The Fault in Our Stars

die—” and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say I’m sorry, as if it were a crime to
mention death to the dying. “You should try them on,” Kaitlyn continued, trying to paper
over the awkwardness.
“I’d sooner die,” I assured her.
I ended up just picking out some flip-flops so that I could have something to buy, and
then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a bank of shoes and watched Kaitlyn snake
her way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually
associates with professional chess. I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Dawns and read
for a while, but I knew that’d be rude, so I just watched Kaitlyn. Occasionally she’d circle
back to me clutching some closed-toe prey and say, “This?” and I would try to make an
intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally she bought three pairs and I bought
my flip-flops and then as we exited she said, “Anthropologie?”
“I should head home actually,” I said. “I’m kinda tired.”
“Sure, of course,” she said. “I have to see you more often, darling.” She placed her
hands on my shoulders, kissed me on both cheeks, and marched off, her narrow hips
swishing.
I didn’t go home, though. I’d told Mom to pick me up at six, and while I figured she
was either in the mall or in the parking lot, I still wanted the next two hours to myself.
I liked my mom, but her perpetual nearness sometimes made me feel weirdly
nervous. And I liked Kaitlyn, too. I really did. But three years removed from proper full-
time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I
think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found
out that they couldn’t. For one thing, there was no through.
So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years
when seeing Kaitlyn or any of my other friends. In truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not
to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing
yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of
underoxygenation. So I wasn’t lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.
I found a bench surrounded by an Irish Gifts store, the Fountain Pen Emporium, and
a baseball-cap outlet—a corner of the mall even Kaitlyn would never shop, and started
reading Midnight Dawns.
It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever

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looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, even though he didn’t have much in the
way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening.
There were always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started
even before the old ones were won. I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid,
and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.
Twenty pages from the end of Midnight Dawns, things started to look pretty bleak for
Mayhem when he was shot seventeen times while attempting to rescue a (blond,
American) hostage from the Enemy. But as a reader, I did not despair. The war effort
would go on without him. There could—and would—be sequels starring his cohorts:
Specialist Manny Loco and Private Jasper Jacks and the rest.
I was just about to the end when this little girl with barretted braids appeared in front
of me and said, “What’s in your nose?”
And I said, “Um, it’s called a cannula. These tubes give me oxygen and help me
breathe.” Her mother swooped in and said, “Jackie,” disapprovingly, but I said, “No no,
it’s okay,” because it totally was, and then Jackie asked, “Would they help me breathe,
too?”
“I dunno. Let’s try.” I took it off and let Jackie stick the cannula in her nose and
breathe. “Tickles,” she said.
“I know, right?”
“I think I’m breathing better,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, “I wish I could give you my cannula but I kind of really need the
help.” I already felt the loss. I focused on my breathing as Jackie handed the tubes back to
me. I gave them a quick swipe with my T-shirt, laced the tubes behind my ears, and put
the nubbins back in place.
“Thanks for letting me try it,” she said.
“No problem.”
“Jackie,” her mother said again, and this time I let her go.
I returned to the book, where Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem was regretting that he had
but one life to give for his country, but I kept thinking about that little kid, and how much I
liked her.
The other thing about Kaitlyn, I guess, was that it could never again feel natural to
talk to her. Any attempts to feign normal social interactions were just depressing because
it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel
awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn’t
know any better.
Anyway, I really did like being alone. I liked being alone with poor Staff Sergeant
Max Mayhem, who—oh, come on, he’s not going to survive these seventeen bullet
wounds, is he?

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(Spoiler alert: He lives.)

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