The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

for departure, and then two tremendous jet engines roared to life and we began
to accelerate. “This is what it feels like to drive in a car with you,” I said, and he
smiled, but kept his jaw clenched tight and I said, “Okay?”
We were picking up speed and suddenly Gus’s hand grabbed the armrest,
his eyes wide, and I put my hand on top of his and said, “Okay?” He didn’t say
anything, just stared at me wide-eyed, and I said, “Are you scared of flying?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. The nose of the plane rose up and we
were aloft. Gus stared out the window, watching the planet shrink beneath us,
and then I felt his hand relax beneath mine. He glanced at me and then back out
the window. “We are flying,” he announced.
“You’ve never been on a plane before?”

---

He shook his head. “LOOK!” he half shouted, pointing at the window.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I see it. It looks like we’re in an airplane.”
“NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF
HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist
leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your
mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”
“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.
“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear.
When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture
Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.
It was a quick flight to Detroit, where the little electric car met us as we
disembarked and drove us to the gate for Amsterdam. That plane had TVs in the
back of each seat, and once we were above the clouds, Augustus and I timed it
so that we started watching the same romantic comedy at the same time on our
respective screens. But even though we were perfectly synchronized in our
pressing of the play button, his movie started a couple seconds before mine, so at
every funny moment, he’d laugh just as I started to hear whatever the joke was.
*
Mom had this big plan that we would sleep for the last several hours of the
flight, so when we landed at eight
A.M
., we’d hit the city ready to suck the marrow
out of life or whatever. So after the movie was over, Mom and Augustus and I
all took sleeping pills. Mom conked out within seconds, but Augustus and I
stayed up to look out the window for a while. It was a clear day, and although
we couldn’t see the sun setting, we could see the sky’s response.
“God, that is beautiful,” I said mostly to myself.
“‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes,’” he said, a line from An
Imperial Affliction.
“But it’s not rising,” I said.
“It’s rising somewhere,” he answered, and then after a moment said,
“Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could
chase the sunrise around the world for a while.”
“Also I’d live longer.” He looked at me askew. “You know, because of
relativity or whatever.” He still looked confused. “We age slower when we move
quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for
people on the ground.”

---

“College chicks,” he said. “They’re so smart.”
I rolled my eyes. He hit his (real) knee with my knee and I hit his knee back
with mine. “Are you sleepy?” I asked him.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.” Sleeping meds and narcotics didn’t do for me
what they did for normal people.
“Want to watch another movie?” he asked. “They’ve got a Portman movie
from her Hazel Era.”
“I want to watch something you haven’t seen.”
In the end we watched 300, a war movie about 300 Spartans who protect
Sparta from an invading army of like a billion Persians. Augustus’s movie
started before mine again, and after a few minutes of hearing him go, “Dang!” or
“Fatality!” every time someone was killed in some badass way, I leaned over the
armrest and put my head on his shoulder so I could see his screen and we could
actually watch the movie together.
300 featured a sizable collection of shirtless and well-oiled strapping young
lads, so it was not particularly difficult on the eyes, but it was mostly a lot of
sword wielding to no real effect. The bodies of the Persians and the Spartans
piled up, and I couldn’t quite figure out why the Persians were so evil or the
Spartans so awesome. “Contemporaneity,” to quote AIA, “specializes in the kind
of battles wherein no one loses anything of any value, except arguably their
lives.” And so it was with these titans clashing.
Toward the end of the movie, almost everyone is dead, and there is this
insane moment when the Spartans start stacking the bodies of the dead up to
form a wall of corpses. The dead become this massive roadblock standing
between the Persians and the road to Sparta. I found the gore a bit gratuitous, so
I looked away for a second, asking Augustus, “How many dead people do you
think there are?”
He dismissed me with a wave. “Shh. Shh. This is getting awesome.”
When the Persians attacked, they had to climb up the wall of death, and the
Spartans were able to occupy the high ground atop the corpse mountain, and as
the bodies piled up, the wall of martyrs only became higher and therefore harder
to climb, and everybody swung swords/shot arrows, and the rivers of blood
poured down Mount Death, etc.
I took my head off his shoulder for a moment to get a break from the gore
and watched Augustus watch the movie. He couldn’t contain his goofy grin. I
watched my own screen through squinted eyes as the mountain grew with the
bodies of Persians and Spartans. When the Persians finally overran the Spartans,
I looked over at Augustus again. Even though the good guys had just lost,

---

Augustus seemed downright joyful. I nuzzled up to him again, but kept my eyes
closed until the battle was finished.
As the credits rolled, he took off his headphones and said, “Sorry, I was
awash in the nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”
“How many dead people do you think there are?”
“Like, how many fictional people died in that fictional movie? Not
enough,” he joked.
“No, I mean, like, ever. Like, how many people do you think have ever
died?”
“I happen to know the answer to that question,” he said. “There are seven
billion living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead people.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d thought that maybe since population growth had been so
fast, there were more people alive than all the dead combined.
“There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,” he said.
The credits continued rolling. It took a long time to identify all those corpses, I
guess. My head was still on his shoulder. “I did some research on this a couple
years ago,” Augustus continued. “I was wondering if everybody could be
remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of
corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember
all the dead people?”
“And are there?”
“Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized
mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends
up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.”
“Yeah,” I said.
It was quiet for a minute, and then he asked, “You want to read or
something?” I said sure. I was reading this long poem called Howl by Allen
Ginsberg for my poetry class, and Gus was rereading An Imperial Affliction.
After a while he said, “Is it any good?”
“The poem?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, it’s great. The guys in this poem take even more drugs than I do.
How’s AIA?”
“Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.”
“This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your
sleeping mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I said.
“You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said. “Okay, read me
something else then?”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t have anything else?”

---

“That’s too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything
memorized?”
“‘Let us go then, you and I,’” I started nervously, “‘When the evening is
spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.’”
“Slower,” he said.
I felt bashful, like I had when I’d first told him of An Imperial Affliction.
“Um, okay. Okay. ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The
muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust
restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of
insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . Oh, do not ask,
“What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”
“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“Augustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his
eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying
myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I
know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and
that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been
returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have,
and I am in love with you.”
“Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like
everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy,
but I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at him and
let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side
of his head against the window.

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