The Fault in Our Stars(41)

I opened the door. He looked down at the shirt and smiled. “Funny,” he said.

“Don’t call my boobs funny,” I answered.

“Right here,” Mom said behind us. But I’d made Augustus blush and put him enough off his game that I could finally bear to look up at him.

“You sure you don’t want to come?” I asked Mom.

“I’m going to the Rijksmuseum and the Vondelpark today,” she said. “Plus, I just don’t get his book. No offense. Thank him and Lidewij for us, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I hugged Mom, and she kissed my head just above my ear.



Peter Van Houten’s white row house was just around the corner from the hotel, on the Vondelstraat, facing the park. Number 158. Augustus took me by one arm and grabbed the oxygen cart with the other, and we walked up the three steps to the lacquered blue-black front door. My heart pounded. One closed door away from the answers I’d dreamed of ever since I first read that last unfinished page.

Inside, I could hear a bass beat thumping loud enough to rattle the windowsills. I wondered whether Peter Van Houten had a kid who liked rap music.

I grabbed the lion’s-head door knocker and knocked tentatively. The beat continued. “Maybe he can’t hear over the music?” Augustus asked. He grabbed the lion’s head and knocked much louder.

The music disappeared, replaced by shuffled footsteps. A dead bolt slid. Another. The door creaked open. A potbellied man with thin hair, sagging jowls, and a week-old beard squinted into the sunlight. He wore baby-blue man pajamas like guys in old movies. His face and belly were so round, and his arms so skinny, that he looked like a dough ball with four sticks stuck into it. “Mr. Van Houten?” Augustus asked, his voice squeaking a bit.

The door slammed shut. Behind it, I heard a stammering, reedy voice shout, “LEEE-DUH-VIGH!” (Until then, I’d pronounced his assistant’s name like lid-uh-widge.)

We could hear everything through the door. “Are they here, Peter?” a woman asked.

“There are—Lidewij, there are two adolescent apparitions outside the door.”

“Apparitions?” she asked with a pleasant Dutch lilt.

Van Houten answered in a rush. “Phantasms specters ghouls visitants post-terrestrials apparitions, Lidewij. How can someone pursuing a postgraduate degree in American literature display such abominable English-language skills?”

“Peter, those are not post-terrestrials. They are Augustus and Hazel, the young fans with whom you have been corresponding.”

“They are—what? They—I thought they were in America!”

“Yes, but you invited them here, you will remember.”

“Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans.”

“But you are an American.”

“Incurably so, it seems. But as to these Americans, you must tell them to leave at once, that there has been a terrible mistake, that the blessed Van Houten was making a rhetorical offer to meet, not an actual one, that such offers must be read symbolically.”

I thought I might throw up. I looked over at Augustus, who was staring intently at the door, and saw his shoulders slacken.

“I will not do this, Peter,” answered Lidewij. “You must meet them. You must. You need to see them. You need to see how your work matters.”

“Lidewij, did you knowingly deceive me to arrange this?”

A long silence ensued, and then finally the door opened again. He turned his head metronomically from Augustus to me, still squinting. “Which of you is Augustus Waters?” he asked. Augustus raised his hand tentatively. Van Houten nodded and said, “Did you close the deal with that chick yet?”

Whereupon I encountered for the first and only time a truly speechless Augustus Waters. “I,” he started, “um, I, Hazel, um. Well.”

“This boy appears to have some kind of developmental delay,” Peter Van Houten said to Lidewij.

“Peter,” she scolded.

“Well,” Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. “It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures.” I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

Of course, I had hoped that Peter Van Houten would be sane, but the world is not a wish-granting factory. The important thing was that the door was open and I was crossing the threshold to learn what happens after the end of An Imperial Affliction. That was enough. We followed him and Lidewij inside, past a huge oak dining room table with only two chairs, into a creepily sterile living room. It looked like a museum, except there was no art on the empty white walls. Aside from one couch and one lounge chair, both a mix of steel and black leather, the room seemed empty. Then I noticed two large black garbage bags, full and twist-tied, behind the couch.

“Trash?” I mumbled to Augustus soft enough that I thought no one else would hear.

“Fan mail,” Van Houten answered as he sat down in the lounge chair. “Eighteen years’ worth of it. Can’t open it. Terrifying. Yours are the first missives to which I have replied, and look where that got me. I frankly find the reality of readers wholly unappetizing.”