The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

CHAPTER TEN
W
e could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that
she couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my
parents had gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was
supposed to spend its life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and
forth to Dayton, where Morris Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often
visited.
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the
suitcase, since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in
the first place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and
therefore required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at
least two-thirds of the suitcase.
In the end, we both lost. So it goes.
Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty,
turning on the light and shouting, “AMSTERDAM!” She ran around all morning
making sure we had international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we
had the right number of oxygen tanks to get there and that they were all full, etc.,
while I just rolled out of bed, put on my Travel to Amsterdam Outfit (jeans, a
pink tank top, and a black cardigan in case the plane was cold).
The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat
breakfast with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on
the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying
myself for a day in the fields. But anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs
while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade versions of Egg McMuffins they
liked.
“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t
we have curry for breakfast?”
“Hazel, eat.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck
with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone
freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast
sandwich.”

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Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have
breakfast for dinner. Deal?”
“I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and
fork over my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner
without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is
breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime.”
“You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if
this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.”
“Quite a bit behind you,” my dad added, and Mom laughed.
Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.
After they finished eating, Dad did the dishes and walked us to the car. Of
course, he started crying, and he kissed my cheek with his wet stubbly face. He
pressed his nose against my cheekbone and whispered, “I love you. I’m so proud
of you.” (For what, I wondered.)
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’ll see you in a few days, okay, sweetie? I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I smiled. “And it’s only three days.”
As we backed out of the driveway, I kept waving at him. He was waving
back, and crying. It occurred to me that he was probably thinking he might never
see me again, which he probably thought every single morning of his entire
weekday life as he left for work, which probably sucked.
Mom and I drove over to Augustus’s house, and when we got there, she
wanted me to stay in the car to rest, but I went to the door with her anyway. As
we approached the house, I could hear someone crying inside. I didn’t think it
was Gus at first, because it didn’t sound anything like the low rumble of his
speaking, but then I heard a voice that was definitely a twisted version of his say,
“BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE, MOM. IT BELONGS TO ME.” And quickly my
mom put her arm around my shoulders and spun me back toward the car,
walking quickly, and I was like, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
And she said, “We can’t eavesdrop, Hazel.”
We got back into the car and I texted Augustus that we were outside
whenever he was ready.
We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that
they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though
they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of
architecture.
“Well,” Mom said after a while, “we are pretty early, I guess.”
“Almost as if I didn’t have to get up at five thirty,” I said. Mom reached
down to the console between us, grabbed her coffee mug, and took a sip. My

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phone buzzed. A text from Augustus.
Just CAN’T decide what to wear. Do you like me better in a polo or a
button-down?
I replied:
Button-down.
Thirty seconds later, the front door opened, and a smiling Augustus appeared, a
roller bag behind him. He wore a pressed sky-blue button-down tucked into his
jeans. A Camel Light dangled from his lips. My mom got out to say hi to him.
He took the cigarette out momentarily and spoke in the confident voice to which
I was accustomed. “Always a pleasure to see you, ma’am.”
I watched them through the rearview mirror until Mom opened the trunk.
Moments later, Augustus opened a door behind me and engaged in the
complicated business of entering the backseat of a car with one leg.
“Do you want shotgun?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “And hello, Hazel Grace.”
“Hi,” I said. “Okay?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
My mom got in and closed the car door. “Next stop, Amsterdam,” she
announced.
Which was not quite true. The next stop was the airport parking lot, and then a
bus took us to the terminal, and then an open-air electric car took us to the
security line. The TSA guy at the front of the line was shouting about how our
bags had better not contain explosives or firearms or anything liquid over three
ounces, and I said to Augustus, “Observation: Standing in line is a form of
oppression,” and he said, “Seriously.”
Rather than be searched by hand, I chose to walk through the metal detector
without my cart or my tank or even the plastic nubbins in my nose. Walking
through the X-ray machine marked the first time I’d taken a step without oxygen
in some months, and it felt pretty amazing to walk unencumbered like that,
stepping across the Rubicon, the machine’s silence acknowledging that I was,
however briefly, a nonmetallicized creature.
I felt a bodily sovereignty that I can’t really describe except to say that
when I was a kid I used to have a really heavy backpack that I carried

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everywhere with all my books in it, and if I walked around with the backpack for
long enough, when I took it off I felt like I was floating.
After about ten seconds, my lungs felt like they were folding in upon
themselves like flowers at dusk. I sat down on a gray bench just past the machine
and tried to catch my breath, my cough a rattling drizzle, and I felt pretty
miserable until I got the cannula back into place.
Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself,
demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when
something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or
attention. Mom was looking at me, concerned. She’d just said something. What
had she just said? Then I remembered. She’d asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Amsterdam!” she half shouted.
I smiled. “Amsterdam,” I answered. She reached her hand down to me and
pulled me up.
We got to the gate an hour before our scheduled boarding time. “Mrs. Lancaster,
you are an impressively punctual person,” Augustus said as he sat down next to
me in the mostly empty gate area.
“Well, it helps that I am not technically very busy,” she said.
“You’re plenty busy,” I told her, although it occurred to me that Mom’s
business was mostly me. There was also the business of being married to my dad
—he was kind of clueless about, like, banking and hiring plumbers and cooking
and doing things other than working for Morris Property, Inc.—but it was mostly
me. Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully
entangled.
As the seats around the gate started to fill, Augustus said, “I’m gonna get a
hamburger before we leave. Can I get you anything?”
“No,” I said, “but I really appreciate your refusal to give in to breakfasty
social conventions.”
He tilted his head at me, confused. “Hazel has developed an issue with the
ghettoization of scrambled eggs,” Mom said.
“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that
scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”
“I want to talk about this more,” Augustus said. “But I am starving. I’ll be
right back.”
When Augustus hadn’t showed up after twenty minutes, I asked Mom if she
thought something was wrong, and she looked up from her awful magazine only

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long enough to say, “He probably just went to the bathroom or something.”
A gate agent came over and switched my oxygen container out with one
provided by the airline. I was embarrassed to have this lady kneeling in front of
me while everyone watched, so I texted Augustus while she did it.
He didn’t reply. Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds
of Amsterdam trip–ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental breakdown) and I felt like
there was something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked
away.
And just when the lady behind the ticket counter announced they were
going to start preboarding people who might need a bit of extra time and every
single person in the gate area turned squarely to me, I saw Augustus fast-limping
toward us with a McDonald’s bag in one hand, his backpack slung over his
shoulder.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Line got superlong, sorry,” he said, offering me a hand up. I took it, and
we walked side by side to the gate to preboard.
I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us,
and whether it would kill us, and how heroic my mom must be, and everything
else. That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical
evidence of disease separates you from other people. We were irreconcilably
other, and never was it more obvious than when the three of us walked through
the empty plane, the stewardess nodding sympathetically and gesturing us
toward our row in the distant back. I sat in the middle of our three-person row
with Augustus in the window seat and Mom in the aisle. I felt a little hemmed in
by Mom, so of course I scooted over toward Augustus. We were right behind the
plane’s wing. He opened up his bag and unwrapped his burger.
“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the
scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or
Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled
cheese, but scrambled eggs—they’re important.”
“Ludicrous,” I said. The people were starting to file into the plane now. I
didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at
Augustus.
“I’m just saying: Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also
special. They have a place and a time, like church does.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-
stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing that the
fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a
lie, and you know it.”

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“You’re a hard person to comfort,” Augustus said.
“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said. “You were a rare and fragile flower
once. You remember.”
For a moment, he said nothing. “You do know how to shut me up, Hazel
Grace.”
“It’s my privilege and my responsibility,” I answered.
Before I broke eye contact with him, he said, “Listen, sorry I avoided the
gate area. The McDonald’s line wasn’t really that long; I just . . . I just didn’t
want to sit there with all those people looking at us or whatever.”
“At me, mostly,” I said. You could glance at Gus and never know he’d been
sick, but I carried my disease with me on the outside, which is part of why I’d
become a homebody in the first place. “Augustus Waters, noted charismatist, is
embarrassed to sit next to a girl with an oxygen tank.”
“Not embarrassed,” he said. “They just piss me off sometimes. And I don’t
want to be pissed off today.” After a minute, he dug into his pocket and flipped
open his pack of smokes.
About nine seconds later, a blond stewardess rushed over to our row and
said, “Sir, you can’t smoke on this plane. Or any plane.”
“I don’t smoke,” he explained, the cigarette dancing in his mouth as he
spoke.
“But—”
“It’s a metaphor,” I explained. “He puts the killing thing in his mouth but
doesn’t give it the power to kill him.”
The stewardess was flummoxed for only a moment. “Well, that metaphor is
prohibited on today’s flight,” she said. Gus nodded and rejoined the cigarette to
its pack.
We finally taxied out to the runway and the pilot said, Flight attendants, prepare