The Fault in Our Stars(20)

At which point I emerged, silencing him.

“So where are you going?” asked Mom. Augustus stood up and leaned over to her, whispering the answer, and then held a finger to his lips. “Shh,” he told her. “It’s a secret.”

Mom smiled. “You’ve got your phone?” she asked me. I held it up as evidence, tilted my oxygen cart onto its front wheels, and started walking. Augustus hustled over, offering me his arm, which I took. My fingers wrapped around his biceps.

Unfortunately, he insisted upon driving, so the surprise could be a surprise. As we shuddered toward our destination, I said, “You nearly charmed the pants off my mom.”

“Yeah, and your dad is a Smits fan, which helps. You think they liked me?”

“Sure they did. Who cares, though? They’re just parents.”

“They’re your parents,” he said, glancing over at me. “Plus, I like being liked. Is that crazy?”

“Well, you don’t have to rush to hold doors open or smother me in compliments for me to like you.” He slammed the brakes, and I flew forward hard enough that my breathing felt weird and tight. I thought of the PET scan. Don’t worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.

We burned rubber, roaring away from a stop sign before turning left onto the misnomered Grandview (there’s a view of a golf course, I guess, but nothing grand). The only thing I could think of in this direction was the cemetery. Augustus reached into the center console, flipped open a full pack of cigarettes, and removed one.

“Do you ever throw them away?” I asked him.

“One of the many benefits of not smoking is that packs of cigarettes last forever,” he answered. “I’ve had this one for almost a year. A few of them are broken near the filters, but I think this pack could easily get me to my eighteenth birthday.” He held the filter between his fingers, then put it in his mouth. “So, okay,” he said. “Okay. Name some things that you never see in Indianapolis.”

“Um. Skinny adults,” I said.

He laughed. “Good. Keep going.”

“Mmm, beaches. Family-owned restaurants. Topography.”

“All excellent examples of things we lack. Also, culture.”

“Yeah, we are a bit short on culture,” I said, finally realizing where he was taking me. “Are we going to the museum?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Oh, are we going to that park or whatever?”

Gus looked a bit deflated. “Yes, we are going to that park or whatever,” he said. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

“Um, figured what out?”

“Nothing.”



There was this park behind the museum where a bunch of artists had made big sculptures. I’d heard about it but had never visited. We drove past the museum and parked right next to this basketball court filled with huge blue and red steel arcs that imagined the path of a bouncing ball.

We walked down what passes for a hill in Indianapolis to this clearing where kids were climbing all over this huge oversize skeleton sculpture. The bones were each about waist high, and the thighbone was longer than me. It looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton rising up out of the ground.

My shoulder hurt. I worried the cancer had spread from my lungs. I imagined the tumor metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes into my skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent. “Funky Bones,” Augustus said. “Created by Joep Van Lieshout.”

“Sounds Dutch.”

“He is,” Gus said. “So is Rik Smits. So are tulips.” Gus stopped in the middle of the clearing with the bones right in front of us and slipped his backpack off one shoulder, then the other. He unzipped it, producing an orange blanket, a pint of orange juice, and some sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap with the crusts cut off.

“What’s with all the orange?” I asked, still not wanting to let myself imagine that all this would lead to Amsterdam.

“National color of the Netherlands, of course. You remember William of Orange and everything?”

“He wasn’t on the GED test.” I smiled, trying to contain my excitement.

“Sandwich?” he asked.

“Let me guess,” I said.

“Dutch cheese. And tomato. The tomatoes are from Mexico. Sorry.”

“You’re always such a disappointment, Augustus. Couldn’t you have at least gotten orange tomatoes?”

He laughed, and we ate our sandwiches in silence, watching the kids play on the sculpture. I couldn’t very well ask him about it, so I just sat there surrounded by Dutchness, feeling awkward and hopeful.

In the distance, soaked in the unblemished sunlight so rare and precious in our hometown, a gaggle of kids made a skeleton into a playground, jumping back and forth among the prosthetic bones.

“Two things I love about this sculpture,” Augustus said. He was holding the unlit cigarette between his fingers, flicking at it as if to get rid of the ash. He placed it back in his mouth. “First, the bones are just far enough apart that if you’re a kid, you cannot resist the urge to jump between them. Like, you just have to jump from rib cage to skull. Which means that, second, the sculpture essentially forces children to play on bones. The symbolic resonances are endless, Hazel Grace.”

“You do love symbols,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation back toward the many symbols of the Netherlands at our picnic.