The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I
woke up the next morning panicked because I’d dreamed of being alone and
boatless in a huge lake. I bolted up, straining against the BiPAP, and felt Mom’s
arm on me.
“Hi, you okay?”
My heart raced, but I nodded. Mom said, “Kaitlyn’s on the phone for you.”
I pointed at my BiPAP. She helped me get it off and hooked me up to Philip and
then finally I took my cell from Mom and said, “Hey, Kaitlyn.”
“Just calling to check in,” she said. “See how you’re doing.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’m doing okay.”
“You’ve just had the worst luck, darling. It’s unconscionable.”
“I guess,” I said. I didn’t think much about my luck anymore one way or
the other. Honestly, I didn’t really want to talk with Kaitlyn about anything, but
she kept dragging the conversation along.
“So what was it like?” she asked.
“Having your boyfriend die? Um, it sucks.”
“No,” she said. “Being in love.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. It was . . . it was nice to spend time with someone so
interesting. We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but
he was always so interesting, you know?”
“Alas, I do not. The boys I’m acquainted with are vastly uninteresting.”
“He wasn’t perfect or anything. He wasn’t your fairy-tale Prince Charming
or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes, but I liked him best when that
stuff fell away.”
“Do you have like a scrapbook of pictures and letters he wrote?”
“I have some pictures, but he never really wrote me letters. Except, well
there are some missing pages from his notebook that might have been something
for me, but I guess he threw them away or they got lost or something.”
“Maybe he mailed them to you,” she said.
“Nah, they’d’ve gotten here.”
“Then maybe they weren’t written for you,” she said. “Maybe . . . I mean,
not to depress you or anything, but maybe he wrote them for someone else and

---

mailed them—”
“VAN HOUTEN!” I shouted.
“Are you okay? Was that a cough?”
“Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go.”
I hung up, rolled over, reached for my laptop, turned it on, and emailed
lidewij.vliegenthart.
Lidewij,
I believe Augustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebook to Peter Van
Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that
someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they
weren’t written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can
you help?
Your friend,
Hazel Grace Lancaster
She responded late that afternoon.

Dear Hazel,
I did not know that Augustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He
was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and so sad.
I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very
late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing in the morning
to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time,
usually.
Your friend,
Lidewij Vliegenthart
p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically restrain Peter.
I wondered why he’d written Van Houten in those last days instead of me,
telling Van Houten that he’d be redeemed if only he gave me my sequel. Maybe
the notebook pages had just repeated his request to Van Houten. It made sense,
Gus leveraging his terminality to make my dream come true: The sequel was a
tiny thing to die for, but it was the biggest thing left at his disposal.
I refreshed my email continually that night, slept for a few hours, and then

---

commenced to refreshing around five in the morning. But nothing arrived. I tried
to watch TV to distract myself, but my thoughts kept drifting back to
Amsterdam, imagining Lidewij Vliegenthart and her boyfriend bicycling around
town on this crazy mission to find a dead kid’s last correspondence. How fun it
would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick
streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and
cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying
their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn.
I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d
never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her
boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty
thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so
that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could
remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious
ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is
always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
That is probably true even if you live to be ninety—although I’m jealous of
the people who get to find out for sure. Then again, I’d already lived twice as
long as Van Houten’s daughter. What he wouldn’t have given to have a kid die
at sixteen.
Suddenly Mom was standing between the TV and me, her hands folded
behind her back. “Hazel,” she said. Her voice was so serious I thought
something might be wrong.
“Yes?”
“Do you know what today is?”
“It’s not my birthday, is it?”
She laughed. “Not just yet. It’s July fourteenth, Hazel.”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No . . .”
“Is it Harry Houdini’s birthday?”
“No . . .”
“I am really tired of guessing.”
“IT IS BASTILLE DAY!” She pulled her arms from behind her back,
producing two small plastic French flags and waving them enthusiastically.
“That sounds like a fake thing. Like Cholera Awareness Day.”
“I assure you, Hazel, that there is nothing fake about Bastille Day. Did you
know that two hundred and twenty-three years ago today, the people of France
stormed the Bastille prison to arm themselves to fight for their freedom?”
“Wow,” I said. “We should celebrate this momentous anniversary.”

---

“It so happens that I have just now scheduled a picnic with your father in
Holliday Park.”
She never stopped trying, my mom. I pushed against the couch and stood
up. Together, we cobbled together some sandwich makings and found a dusty
picnic basket in the hallway utility closet.
It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and
humid—the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the
world wasn’t built for humans, we were built for the world. Dad was waiting for
us, wearing a tan suit, standing in a handicapped parking spot typing away on his
handheld. He waved as we parked and then hugged me. “What a day,” he said.
“If we lived in California, they’d all be like this.”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t enjoy them,” my mom said. She was wrong,
but I didn’t correct her.
We ended up putting our blanket down by the Ruins, this weird rectangle of
Roman ruins plopped down in the middle of a field in Indianapolis. But they
aren’t real ruins: They’re like a sculptural re-creation of ruins built eighty years
ago, but the fake Ruins have been neglected pretty badly, so they have kind of
become actual ruins by accident. Van Houten would like the Ruins. Gus, too.
So we sat in the shadow of the Ruins and ate a little lunch. “Do you need
sunscreen?” Mom asked.
“I’m okay,” I said.
You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the
screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out
how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by
navigating a playground that was. Dad saw me watching the kids and said, “You
miss running around like that?”
“Sometimes, I guess.” But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was just trying
to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could
barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable
mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his
handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a
Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him.
Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van
Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of
heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless
motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
My dad was waving his hand in front of my face. “Tune in, Hazel. Are you
there?”

---

“Sorry, yeah, what?”
“Mom suggested we go see Gus?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said.
So after lunch, we drove down to Crown Hill Cemetery, the last and final resting
place of three vice presidents, one president, and Augustus Waters. We drove up
the hill and parked. Cars roared by behind us on Thiry-eighth Street. It was easy
to find his grave: It was the newest. The earth was still mounded above his
coffin. No headstone yet.
I didn’t feel like he was there or anything, but I still took one of Mom’s
dumb little French flags and stuck it in the ground at the foot of his grave.
Maybe passersby would think he was a member of the French Foreign Legion or
some heroic mercenary.
*
Lidewij finally wrote back just after six
P.M.
while I was on the couch watching
both TV and videos on my laptop. I saw immediately there were four
attachments to the email and I wanted to open them first, but I resisted
temptation and read the email.
Dear Hazel,
Peter was very intoxicated when we arrived at his house this morning, but
this made our job somewhat easier. Bas (my boyfriend) distracted him
while I searched through the garbage bag Peter keeps with the fan mail in it,
but then I realized that Augustus knew Peter’s address. There was a large
pile of mail on his dining room table, where I found the letter very quickly.
I opened it and saw that it was addressed to Peter, so I asked him to read it.
He refused.
At this point, I became very angry, Hazel, but I did not yell at him.
Instead, I told him that he owed it to his dead daughter to read this letter
from a dead boy, and I gave him the letter and he read the entire thing and
said—I quote him directly—“Send it to the girl and tell her I have nothing
to add.”
I have not read the letter, although my eyes did fall on some phrases
while scanning the pages. I have attached them here and then will mail
them to you at your home; your address is the same?
May God bless and keep you, Hazel.

---

Your friend,
Lidewij Vliegenthart
I clicked open the four attachments. His handwriting was messy, slanting
across the page, the size of the letters varying, the color of the pen changing.
He’d written it over many days in varying degrees of consciousness.

Van Houten,
I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good
writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if
you have time—and from what I saw, you have plenty—I was wondering if
you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if
you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell
me what I should say differently.
Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a
mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want
to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another
unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
I want to leave a mark.
But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a
hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think,
“They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all
you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your
minimall becomes a lesion.
(Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas
together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into
constellations.)
We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the
groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous
attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know
it’s silly and useless—epically useless in my current state—but I am an
animal like any other.

---

Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the
earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are
to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember
her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten.
It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say:
First, do no harm.
The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are
the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the
smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that
people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox.
After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was
unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit
next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was
going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too. It was brutal:
the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark
cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand
was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark
blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and
for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she
would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we
could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t
allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still
taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse.
What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You
never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny
without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten.
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do
have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

I do, Augustus.
I do.

---

Click here for more books from this author.

---

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge:
That disease and its treatment are treated fictitiously in this novel. For example, there is no such thing
as Phalanxifor. I made it up, because I would like for it to exist. Anyone seeking an actual history of
cancer ought to read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I am also indebted to