The Fault in Our Stars

going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to
the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.”
“And yet,” I said, “Isaac won’t so much as glance over at me. Too in love with
Monica, I suppose,” which resulted in a catastrophic sob.
“Bit of a touchy subject,” Augustus explained. “Isaac, I don’t know about you, but I
have the vague sense that we are being outflanked.” And then back to me, “Isaac and
Monica are no longer a going concern, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. He just wants
to cry and play Counterinsurgence 2: The Price of Dawn.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Isaac, I feel a growing concern about our position. If you agree, head over to that
power station, and I’ll cover you.” Isaac ran toward a nondescript building while Augustus
fired a machine gun wildly in a series of quick bursts, running behind him.
“Anyway,” Augustus said to me, “it doesn’t hurt to talk to him. If you have any sage
words of feminine advice.”
“I actually think his response is probably appropriate,” I said as a burst of gunfire
from Isaac killed an enemy who’d peeked his head out from behind the burned-out husk of
a pickup truck.
Augustus nodded at the screen. “Pain demands to be felt,” he said, which was a line
from An Imperial Affliction. “You’re sure there’s no one behind us?” he asked Isaac.
Moments later, tracer bullets started whizzing over their heads. “Oh, goddamn it, Isaac,”
Augustus said. “I don’t mean to criticize you in your moment of great weakness, but
you’ve allowed us to be outflanked, and now there’s nothing between the terrorists and the
school.” Isaac’s character took off running toward the fire, zigging and zagging down a
narrow alleyway.
“You could go over the bridge and circle back,” I said, a tactic I knew about thanks to
The Price of Dawn.
Augustus sighed. “Sadly, the bridge is already under insurgent control due to
questionable strategizing by my bereft cohort.”
“Me?” Isaac said, his voice breathy. “Me?! You’re the one who suggested we hole up
in the freaking power station.”
Gus turned away from the screen for a second and flashed his crooked smile at Isaac.

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“I knew you could talk, buddy,” he said. “Now let’s go save some fictional
schoolchildren.”
Together, they ran down the alleyway, firing and hiding at the right moments, until
they reached this one-story, single-room schoolhouse. They crouched behind a wall across
the street and picked off the enemy one by one.
“Why do they want to get into the school?” I asked.
“They want the kids as hostages,” Augustus answered. His shoulders rounded over
his controller, slamming buttons, his forearms taut, veins visible. Isaac leaned toward the
screen, the controller dancing in his thin-fingered hands. “Get it get it get it,” Augustus
said. The waves of terrorists continued, and they mowed down every one, their shooting
astonishingly precise, as it had to be, lest they fire into the school.
“Grenade! Grenade!” Augustus shouted as something arced across the screen,
bounced in the doorway of the school, and then rolled against the door.
Isaac dropped his controller in disappointment. “If the bastards can’t take hostages,
they just kill them and claim we did it.”
“Cover me!” Augustus said as he jumped out from behind the wall and raced toward
the school. Isaac fumbled for his controller and then started firing while the bullets rained
down on Augustus, who was shot once and then twice but still ran, Augustus shouting,
“YOU CAN’T KILL MAX MAYHEM!” and with a final flurry of button combinations, he
dove onto the grenade, which detonated beneath him. His dismembered body exploded
like a geyser and the screen went red. A throaty voice said, “MISSION FAILURE,” but
Augustus seemed to think otherwise as he smiled at his remnants on the screen. He
reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and shoved it between his teeth. “Saved the
kids,” he said.
“Temporarily,” I pointed out.
“All salvation is temporary,” Augustus shot back. “I bought them a minute. Maybe
that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s
gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that’s not
nothing.”
“Whoa, okay,” I said. “We’re just talking about pixels.”
He shrugged, as if he believed the game might be really real. Isaac was wailing again.
Augustus snapped his head back to him. “Another go at the mission, corporal?”
Isaac shook his head no. He leaned over Augustus to look at me and through tightly
strung vocal cords said, “She didn’t want to do it after.”
“She didn’t want to dump a blind guy,” I said. He nodded, the tears not like tears so
much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless.
“She said she couldn’t handle it,” he told me. “I’m about to lose my eyesight and she
can’t handle it.”
I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled.
“I’m sorry,” I said.

---

He wiped his sopping face with a sleeve. Behind his glasses, Isaac’s eyes seemed so
big that everything else on his face kind of disappeared and it was just these disembodied
floating eyes staring at me—one real, one glass. “It’s unacceptable,” he told me. “It’s
totally unacceptable.”
“Well, to be fair,” I said, “I mean, she probably can’t handle it. Neither can you, but
she doesn’t have to handle it. And you do.”
“I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she just kept talking
over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? ‘Always’ was a
promise! How can you just break the promise?”
“Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make
them,” I said.
Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s
what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that
was a pretty good definition of it.
“Well, I believe in true love,” Isaac said. “And I love her. And she promised. She
promised me always.” He stood and took a step toward me. I pushed myself up, thinking
he wanted a hug or something, but then he just spun around, like he couldn’t remember
why he’d stood up in the first place, and then Augustus and I both saw this rage settle into
his face.
“Isaac,” Gus said.
“What?”
“You look a little . . . Pardon the double entendre, my friend, but there’s something a
little worrisome in your eyes.”
Suddenly Isaac started kicking the crap out of his gaming chair, which somersaulted
back toward Gus’s bed. “Here we go,” said Augustus. Isaac chased after the chair and
kicked it again. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Get it. Kick the shit out of that chair!” Isaac kicked
the chair again, until it bounced against Gus’s bed, and then he grabbed one of the pillows
and started slamming it against the wall between the bed and the trophy shelf above.
Augustus looked over at me, cigarette still in his mouth, and half smiled. “I can’t stop
thinking about that book.”
“I know, right?”
“He never said what happens to the other characters?”
“No,” I told him. Isaac was still throttling the wall with the pillow. “He moved to
Amsterdam, which makes me think maybe he is writing a sequel featuring the Dutch Tulip
Man, but he hasn’t published anything. He’s never interviewed. He doesn’t seem to be
online. I’ve written him a bunch of letters asking what happens to everyone, but he never
responds. So . . . yeah.” I stopped talking because Augustus didn’t appear to be listening.
Instead, he was squinting at Isaac.
“Hold on,” he mumbled to me. He walked over to Isaac and grabbed him by the

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shoulders. “Dude, pillows don’t break. Try something that breaks.”
Isaac reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then held it
over his head as if waiting for permission. “Yes,” Augustus said. “Yes!” The trophy
smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player’s arm splintering off, still grasping
its ball. Isaac stomped on the trophy. “Yes!” Augustus said. “Get it!”
And then back to me, “I’ve been looking for a way to tell my father that I actually
sort of hate basketball, and I think we’ve found it.” The trophies came down one after the
other, and Isaac stomped on them and screamed while Augustus and I stood a few feet
away, bearing witness to the madness. The poor, mangled bodies of plastic basketballers
littered the carpeted ground: here, a ball palmed by a disembodied hand; there, two
torsoless legs caught midjump. Isaac kept attacking the trophies, jumping on them with
both feet, screaming, breathless, sweaty, until finally he collapsed on top of the jagged
trophic remnants.
Augustus stepped toward him and looked down. “Feel better?” he asked.
“No,” Isaac mumbled, his chest heaving.
“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It
demands to be felt.”

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