Catch

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and together we wrote an ad.
“Headline?” he asked.
“‘Swing Set Needs Home,’” I said.
“‘Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,’” he said.
“‘Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,’” I
said.
He laughed. “That’s why.”
“What?”
“That’s why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot
girl who creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy
being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
I took a deep breath through my nose. There was never enough air in the
world, but the shortage was particularly acute in that moment.
We wrote the ad together, editing each other as we went. In the end, we
settled upon this: