The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER ONE
L
ate in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed,
presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same
book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to
thinking about death.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list
depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of
cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost
everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see
my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and
totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I
should attend a weekly Support Group.
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-
driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the
basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle
right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of
Jesus would have been.
I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person over
eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how
we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ’s very sacred heart and
whatever.
So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled
in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust,
and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life
story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t
die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in
America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living
by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that
will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to
give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his
nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we’re doing today.
I’m Hazel, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an
impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I’m doing okay.
Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to share. And
then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and
winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Patrick, he let us talk about dying, too.

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But most of them weren’t dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had.
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody
wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize
that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of
living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around
and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long-faced,
skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.
And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer.
One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses
that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his
whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I
could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had
placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.
Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone
discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he’d glance over at
me and sigh ever so slightly. I’d shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.
So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming
about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Augustus
Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with
my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season’s America’s