The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER THREE
I
stayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Dawn. (Spoiler alert: The price of
dawn is blood.) It wasn’t An Imperial Affliction, but the protagonist, Staff Sergeant Max
Mayhem, was vaguely likable despite killing, by my count, no fewer than 118 individuals
in 284 pages.
So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom’s policy was never to wake me
up, because one of the job requirements of Professional Sick Person is sleeping a lot, so I
was kind of confused at first when I jolted awake with her hands on my shoulders.
“It’s almost ten,” she said.
“Sleep fights cancer,” I said. “I was up late reading.”
“It must be some book,” she said as she knelt down next to the bed and unscrewed
me from my large, rectangular oxygen concentrator, which I called Philip, because it just
kind of looked like a Philip.
Mom hooked me up to a portable tank and then reminded me I had class. “Did that
boy give it to you?” she asked out of nowhere.
“By it, do you mean herpes?”
“You are too much,” Mom said. “The book, Hazel. I mean the book.”
“Yeah, he gave me the book.”
“I can tell you like him,” she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation required
some uniquely maternal instinct. I shrugged. “I told you Support Group would be worth
your while.”
“Did you just wait outside the entire time?”
“Yes. I brought some paperwork. Anyway, time to face the day, young lady.”
“Mom. Sleep. Cancer. Fighting.”
“I know, love, but there is class to attend. Also, today is . . . ” The glee in Mom’s
voice was evident.
“Thursday?”
“Did you seriously forget?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s Thursday, March twenty-ninth!” she basically screamed, a demented smile
plastered to her face.
“You are really excited about knowing the date!” I yelled back.
“HAZEL! IT’S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!”
“Ohhhhhh,” I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT’S

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ARBOR DAY! LET’S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT
SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A
PICNIC!, etc. “Well, Happy thirty-third Half Birthday to me,” I said.
“What do you want to do on your very special day?”
“Come home from class and set the world record for number of episodes of Top Chef
watched consecutively?”
Mom reached up to this shelf above my bed and grabbed Bluie, the blue stuffed bear
I’d had since I was, like, one—back when it was socially acceptable to name one’s friends
after their hue.
“You don’t want to go to a movie with Kaitlyn or Matt or someone?” who were my
friends.
That was an idea. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll text Kaitlyn and see if she wants to go to the
mall or something after school.”
Mom smiled, hugging the bear to her stomach. “Is it still cool to go to the mall?” she
asked.
“I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool,” I answered.
* * *
I texted Kaitlyn, took a shower, got dressed, and then Mom drove me to school. My class
was American Literature, a lecture about Frederick Douglass in a mostly empty
auditorium, and it was incredibly difficult to stay awake. Forty minutes into the ninety-
minute class, Kaitlyn texted back.
Awesomesauce. Happy Half Birthday. Castleton at 3:32?

Kaitlyn had the kind of packed social life that needs to be scheduled down to the minute. I
responded:
Sounds good. I’ll be at the food court.
Mom drove me directly from school to the bookstore attached to the mall, where I
purchased both Midnight Dawns and Requiem for Mayhem, the first two sequels to The
Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and bought a Diet Coke. It
was 3:21.
I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I read. There
was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and over and they never
seemed to get tired, which made me think of Augustus Waters and the existentially fraught
free throws.
Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought I

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couldn’t see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some papers. Medical
stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.
At 3:32 precisely, I noticed Kaitlyn striding confidently past the Wok House. She saw
me the moment I raised my hand, flashed her very white and newly straightened teeth at
me, and headed over.
She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that dominated
her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her head as she leaned down to hug me.
“Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How are you?” People didn’t find the accent
odd or off-putting. Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-
year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone
accepted it.
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her. She sipped
through the straw. “I do wish you were at school these days. Some of the boys have
become downright edible.”
“Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we’d attended
elementary and middle school with, but I couldn’t picture any of them.
“I’ve been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, “but I don’t think it will last.
He’s such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the Hazelverse?”
“Nothing, really,” I said.
“Health is good?”
“The same, I guess?”
“Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. “So you could just live forever, right?”
“Probably not forever,” I said.
“But basically,” she said. “What else is new?”
I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I’d watched a
movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as
disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a boy.
But I didn’t really have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.
“What in heaven is that?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book.
“Oh, it’s sci-fi. I’ve gotten kinda into it. It’s a series.”
“I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”
We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Kaitlyn kept picking out all these open-
toed flats for me and saying, “These would look cute on you,” which reminded me that
Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt
her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or
something. So when I pointed out a pair of sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was

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like, “Yeah, but . . .” the but being but they will expose my hideous second toes to the
public, and I said, “Kaitlyn, you’re the only person I’ve ever known to have toe-specific
dysmorphia,” and she said, “What is that?”
“You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as
it really is.”
“Oh. Oh,” she said. “Do you like these?” She held up a pair of cute but unspectacular
Mary Janes, and I nodded, and she found her size and tried them on, pacing up and down
the aisle, watching her feet in the knee-high angled mirrors. Then she grabbed a pair of
strappy hooker shoes and said, “Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just