The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

part?”
“I know that part,” I said.
“So afterward, while I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I
decided to feel really hopeful. Not about survival specifically, but I felt like
Anna does in the book, that feeling of excitement and gratitude about just being
able to marvel at it all.
“But meanwhile Caroline got worse every day. She went home after a while
and there were moments where I thought we could have, like, a regular
relationship, but we couldn’t, really, because she had no filter between her
thoughts and her speech, which was sad and unpleasant and frequently hurtful.
But, I mean, you can’t dump a girl with a brain tumor. And her parents liked me,
and she has this little brother who is a really cool kid. I mean, how can you
dump her? She’s dying.
“It took forever. It took almost a year, and it was a year of me hanging out
with this girl who would, like, just start laughing out of nowhere and point at my
prosthetic and call me Stumpy.”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah. I mean, it was the tumor. It ate her brain, you know? Or it wasn’t
the tumor. I have no way of knowing, because they were inseparable, she and the
tumor. But as she got sicker, I mean, she’d just repeat the same stories and laugh
at her own comments even if she’d already said the same thing a hundred times
that day. Like, she made the same joke over and over again for weeks: ‘Gus has
great legs. I mean leg.’ And then she would just laugh like a maniac.”
“Oh, Gus,” I said. “That’s . . .” I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t
looking at me, and it felt invasive of me to look at him. I felt him scoot forward.
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at it, rolling it between his
thumb and forefinger, then put it back.

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“Well,” he said, “to be fair, I do have great leg.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all good, Hazel Grace. But just to be clear, when I thought I saw
Caroline Mathers’s ghost in Support Group, I was not entirely happy. I was
staring, but I wasn’t yearning, if you know what I mean.” He pulled the pack out
of his pocket and placed the cigarette back in it.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Me too,” he said.
“I don’t ever want to do that to you,” I told him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my
heart broken by you.”

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