The Fault in Our Stars pdfdrive com

go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”
“This was before your diagnosis?” I asked.
“Right, well, there was that, too.” He smiled with half his mouth. “The day
of the existentially fraught free throws was coincidentally also my last day of
dual leggedness. I had a weekend between when they scheduled the amputation
and when it happened. My own little glimpse of what Isaac is going through.”
I nodded. I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really, really liked him. I liked
the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took
existentially fraught free throws. I liked that he was a tenured professor in the
Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the
Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin. And I

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liked that he had two names. I’ve always liked people with two names, because
you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or Augustus? Me, I was
always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.
“Do you have siblings?” I asked.
“Huh?” he answered, seeming a little distracted.
“You said that thing about watching kids play.”
“Oh, yeah, no. I have nephews, from my half sisters. But they’re older.
They’re like—DAD, HOW OLD ARE JULIE AND MARTHA?”
“Twenty-eight!”
“They’re like twenty-eight. They live in Chicago. They are both married to
very fancy lawyer dudes. Or banker dudes. I can’t remember. You have
siblings?”
I shook my head no. “So what’s your story?” he asked, sitting down next to
me at a safe distance.
“I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—”
“No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird
fetishes, etcetera.”
“Um,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease. I
know so many people like that. It’s disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth
business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven’t let it
succeed prematurely.”
It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to
Augustus Waters, which enthusiasms to embrace, and in the silence that
followed it occurred to me that I wasn’t very interesting. “I am pretty
unextraordinary.”
“I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that
comes to mind.”
“Um. Reading?”
“What do you read?”
“Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry.
Whatever.”
“Do you write poetry, too?”
“No. I don’t write.”
“There!” Augustus almost shouted. “Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager
in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You
read a lot of capital-G great books, don’t you?”
“I guess?”
“What’s your favorite?”

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“Um,” I said.
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I
didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you
with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered
world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the
book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell
people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection
feels like a betrayal.
It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the
author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible
ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body
and my thoughts were my thoughts.
Even so, I told Augustus. “My favorite book is probably An Imperial
Affliction,” I said.
“Does it feature zombies?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Stormtroopers?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that kind of book.”
He smiled. “I am going to read this terrible book with the boring title that
does not contain stormtroopers,” he promised, and I immediately felt like I
shouldn’t have told him about it. Augustus spun around to a stack of books
beneath his bedside table. He grabbed a paperback and a pen. As he scribbled an
inscription onto the title page, he said, “All I ask in exchange is that you read
this brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game.” He held up
the book, which was called The Price of Dawn. I laughed and took it. Our hands
kind of got muddled together in the book handoff, and then he was holding my
hand. “Cold,” he said, pressing a finger to my pale wrist.
“Not cold so much as underoxygenated,” I said.
“I love it when you talk medical to me,” he said. He stood, and pulled me
up with him, and did not let go of my hand until we reached the stairs.
*
We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally
middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch about halfway
between us to let him know that it was okay to hold it, but he didn’t try. An hour
into the movie, Augustus’s parents came in and served us the enchiladas, which
we ate on the couch, and they were pretty delicious.
The movie was about this heroic guy in a mask who died heroically for

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Natalie Portman, who’s pretty badass and very hot and does not have anything
approaching my puffy steroid face.
As the credits rolled, he said, “Pretty great, huh?”
“Pretty great,” I agreed, although it wasn’t, really. It was kind of a boy
movie. I don’t know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don’t expect
them to like girl movies. “I should get home. Class in the morning,” I said.
I sat on the couch for a while as Augustus searched for his keys. His mom
sat down next to me and said, “I just love this one, don’t you?” I guess I had
been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel
with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?
(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its
stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it
to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of
chocolate.) “Yes,” I said. “A lovely thought.”
I drove Augustus’s car home with Augustus riding shotgun. He played me a
couple songs he liked by a band called The Hectic Glow, and they were good
songs, but because I didn’t know them already, they weren’t as good to me as
they were to him. I kept glancing over at his leg, or the place where his leg had
been, trying to imagine what the fake leg looked like. I didn’t want to care about
it, but I did a little. He probably cared about my oxygen. Illness repulses. I’d
learned that a long time ago, and I suspected Augustus had, too.
As I pulled up outside of my house, Augustus clicked the radio off. The air
thickened. He was probably thinking about kissing me, and I was definitely
thinking about kissing him. Wondering if I wanted to. I’d kissed boys, but it had
been a while. Pre-Miracle.
I put the car in park and looked over at him. He really was beautiful. I know
boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, my name new and better in his voice. “It has been a
real pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Ditto, Mr. Waters,” I said. I felt shy looking at him. I could not match the
intensity of his waterblue eyes.
“May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in
his voice.
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.”
“Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again
tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I rolled my
eyes. “I’m serious,” he said.

---

“You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center
console. “How about I call you when I finish this?”
“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.
“I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.”
He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you say we don’t know each
other.”

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