The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER TEN
W
e could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that she
couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my parents had
gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was supposed to spend its
life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and forth to Dayton, where Morris
Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often visited.
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase, since
without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in the first place. Mom
countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore required more physical
fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-thirds of the suitcase.
In the end, we both lost. So it goes.
Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty, turning on the
light and shouting, “AMSTERDAM!” She ran around all morning making sure we had
international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we had the right number of
oxygen tanks to get there and that they were all full, etc., while I just rolled out of bed, put
on my Travel to Amsterdam Outfit (jeans, a pink tank top, and a black cardigan in case the
plane was cold).
The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat breakfast
with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I
was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields. But
anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade
versions of Egg McMuffins they liked.
“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t we have
curry for breakfast?”
“Hazel, eat.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with
breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But
the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.”
Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have breakfast for
dinner. Deal?”
“I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and fork over
my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous
construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at
dinnertime.”
“You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if this is
the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.”
“Quite a bit behind you,” my dad added, and Mom laughed.

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Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.
After they finished eating, Dad did the dishes and walked us to the car. Of course, he
started crying, and he kissed my cheek with his wet stubbly face. He pressed his nose
against my cheekbone and whispered, “I love you. I’m so proud of you.” (For what, I
wondered.)
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’ll see you in a few days, okay, sweetie? I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I smiled. “And it’s only three days.”
As we backed out of the driveway, I kept waving at him. He was waving back, and
crying. It occurred to me that he was probably thinking he might never see me again,
which he probably thought every single morning of his entire weekday life as he left for
work, which probably sucked.
Mom and I drove over to Augustus’s house, and when we got there, she wanted me to
stay in the car to rest, but I went to the door with her anyway. As we approached the
house, I could hear someone crying inside. I didn’t think it was Gus at first, because it
didn’t sound anything like the low rumble of his speaking, but then I heard a voice that
was definitely a twisted version of his say, “BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE, MOM. IT
BELONGS TO ME.” And quickly my mom put her arm around my shoulders and spun
me back toward the car, walking quickly, and I was like, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
And she said, “We can’t eavesdrop, Hazel.”
We got back into the car and I texted Augustus that we were outside whenever he was
ready.
We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that they almost
always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of
our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
“Well,” Mom said after a while, “we are pretty early, I guess.”
“Almost as if I didn’t have to get up at five thirty,” I said. Mom reached down to the
console between us, grabbed her coffee mug, and took a sip. My phone buzzed. A text
from Augustus.
Just CAN’T decide what to wear. Do you like me better in a polo or a button-down?
I replied:
Button-down.
Thirty seconds later, the front door opened, and a smiling Augustus appeared, a roller bag
behind him. He wore a pressed sky-blue button-down tucked into his jeans. A Camel Light

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dangled from his lips. My mom got out to say hi to him. He took the cigarette out
momentarily and spoke in the confident voice to which I was accustomed. “Always a
pleasure to see you, ma’am.”
I watched them through the rearview mirror until Mom opened the trunk. Moments
later, Augustus opened a door behind me and engaged in the complicated business of
entering the backseat of a car with one leg.
“Do you want shotgun?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “And hello, Hazel Grace.”
“Hi,” I said. “Okay?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
My mom got in and closed the car door. “Next stop, Amsterdam,” she announced.
Which was not quite true. The next stop was the airport parking lot, and then a bus took us
to the terminal, and then an open-air electric car took us to the security line. The TSA guy
at the front of the line was shouting about how our bags had better not contain explosives
or firearms or anything liquid over three ounces, and I said to Augustus, “Observation:
Standing in line is a form of oppression,” and he said, “Seriously.”
Rather than be searched by hand, I chose to walk through the metal detector without
my cart or my tank or even the plastic nubbins in my nose. Walking through the X-ray
machine marked the first time I’d taken a step without oxygen in some months, and it felt
pretty amazing to walk unencumbered like that, stepping across the Rubicon, the
machine’s silence acknowledging that I was, however briefly, a nonmetallicized creature.
I felt a bodily sovereignty that I can’t really describe except to say that when I was a
kid I used to have a really heavy backpack that I carried everywhere with all my books in
it, and if I walked around with the backpack for long enough, when I took it off I felt like I
was floating.
After about ten seconds, my lungs felt like they were folding in upon themselves like
flowers at dusk. I sat down on a gray bench just past the machine and tried to catch my
breath, my cough a rattling drizzle, and I felt pretty miserable until I got the cannula back
into place.
Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself,
demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in
the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention. Mom was looking at
me, concerned. She’d just said something. What had she just said? Then I remembered.
She’d asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Amsterdam!” she half shouted.
I smiled. “Amsterdam,” I answered. She reached her hand down to me and pulled me

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up.
We got to the gate an hour before our scheduled boarding time. “Mrs. Lancaster, you are
an impressively punctual person,” Augustus said as he sat down next to me in the mostly
empty gate area.
“Well, it helps that I am not technically very busy,” she said.
“You’re plenty busy,” I told her, although it occurred to me that Mom’s business was
mostly me. There was also the business of being married to my dad—he was kind of
clueless about, like, banking and hiring plumbers and cooking and doing things other than
working for Morris Property, Inc.—but it was mostly me. Her primary reason for living
and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.
As the seats around the gate started to fill, Augustus said, “I’m gonna get a
hamburger before we leave. Can I get you anything?”
“No,” I said, “but I really appreciate your refusal to give in to breakfasty social
conventions.”
He tilted his head at me, confused. “Hazel has developed an issue with the
ghettoization of scrambled eggs,” Mom said.
“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled
eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”
“I want to talk about this more,” Augustus said. “But I am starving. I’ll be right
back.”
When Augustus hadn’t showed up after twenty minutes, I asked Mom if she thought
something was wrong, and she looked up from her awful magazine only long enough to
say, “He probably just went to the bathroom or something.”
A gate agent came over and switched my oxygen container out with one provided by
the airline. I was embarrassed to have this lady kneeling in front of me while everyone
watched, so I texted Augustus while she did it.
He didn’t reply. Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds of
Amsterdam trip–ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental breakdown) and I felt like there was
something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked away.
And just when the lady behind the ticket counter announced they were going to start
preboarding people who might need a bit of extra time and every single person in the gate
area turned squarely to me, I saw Augustus fast-limping toward us with a McDonald’s bag
in one hand, his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Line got superlong, sorry,” he said, offering me a hand up. I took it, and we walked
side by side to the gate to preboard.
I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us, and whether

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it would kill us, and how heroic my mom must be, and everything else. That was the worst
part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from
other people. We were irreconcilably other, and never was it more obvious than when the
three of us walked through the empty plane, the stewardess nodding sympathetically and
gesturing us toward our row in the distant back. I sat in the middle of our three-person row
with Augustus in the window seat and Mom in the aisle. I felt a little hemmed in by Mom,
so of course I scooted over toward Augustus. We were right behind the plane’s wing. He
opened up his bag and unwrapped his burger.
“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the scrambled
egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese
anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled
eggs—they’re important.”
“Ludicrous,” I said. The people were starting to file into the plane now. I didn’t want
to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.
“I’m just saying: Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special.
They have a place and a time, like church does.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-stitched
sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is
beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”
“You’re a hard person to comfort,” Augustus said.
“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said. “You were a rare and fragile flower once.
You remember.”
For a moment, he said nothing. “You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace.”
“It’s my privilege and my responsibility,” I answered.
Before I broke eye contact with him, he said, “Listen, sorry I avoided the gate area.
The McDonald’s line wasn’t really that long; I just . . . I just didn’t want to sit there with
all those people looking at us or whatever.”
“At me, mostly,” I said. You could glance at Gus and never know he’d been sick, but
I carried my disease with me on the outside, which is part of why I’d become a homebody
in the first place. “Augustus Waters, noted charismatist, is embarrassed to sit next to a girl
with an oxygen tank.”
“Not embarrassed,” he said. “They just piss me off sometimes. And I don’t want to
be pissed off today.” After a minute, he dug into his pocket and flipped open his pack of
smokes.
About nine seconds later, a blond stewardess rushed over to our row and said, “Sir,
you can’t smoke on this plane. Or any plane.”
“I don’t smoke,” he explained, the cigarette dancing in his mouth as he spoke.
“But—”
“It’s a metaphor,” I explained. “He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn’t
give it the power to kill him.”

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The stewardess was flummoxed for only a moment. “Well, that metaphor is
prohibited on today’s flight,” she said. Gus nodded and rejoined the cigarette to its pack.
We finally taxied out to the runway and the pilot said, Flight attendants, prepare for