The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

Affliction mattered to Gus independently of me mattering to him.
The water lapped quietly at the stone canal walls beneath us; a group of
friends biked past in a clump, shouting over each other in rapid-fire, guttural
Dutch; the tiny boats, not much longer than me, half drowned in the canal; the
smell of water that had stood too still for too long; his arm pulling me in; his real
leg against my real leg all the way from hip to foot. I leaned in to his body a
little. He winced. “Sorry, you okay?”
He breathed out a yeah in obvious pain.
“Sorry,” I said. “Bony shoulder.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Nice, actually.”
We sat there for a long time. Eventually his hand abandoned my shoulder
and rested against the back of the park bench. Mostly we just stared into the
canal. I was thinking a lot about how they’d made this place exist even though it
should’ve been underwater, and how I was for Dr. Maria a kind of Amsterdam, a
half-drowned anomaly, and that made me think about dying. “Can I ask you

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about Caroline Mathers?”
“And you say there’s no afterlife,” he answered without looking at me. “But
yeah, of course. What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a
grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved. “Just, like,
what happened.”
He sighed, exhaling for so long that to my crap lungs it seemed like he was
bragging. He popped a fresh cigarette into his mouth. “You know how there is
famously no place less played in than a hospital playground?” I nodded. “Well, I
was at Memorial for a couple weeks when they took off the leg and everything. I
was up on the fifth floor and I had a view of the playground, which was always
of course utterly desolate. I was all awash in the metaphorical resonance of the
empty playground in the hospital courtyard. But then this girl started showing up
alone at the playground, every day, swinging on a swing completely alone, like
you’d see in a movie or something. So I asked one of my nicer nurses to get the
skinny on the girl, and the nurse brought her up to visit, and it was Caroline, and
I used my immense charisma to win her over.” He paused, so I decided to say
something.
“You’re not that charismatic,” I said. He scoffed, disbelieving. “You’re
mostly just hot,” I explained.
He laughed it off. “The thing about dead people,” he said, and then stopped
himself. “The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don’t romanticize them,
but the truth is . . . complicated, I guess. Like, you are familiar with the trope of
the stoic and determined cancer victim who heroically fights her cancer with
inhuman strength and never complains or stops smiling even at the very end,
etcetera?”
“Indeed,” I said. “They are kindhearted and generous souls whose every
breath is an Inspiration to Us All. They’re so strong! We admire them so!”
“Right, but really, I mean aside from us obviously, cancer kids are not
statistically more likely to be awesome or compassionate or perseverant or
whatever. Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked
feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and
so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know? Ragging
on the nurses and the other kids and our families and whatever else. But I don’t
know if that was her or the tumor. I mean, one of her nurses told me once that
the kind of tumor Caroline had is known among medical types as the Asshole
Tumor, because it just turns you into a monster. So here’s this girl missing a fifth
of her brain who’s just had a recurrence of the Asshole Tumor, and so she was
not, you know, the paragon of stoic cancer-kid heroism. She was . . . I mean, to

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be honest, she was a bitch. But you can’t say that, because she had this tumor,
and also she’s, I mean, she’s dead. And she had plenty of reason to be
unpleasant, you know?”
I knew.
“You know that part in An Imperial Affliction when Anna’s walking across
the football field to go to PE or whatever and she falls and goes face-first into
the grass and that’s when she knows that the cancer is back and in her nervous
system and she can’t get up and her face is like an inch from the football-field
grass and she’s just stuck there looking at this grass up close, noticing the way
the light hits it and . . . I don’t remember the line but it’s something like Anna
having the Whitmanesque revelation that the definition of humanness is the
opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever. You know that