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Impossible to Forget read an illustration above the coatrack. True Love Is Born
from Hard Times promised a needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished
living room. Augustus saw me reading. “My parents call them
Encouragements,” he explained. “They’re everywhere.”
His mom and dad called him Gus. They were making enchiladas in the kitchen
(a piece of stained glass by the sink read in bubbly letters Family Is Forever).
His mom was putting chicken into tortillas, which his dad then rolled up and
placed in a glass pan. They didn’t seem too surprised by my arrival, which made
sense: The fact that Augustus made me feel special did not necessarily indicate
that I was special. Maybe he brought home a different girl every night to show
her movies and feel her up.
“This is Hazel Grace,” he said, by way of introduction.
“Just Hazel,” I said.
“How’s it going, Hazel?” asked Gus’s dad. He was tall—almost as tall as
Gus—and skinny in a way that parentally aged people usually aren’t.
“Okay,” I said.
“How was Isaac’s Support Group?”
“It was incredible,” Gus said.
“You’re such a Debbie Downer,” his mom said. “Hazel, do you enjoy it?”
I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated
to please Augustus or his parents. “Most of the people are really nice,” I finally

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said.
“That’s exactly what we found with families at Memorial when we were in
the thick of it with Gus’s treatment,” his dad said. “Everybody was so kind.
Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”
“Quick, give me a throw pillow and some thread because that needs to be
an Encouragement,” Augustus said, and his dad looked a little annoyed, but then
Gus wrapped his long arm around his dad’s neck and said, “I’m just kidding,
Dad. I like the freaking Encouragements. I really do. I just can’t admit it because
I’m a teenager.” His dad rolled his eyes.
“You’re joining us for dinner, I hope?” asked his mom. She was small and
brunette and vaguely mousy.
“I guess?” I said. “I have to be home by ten. Also I don’t, um, eat meat?”
“No problem. We’ll vegetarianize some,” she said.
“Animals are just too cute?” Gus asked.
“I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for,” I said.
Gus opened his mouth to respond but then stopped himself.
His mom filled the silence. “Well, I think that’s wonderful.”
They talked to me for a bit about how the enchiladas were Famous Waters
Enchiladas and Not to Be Missed and about how Gus’s curfew was also ten, and
how they were inherently distrustful of anyone who gave their kids curfews
other than ten, and was I in school—“she’s a college student,” Augustus
interjected—and how the weather was truly and absolutely extraordinary for
March, and how in spring all things are new, and they didn’t even once ask me
about the oxygen or my diagnosis, which was weird and wonderful, and then
Augustus said, “Hazel and I are going to watch V for Vendetta so she can see her
filmic doppelgänger, mid-two thousands Natalie Portman.”
“The living room TV is yours for the watching,” his dad said happily.
“I think we’re actually gonna watch it in the basement.”
His dad laughed. “Good try. Living room.”
“But I want to show Hazel Grace the basement,” Augustus said.
“Just Hazel,” I said.
“So show Just Hazel the basement,” said his dad. “And then come upstairs
and watch your movie in the living room.”
Augustus puffed out his cheeks, balanced on his leg, and twisted his hips,
throwing the prosthetic forward. “Fine,” he mumbled.
I followed him down carpeted stairs to a huge basement bedroom. A shelf
at my eye level reached all the way around the room, and it was stuffed solid
with basketball memorabilia: dozens of trophies with gold plastic men mid–jump
shot or dribbling or reaching for a layup toward an unseen basket. There were

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also lots of signed balls and sneakers.
“I used to play basketball,” he explained.
“You must’ve been pretty good.”
“I wasn’t bad, but all the shoes and balls are Cancer Perks.” He walked
toward the TV, where a huge pile of DVDs and video games were arranged into
a vague pyramid shape. He bent at the waist and snatched up V for Vendetta. “I
was, like, the prototypical white Hoosier kid,” he said. “I was all about
resurrecting the lost art of the midrange jumper, but then one day I was shooting
free throws—just standing at the foul line at the North Central gym shooting
from a rack of balls. All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically
tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest
thing I could possibly be doing.
“I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a
circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they
figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic
version of that same exercise. Anyway, for the longest time, I just kept sinking
free throws. I hit eighty in a row, my all-time best, but as I kept going, I felt
more and more like a two-year-old. And then for some reason I started to think
about hurdlers. Are you okay?”
I’d taken a seat on the corner of his unmade bed. I wasn’t trying to be
suggestive or anything; I just got kind of tired when I had to stand a lot. I’d stood
in the living room and then there had been the stairs, and then more standing,
which was quite a lot of standing for me, and I didn’t want to faint or anything. I
was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just listening.
Hurdlers?”
“Yeah, hurdlers. I don’t know why. I started thinking about them running
their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been
set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would