The Fault in Our Stars(22)
But the truth is that I had never wanted him to kiss me, not in the way you are supposed to want these things. I mean, he was gorgeous. I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the realized touch . . . it was all wrong.
Then I found myself worrying I would have to make out with him to get to Amsterdam, which is not the kind of thing you want to be thinking, because (a) It shouldn’t’ve even been a question whether I wanted to kiss him, and (b) Kissing someone so that you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking, and I have to confess that while I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.
But then again, he hadn’t tried to kiss me; he’d only touched my face, which is not even sexual. It was not a move designed to elicit arousal, but it was certainly a designed move, because Augustus Waters was no improviser. So what had he been trying to convey? And why hadn’t I wanted to accept it?
At some point, I realized I was Kaitlyning the encounter, so I decided to text Kaitlyn and ask for some advice. She called immediately.
“I have a boy problem,” I said.
“DELICIOUS,” Kaitlyn responded. I told her all about it, complete with the awkward face touching, leaving out only Amsterdam and Augustus’s name. “You’re sure he’s hot?” she asked when I was finished.
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“Athletic?”
“Yeah, he used to play basketball for North Central.”
“Wow. How’d you meet him?”
“This hideous Support Group.”
“Huh,” Kaitlyn said. “Out of curiosity, how many legs does this guy have?”
“Like, 1.4,” I said, smiling. Basketball players were famous in Indiana, and although Kaitlyn didn’t go to North Central, her social connectivity was endless.
“Augustus Waters,” she said.
“Um, maybe?”
“Oh, my God. I’ve seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you’re interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.”
“Kaitlyn,” I said.
“Sorry. Do you think you’d have to be on top?”
“Kaitlyn,” I said.
“What were we talking about. Right, you and Augustus Waters. Maybe . . . are you gay?”
“I don’t think so? I mean, I definitely like him.”
“Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands.”
“No, he has kind of amazing hands.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said.
After a second, Kaitlyn said, “Remember Derek? He broke up with me last week because he’d decided there was something fundamentally incompatible about us deep down and that we’d only get hurt more if we played it out. He called it preemptive dumping. So maybe you have this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you’re preempting the preemption.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I’m just thinking out loud here.”
“Sorry about Derek.”
“Oh, I got over it, darling. It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.”
I laughed. “Well, thanks, Kaitlyn.”
“In the event you do hook up with him, I expect lascivious details.”
“But of course,” I said, and then Kaitlyn made a kissy sound into the phone and I said, “Bye,” and she hung up.
*
I realized while listening to Kaitlyn that I didn’t have a premonition of hurting him. I had a postmonition.
I pulled out my laptop and looked up Caroline Mathers. The physical similarities were striking: same steroidally round face, same nose, same approximate overall body shape. But her eyes were dark brown (mine are green) and her complexion was much darker—Italian or something.
Thousands of people—literally thousands—had left condolence messages for her. It was an endless scroll of people who missed her, so many that it took me an hour of clicking to get past the I’m sorry you’re dead wall posts to the I’m praying for you wall posts. She’d died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to click through to some of her pictures. Augustus was in a bunch of the earlier ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in arm at Memorial Hospital’s playground, with their backs facing the camera; kissing while Caroline held the camera out, so you could only see their noses and closed eyes.
The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy, uploaded postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped and curvy, with long, straight deadblack hair falling over her face. My healthy self looked very little like her healthy self. But our cancer selves might’ve been sisters. No wonder he’d stared at me the first time he saw me.
I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine months after she died, by one of her friends. We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.
After a while, Mom and Dad announced it was time for dinner. I shut down the computer and got up, but I couldn’t get the wall post out of my mind, and for some reason it made me nervous and unhungry.