The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

parted neatly on the left side in a way that he would have found absolutely
horrifying, and his face was plasticized. But he was still Gus. My lanky,
beautiful Gus.
I wanted to wear the little black dress I’d bought for my fifteenth birthday
party, my death dress, but I didn’t fit into it anymore, so I wore a plain black

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dress, knee-length. Augustus wore the same thin-lapeled suit he’d worn to
Oranjee.
As I knelt, I realized they’d closed his eyes—of course they had—and that I
would never again see his blue eyes. “I love you present tense,” I whispered, and
then put my hand on the middle of his chest and said, “It’s okay, Gus. It’s okay.
It is. It’s okay, you hear me?” I had—and have—absolutely no confidence that
he could hear me. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I suddenly felt conscious that there were all these people watching us, that
the last time so many people saw us kiss we were in the Anne Frank House. But
there was, properly speaking, no us left to watch. Only a me.
I snapped open the clutch, reached in, and pulled out a hard pack of Camel
Lights. In a quick motion I hoped no one behind would notice, I snuck them into
the space between his side and the coffin’s plush silver lining. “You can light
these,” I whispered to him. “I won’t mind.”
While I was talking to him, Mom and Dad had moved up to the second row with
my tank, so I didn’t have a long walk back. Dad handed me a tissue as I sat
down. I blew my nose, threaded the tubes around my ears, and put the nubbins
back in.
I thought we’d go into the proper sanctuary for the real funeral, but it all
happened in that little side room—the Literal Hand of Jesus, I guess, the part of
the cross he’d been nailed to. A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin,
almost like the coffin was a pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how
Augustus had a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was
an inspiration to us all, and I was already starting to get pissed off at the minister
when he said, “In heaven, Augustus will finally be healed and whole,” implying
that he had been less whole than other people due to his leglessness, and I kind
of could not repress my sigh of disgust. My dad grabbed me just above the knee
and cut me a disapproving look, but from the row behind me, someone muttered
almost inaudibly near my ear, “What a load of horse crap, eh, kid?”
I spun around.
Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his
rotundity, a powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie. He looked like he was
dressed for a colonial occupation of Panama, not a funeral. The minister said,
“Let us pray,” but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-
jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, “We
gotta fake pray,” and bowed his head.
I tried to forget about him and just pray for Augustus. I made a point of
listening to the minister and not looking back.

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The minister called up Isaac, who was much more serious than he’d been at
the prefuneral. “Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of
Cancervania, and he is not replaceable,” Isaac began. “Other people will be able
to tell you funny stories about Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell
you a serious one: A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the
hospital. I was blind and heartbroken and didn’t want to do anything and Gus
burst into my room and shouted, ‘I have wonderful news!’ And I was like, ‘I
don’t really want to hear wonderful news right now,’ and Gus said, ‘This is
wonderful news you want to hear,’ and I asked him, ‘Fine, what is it?’ and he
said, ‘You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible
moments that you cannot even imagine yet!’”
Isaac couldn’t go on, or maybe that was all he had written.
After a high school friend told some stories about Gus’s considerable basketball
talents and his many qualities as a teammate, the minister said, “We’ll now hear
a few words from Augustus’s special friend, Hazel.” Special friend? There were
some titters in the audience, so I figured it was safe for me to start out by saying
to the minister, “I was his girlfriend.” That got a laugh. Then I began reading
from the eulogy I’d written.
“There’s a great quote in Gus’s house, one that both he and I found very
comforting: Without pain, we couldn’t know joy.”
I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus’s parents, arm in arm,
hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the
living.
After his sister Julie spoke, the service ended with a prayer about Gus’s union
with God, and I thought back to what he’d told me at Oranjee, that he didn’t
believe in mansions and harps, but did believe in capital-S Something, and so I
tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could
not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew
too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently than
it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating
loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly
unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he’d once and for all been
demoted from haunted to haunter.
And then one of Gus’s brothers-in-law brought up a boom box and they
played this song Gus had picked out—a sad and quiet song by The Hectic Glow
called “The New Partner.” I just wanted to go home, honestly. I didn’t know
hardly any of these people, and I felt Peter Van Houten’s little eyes boring into

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my exposed shoulder blades, but after the song was over, everyone had to come
up to me and tell me that I’d spoken beautifully, and that it was a lovely service,
which was a lie: It was a funeral. It looked like any other funeral.
His pallbearers—cousins, his dad, an uncle, friends I’d never seen—came
and got him, and they all started walking toward the hearse.
When Mom and Dad and I got in the car, I said, “I don’t want to go. I’m
tired.”
“Hazel,” Mom said.
“Mom, there won’t be a place to sit and it’ll last forever and I’m
exhausted.”
“Hazel, we have to go for Mr. and Mrs. Waters,” Mom said.
“Just . . .” I said. I felt so little in the backseat for some reason. I kind of
wanted to be little. I wanted to be like six years old or something. “Fine,” I said.
I just stared out the window awhile. I really didn’t want to go. I didn’t want
to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he’d picked out with his dad,
and I didn’t want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and
moan in pain, and I didn’t want to see Peter Van Houten’s alcoholic belly
stretched against his linen jacket, and I didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of
people, and I didn’t want to toss a handful of dirt onto his grave, and I didn’t
want my parents to have to stand there beneath the clear blue sky with its certain
slant of afternoon light, thinking about their day and their kid and my plot and
my casket and my dirt.
But I did these things. I did all of them and worse, because Mom and Dad
felt we should.
*
After it was over, Van Houten walked up to me and put a fat hand on my
shoulder and said, “Could I hitch a ride? Left my rental at the bottom of the hill.”
I shrugged, and he opened the door to the backseat right as my dad unlocked the
car.
Inside, he leaned between the front seats and said, “Peter Van Houten:
Novelist Emeritus and Semiprofessional Disappointer.”
My parents introduced themselves. He shook their hands. I was pretty
surprised that Peter Van Houten had flown halfway across the world to attend a
funeral. “How did you even—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I used the infernal Internet of yours to follow the Indianapolis obituary
notices.” He reached into his linen suit and produced a fifth of whiskey.
“And you just like bought a ticket and—”

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He interrupted again while unscrewing the cap. “It was fifteen thousand for
a first-class ticket, but I’m sufficiently capitalized to indulge such whims. And
the drinks are free on the flight. If you’re ambitious, you can almost break even.”
Van Houten took a swig of the whiskey and then leaned forward to offer it
to my dad, who said, “Um, no thanks.” Then Van Houten nodded the bottle
toward me. I grabbed it.
“Hazel,” my mom said, but I unscrewed the cap and sipped. It made my
stomach feel like my lungs. I handed the bottle back to Van Houten, who took a
long slug from it and then said, “So. Omnis cellula e cellula.”
“Huh?”
“Your boy Waters and I corresponded a bit, and in his last—”
“Wait, you read your fan mail now?”
“No, he sent it to my house, not through my publisher. And I’d hardly call
him a fan. He despised me. But at any rate he was quite insistent that I’d be
absolved for my misbehavior if I attended his funeral and told you what became
of Anna’s mother. So here I am, and there’s your answer: Omnis cellula e