The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know
the difference. The guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.
Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not
have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as
Patrick acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it
was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes
glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I
win.
He shrugged. Patrick continued and then finally it was time for the
introductions. “Isaac, perhaps you’d like to go first today. I know you’re facing a
challenging time.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “I’m Isaac. I’m seventeen. And it’s looking like I have
to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I’ll be blind. Not to complain or
anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind
does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Augustus.” He
nodded toward the boy, who now had a name. “So, yeah,” Isaac continued. He
was looking at his hands, which he’d folded into each other like the top of a

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tepee. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“We’re here for you, Isaac,” Patrick said. “Let Isaac hear it, guys.” And
then we all, in a monotone, said, “We’re here for you, Isaac.”
Michael was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He’d always had
leukemia. He was okay. (Or so he said. He’d taken the elevator.)
Lida was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy’s eye.
She was a regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had
not previously known existed. She said—as she had every other time I’d
attended Support Group—that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to me as
the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.
There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his
turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus
Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and
a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”
“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.
“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m
on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”
When it was my turn, I said, “My name is Hazel. I’m sixteen. Thyroid with
mets in my lungs. I’m okay.”
The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars
sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced;
it was agreed that friends just didn’t get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered.
Neither Augustus Waters nor I spoke again until Patrick said, “Augustus,
perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.”
“My fears?”
“Yes.”
“I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the
proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
“Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile.
“Was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other
people’s feelings.”
Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said,
“Augustus, please. Let’s return to you and your struggles. You said you fear
oblivion?”
“I did,” Augustus answered.
Patrick seemed lost. “Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?”
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best
friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a
fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.

---

And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and
Patrick, his delight evident, immediately said, “Hazel!” I was, I’m sure he
assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.
I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could
almost see through his eyes they were so blue. “There will come a time,” I said,
“when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no
human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our
species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or
Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought
and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly
—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is
millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will
not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced
consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human
oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what
everyone else does.”
I’d learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van
Houten, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close
a thing as I had to a Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come
across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have
died.
After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a
smile spread all the way across Augustus’s face—not the little crooked smile of
the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his
face. “Goddamn,” Augustus said quietly. “Aren’t you something else.”
Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all
had to hold hands, and Patrick led us in a prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, we are
gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and
You alone know us as we know ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through
our times of trial. We pray for Isaac’s eyes, for Michael’s and Jamie’s blood, for
Augustus’s bones, for Hazel’s lungs, for James’s throat. We pray that You might
heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your peace, which passes all
understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved
who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and Abigail
and Angelina and Taylor and Gabriel and . . .”
It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while
Patrick droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long
to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly
imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at

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the end when everyone had stopped listening.
When Patrick was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING
OUR BEST LIFE TODAY—and it was over. Augustus Waters pushed himself
out of his chair and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He
towered over me, but he kept his distance so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck to
look him in the eye. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Hazel.”
“No, your full name.”
“Um, Hazel Grace Lancaster.” He was just about to say something else
when Isaac walked up. “Hold on,” Augustus said, raising a finger, and turned to
Isaac. “That was actually worse than you made it out to be.”
“I told you it was bleak.”
“Why do you bother with it?”
“I don’t know. It kind of helps?”
Augustus leaned in so he thought I couldn’t hear. “She’s a regular?” I
couldn’t hear Isaac’s comment, but Augustus responded, “I’ll say.” He clasped
Isaac by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. “Tell Hazel
about clinic.”
Isaac leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me.
“Okay, so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I’d
rather be deaf than blind. And he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ and I was,
like, ‘Yeah, I realize it doesn’t work that way; I’m just saying I’d rather be deaf
than blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don’t have,’ and he said, ‘Well,
the good news is that you won’t be deaf,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you for
explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate
that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.’”
“He sounds like a winner,” I said. “I’m gonna try to get me some eye
cancer just so I can make this guy’s acquaintance.”
“Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Monica’s waiting for me. I
gotta look at her a lot while I can.”
“Counterinsurgence tomorrow?” Augustus asked.
“Definitely.” Isaac turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Augustus Waters turned to me. “Literally,” he said.
“Literally?” I asked.
“We are literally in the heart of Jesus,” he said. “I thought we were in a
church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.”
“Someone should tell Jesus,” I said. “I mean, it’s gotta be dangerous,
storing children with cancer in your heart.”
“I would tell Him myself,” Augustus said, “but unfortunately I am literally

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stuck inside of His heart, so He won’t be able to hear me.” I laughed. He shook
his head, just looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Augustus half smiled. “Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at
beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler
pleasures of existence.” A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed
through: “I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of
this will end in oblivion and everything.”
I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy
and then said, “I’m not beau—”
“You’re like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie
Portman.”
“Never seen it,” I said.
“Really?” he asked. “Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t
help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It’s your autobiography, so far as I
can tell.”
His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn’t even
know that guys could turn me on—not, like, in real life.
A younger girl walked past us. “How’s it going, Alisa?” he asked. She
smiled and mumbled, “Hi, Augustus.” “Memorial people,” he explained.
Memorial was the big research hospital. “Where do you go?”
“Children’s,” I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded.
The conversation seemed over. “Well,” I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps
that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and
started walking. He limped beside me. “So, see you next time, maybe?” I asked.
“You should see it,” he said. “V for Vendetta, I mean.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”
“No. With me. At my house,” he said. “Now.”
I stopped walking. “I hardly know you, Augustus Waters. You could be an
ax murderer.”
He nodded. “True enough, Hazel Grace.” He walked past me, his shoulders
filling out his green knit polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly
to the right as he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a
prosthetic leg. Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if
it likes you, it takes the rest.
I followed him upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs
not being a field of expertise for my lungs.

---

And then we were out of Jesus’s heart and in the parking lot, the spring air
just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its
hurtfulness.
Mom wasn’t there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost
always waiting for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy brunette girl
had Isaac pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather
aggressively. They were close enough to me that I could hear the weird noises of
their mouths together, and I could hear him saying, “Always,” and her saying,
“Always,” in return.
Suddenly standing next to me, Augustus half whispered, “They’re big
believers in PDA.”
“What’s with the ‘always’?” The slurping sounds intensified.
“Always is their thing. They’ll always love each other and whatever. I
would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four
million times in the last year.”
A couple more cars drove up, taking Michael and Alisa away. It was just
Augustus and me now, watching Isaac and Monica, who proceeded apace as if
they were not leaning against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob
over her shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around. I
wondered if that felt good. Didn’t seem like it would, but I decided to forgive
Isaac on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there
is yet hunger and whatever.
“Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital,” I said quietly. “The last time
you’ll ever drive a car.”
Without looking over at me, Augustus said, “You’re killing my vibe here,
Hazel Grace. I’m trying to observe young love in its many-splendored
awkwardness.”
“I think he’s hurting her boob,” I said.
“Yes, it’s difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform
a breast exam.” Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of
all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his
lips.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just
ruined the whole thing.”
“Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit
from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.
“The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or
seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of
literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his

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house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God,
even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in
exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me
just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing.