The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
W
hen we first got there, I sat in the back of the visitation room, a little room of exposed
stone walls off to the side of the sanctuary in the Literal Heart of Jesus church. There were
maybe eighty chairs set up in the room, and it was two-thirds full but felt one-third empty.
For a while, I just watched people walk up to the coffin, which was on some kind of
cart covered in a purple tablecloth. All these people I’d never seen before would kneel
down next to him or stand over him and look at him for a while, maybe crying, maybe
saying something, and then all of them would touch the coffin instead of touching him,
because no one wants to touch the dead.
Gus’s mom and dad were standing next to the coffin, hugging everybody as they
passed by, but when they noticed me, they smiled and shuffled over. I got up and hugged
first his dad and then his mom, who held on to me too tight, like Gus used to, squeezing
my shoulder blades. They both looked so old—their eye sockets hollowed, the skin
sagging from their exhausted faces. They had reached the end of a hurdling sprint, too.
“He loved you so much,” Gus’s mom said. “He really did. It wasn’t—it wasn’t puppy
love or anything,” she added, as if I didn’t know that.
“He loved you so much, too,” I said quietly. It’s hard to explain, but talking to them
felt like stabbing and being stabbed. “I’m sorry,” I said. And then his parents were talking
to my parents—the conversation all nodding and tight lips. I looked up at the casket and
saw it unattended, so I decided to walk up there. I pulled the oxygen tube from my nostrils
and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just
him. I grabbed my little clutch and walked up the makeshift aisle between the rows of
chairs.
The walk felt long, but I kept telling my lungs to shut up, that they were strong, that
they could do this. I could see him as I approached: His hair was parted neatly on the left
side in a way that he would have found absolutely horrifying, and his face was plasticized.
But he was still Gus. My lanky, beautiful Gus.
I wanted to wear the little black dress I’d bought for my fifteenth birthday party, my
death dress, but I didn’t fit into it anymore, so I wore a plain black dress, knee-length.
Augustus wore the same thin-lapeled suit he’d worn to Oranjee.
As I knelt, I realized they’d closed his eyes—of course they had—and that I would
never again see his blue eyes. “I love you present tense,” I whispered, and then put my
hand on the middle of his chest and said, “It’s okay, Gus. It’s okay. It is. It’s okay, you hear
me?” I had—and have—absolutely no confidence that he could hear me. I leaned forward
and kissed his cheek. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I suddenly felt conscious that there were all these people watching us, that the last
time so many people saw us kiss we were in the Anne Frank House. But there was,
properly speaking, no us left to watch. Only a me.
I snapped open the clutch, reached in, and pulled out a hard pack of Camel Lights. In

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a quick motion I hoped no one behind would notice, I snuck them into the space between
his side and the coffin’s plush silver lining. “You can light these,” I whispered to him. “I
won’t mind.”
While I was talking to him, Mom and Dad had moved up to the second row with my tank,
so I didn’t have a long walk back. Dad handed me a tissue as I sat down. I blew my nose,
threaded the tubes around my ears, and put the nubbins back in.
I thought we’d go into the proper sanctuary for the real funeral, but it all happened in
that little side room—the Literal Hand of Jesus, I guess, the part of the cross he’d been
nailed to. A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin, almost like the coffin was a
pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how Augustus had a courageous battle
and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to us all, and I was already
starting to get pissed off at the minister when he said, “In heaven, Augustus will finally be
healed and whole,” implying that he had been less whole than other people due to his
leglessness, and I kind of could not repress my sigh of disgust. My dad grabbed me just
above the knee and cut me a disapproving look, but from the row behind me, someone
muttered almost inaudibly near my ear, “What a load of horse crap, eh, kid?”
I spun around.
Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his rotundity, a
powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie. He looked like he was dressed for a colonial
occupation of Panama, not a funeral. The minister said, “Let us pray,” but as everyone else
bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a
moment, he whispered, “We gotta fake pray,” and bowed his head.
I tried to forget about him and just pray for Augustus. I made a point of listening to
the minister and not looking back.
The minister called up Isaac, who was much more serious than he’d been at the
prefuneral. “Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania, and he is
not replaceable,” Isaac began. “Other people will be able to tell you funny stories about
Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell you a serious one: A day after I got my
eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heartbroken and didn’t want to
do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, ‘I have wonderful news!’ And I was
like, ‘I don’t really want to hear wonderful news right now,’ and Gus said, ‘This is
wonderful news you want to hear,’ and I asked him, ‘Fine, what is it?’ and he said, ‘You
are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you
cannot even imagine yet!’”
Isaac couldn’t go on, or maybe that was all he had written.
After a high school friend told some stories about Gus’s considerable basketball talents
and his many qualities as a teammate, the minister said, “We’ll now hear a few words
from Augustus’s special friend, Hazel.” Special friend? There were some titters in the
audience, so I figured it was safe for me to start out by saying to the minister, “I was his
girlfriend.” That got a laugh. Then I began reading from the eulogy I’d written.

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“There’s a great quote in Gus’s house, one that both he and I found very comforting: