The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

CHAPTER THREE
I
stayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Dawn. (Spoiler alert: The
price of dawn is blood.) It wasn’t An Imperial Affliction, but the protagonist,
Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, was vaguely likable despite killing, by my count,
no fewer than 118 individuals in 284 pages.
So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom’s policy was never to
wake me up, because one of the job requirements of Professional Sick Person is
sleeping a lot, so I was kind of confused at first when I jolted awake with her
hands on my shoulders.
“It’s almost ten,” she said.
“Sleep fights cancer,” I said. “I was up late reading.”
“It must be some book,” she said as she knelt down next to the bed and
unscrewed me from my large, rectangular oxygen concentrator, which I called
Philip, because it just kind of looked like a Philip.
Mom hooked me up to a portable tank and then reminded me I had class.
“Did that boy give it to you?” she asked out of nowhere.
“By it, do you mean herpes?”
“You are too much,” Mom said. “The book, Hazel. I mean the book.”
“Yeah, he gave me the book.”
“I can tell you like him,” she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation
required some uniquely maternal instinct. I shrugged. “I told you Support Group
would be worth your while.”
“Did you just wait outside the entire time?”
“Yes. I brought some paperwork. Anyway, time to face the day, young
lady.”
“Mom. Sleep. Cancer. Fighting.”
“I know, love, but there is class to attend. Also, today is . . . ” The glee in
Mom’s voice was evident.
“Thursday?”
“Did you seriously forget?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s Thursday, March twenty-ninth!” she basically screamed, a demented

---

smile plastered to her face.
“You are really excited about knowing the date!” I yelled back.
“HAZEL! IT’S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!”
“Ohhhhhh,” I said. My mom was really super into celebration
maximization. IT’S ARBOR DAY! LET’S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE!
COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL
RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc. “Well, Happy thirty-third
Half Birthday to me,” I said.
“What do you want to do on your very special day?”
“Come home from class and set the world record for number of episodes of
Top Chef watched consecutively?”
Mom reached up to this shelf above my bed and grabbed Bluie, the blue
stuffed bear I’d had since I was, like, one—back when it was socially acceptable
to name one’s friends after their hue.
“You don’t want to go to a movie with Kaitlyn or Matt or someone?” who
were my friends.
That was an idea. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll text Kaitlyn and see if she wants to go
to the mall or something after school.”
Mom smiled, hugging the bear to her stomach. “Is it still cool to go to the
mall?” she asked.
“I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool,” I answered.
*
I texted Kaitlyn, took a shower, got dressed, and then Mom drove me to school.
My class was American Literature, a lecture about Frederick Douglass in a
mostly empty auditorium, and it was incredibly difficult to stay awake. Forty
minutes into the ninety-minute class, Kaitlyn texted back.
Awesomesauce. Happy Half Birthday. Castleton at 3:32?

Kaitlyn had the kind of packed social life that needs to be scheduled down to the
minute. I responded:
Sounds good. I’ll be at the food court.
Mom drove me directly from school to the bookstore attached to the mall,
where I purchased both Midnight Dawns and Requiem for Mayhem, the first two
sequels to The Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and

---

bought a Diet Coke. It was 3:21.
I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I
read. There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and
over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Augustus
Waters and the existentially fraught free throws.
Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought
I couldn’t see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some
papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.
At 3:32 precisely, I noticed Kaitlyn striding confidently past the Wok
House. She saw me the moment I raised my hand, flashed her very white and
newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.
She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that
dominated her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her head as she leaned
down to hug me.
“Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How are you?” People didn’t find the
accent odd or off-putting. Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated
twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in
Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her.
She sipped through the straw. “I do wish you were at school these days. Some of
the boys have become downright edible.”
“Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we’d
attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn’t picture any of them.
“I’ve been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, “but I don’t think it
will last. He’s such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the
Hazelverse?”
“Nothing, really,” I said.
“Health is good?”
“The same, I guess?”
“Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. “So you could just live forever,
right?”
“Probably not forever,” I said.
“But basically,” she said. “What else is new?”
I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I’d
watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her
that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly
win the affections of a boy. But I didn’t really have much to brag about, so I just
shrugged.

---

“What in heaven is that?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book.
“Oh, it’s sci-fi. I’ve gotten kinda into it. It’s a series.”
“I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”
We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Kaitlyn kept picking out all
these open-toed flats for me and saying, “These would look cute on you,” which
reminded me that Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she
hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe
was a window into the soul or something. So when I pointed out a pair of
sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was like, “Yeah, but . . .” the but being