The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

Totally.”
“A hamartia?” he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his
jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.
“A fatal flaw,” I explained, turning away from him. I stepped toward the
curb, leaving Augustus Waters behind me, and then I heard a car start down the
street. It was Mom. She’d been waiting for me to, like, make friends or
whatever.
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I
don’t even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I
wanted to smack Augustus Waters and also replace my lungs with lungs that
didn’t suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very
edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and
right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine.
I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.
“They don’t kill you unless you light them,” he said as Mom arrived at the
curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right
between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
“It’s a metaphor,” I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.
“It’s a metaphor,” he said.
“You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances . . .” I
said.
“Oh, yes.” He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. “I’m a big believer in
metaphor, Hazel Grace.”
I turned to the car. Tapped the window. It rolled down. “I’m going to a
movie with Augustus Waters,” I said. “Please record the next several episodes of
the ANTM marathon for me.”

---

CHAPTER TWO
A
ugustus Waters drove horrifically. Whether stopping or starting, everything
happened with a tremendous JOLT. I flew against the seat belt of his Toyota
SUV each time he braked, and my neck snapped backward each time he hit the
gas. I might have been nervous—what with sitting in the car of a strange boy on
the way to his house, keenly aware that my crap lungs complicate efforts to fend
off unwanted advances—but his driving was so astonishingly poor that I could
think of nothing else.
We’d gone perhaps a mile in jagged silence before Augustus said, “I failed
the driving test three times.”
“You don’t say.”
He laughed, nodding. “Well, I can’t feel pressure in old Prosty, and I can’t
get the hang of driving left-footed. My doctors say most amputees can drive with
no problem, but . . . yeah. Not me. Anyway, I go in for my fourth driving test,
and it goes about like this is going.” A half mile in front of us, a light turned red.
Augustus slammed on the brakes, tossing me into the triangular embrace of the
seat belt. “Sorry. I swear to God I am trying to be gentle. Right, so anyway, at
the end of the test, I totally thought I’d failed again, but the instructor was like,
‘Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn’t technically unsafe.’”
“I’m not sure I agree,” I said. “I suspect Cancer Perk.” Cancer Perks are the
little things cancer kids get that regular kids don’t: basketballs signed by sports
heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver’s licenses, etc.
“Yeah,” he said. The light turned green. I braced myself. Augustus
slammed the gas.
“You know they’ve got hand controls for people who can’t use their legs,” I
pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe someday.” He sighed in a way that made me
wonder whether he was confident about the existence of someday. I knew
osteosarcoma was highly curable, but still.
There are a number of ways to establish someone’s approximate survival
expectations without actually asking. I used the classic: “So, are you in school?”
Generally, your parents pull you out of school at some point if they expect you

---

to bite it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m at North Central. A year behind, though: I’m a
sophomore. You?”
I considered lying. No one likes a corpse, after all. But in the end I told the
truth. “No, my parents withdrew me three years ago.”
“Three years?” he asked, astonished.
I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV
thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came
three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman.
Now die.) It was, we were told, incurable.
I had a surgery called radical neck dissection, which is about as pleasant as
it sounds. Then radiation. Then they tried some chemo for my lung tumors. The
tumors shrank, then grew. By then, I was fourteen. My lungs started to fill up
with water. I was looking pretty dead—my hands and feet ballooned; my skin
cracked; my lips were perpetually blue. They’ve got this drug that makes you not
feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can’t breathe, and I had a lot
of it flowing into me through a PICC line, and more than a dozen other drugs
besides. But even so, there’s a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly
when it occurs over the course of several months. I finally ended up in the ICU
with pneumonia, and my mom knelt by the side of my bed and said, “Are you
ready, sweetie?” and I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he
loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I
kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I
couldn’t catch my breath, and my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling
me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was
embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn’t just let go, and I
remember my mom telling me it was okay, that I was okay, that I would be
okay, and my father was trying so hard not to sob that when he did, which was
regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.
Everyone figured I was finished, but my Cancer Doctor Maria managed to
get some of the fluid out of my lungs, and shortly thereafter the antibiotics
they’d given me for the pneumonia kicked in.
I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous
in the Republic of Cancervania for Not Working. The drug was Phalanxifor, this
molecule designed to attach itself to cancer cells and slow their growth. It didn’t
work in about 70 percent of people. But it worked in me. The tumors shrank.
And they stayed shrunk. Huzzah, Phalanxifor! In the past eighteen months,
my mets have hardly grown, leaving me with lungs that suck at being lungs but
could, conceivably, struggle along indefinitely with the assistance of drizzled

---

oxygen and daily Phalanxifor.
Admittedly, my Cancer Miracle had only resulted in a bit of purchased
time. (I did not yet know the size of the bit.) But when telling Augustus Waters,
I painted the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the
miracle.
“So now you gotta go back to school,” he said.
“I actually can’t,” I explained, “because I already got my GED. So I’m
taking classes at MCC,” which was our community college.
“A college girl,” he said, nodding. “That explains the aura of
sophistication.” He smirked at me. I shoved his upper arm playfully. I could feel
the muscle right beneath the skin, all tense and amazing.
We made a wheels-screeching turn into a subdivision with eight-foot-high
stucco walls. His house was the first one on the left. A two-story colonial. We
jerked to a halt in his driveway.
I followed him inside. A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in
cursive with the words Home Is Where the Heart Is, and the entire house turned
out to be festooned in such observations. Good Friends Are Hard to Find and