The Fault in Our Stars(8)

“Do you have siblings?” I asked.

“Huh?” he answered, seeming a little distracted.

“You said that thing about watching kids play.”

“Oh, yeah, no. I have nephews, from my half sisters. But they’re older. They’re like—DAD, HOW OLD ARE JULIE AND MARTHA?”

“Twenty-eight!”

“They’re like twenty-eight. They live in Chicago. They are both married to very fancy lawyer dudes. Or banker dudes. I can’t remember. You have siblings?”

I shook my head no. “So what’s your story?” he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.

“I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—”

“No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera.”

“Um,” I said.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It’s disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven’t let it succeed prematurely.”

It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to Augustus Waters, which enthusiasms to embrace, and in the silence that followed it occurred to me that I wasn’t very interesting. “I am pretty unextraordinary.”

“I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that comes to mind.”

“Um. Reading?”

“What do you read?”

“Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry. Whatever.”

“Do you write poetry, too?”

“No. I don’t write.”

“There!” Augustus almost shouted. “Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don’t you?”

“I guess?”

“What’s your favorite?”

“Um,” I said.

My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.

Even so, I told Augustus. “My favorite book is probably An Imperial Affliction,” I said.

“Does it feature zombies?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Stormtroopers?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that kind of book.”

He smiled. “I am going to read this terrible book with the boring title that does not contain stormtroopers,” he promised, and I immediately felt like I shouldn’t have told him about it. Augustus spun around to a stack of books beneath his bedside table. He grabbed a paperback and a pen. As he scribbled an inscription onto the title page, he said, “All I ask in exchange is that you read this brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game.” He held up the book, which was called The Price of Dawn. I laughed and took it. Our hands kind of got muddled together in the book handoff, and then he was holding my hand. “Cold,” he said, pressing a finger to my pale wrist.

“Not cold so much as underoxygenated,” I said.

“I love it when you talk medical to me,” he said. He stood, and pulled me up with him, and did not let go of my hand until we reached the stairs.

*

We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch about halfway between us to let him know that it was okay to hold it, but he didn’t try. An hour into the movie, Augustus’s parents came in and served us the enchiladas, which we ate on the couch, and they were pretty delicious.

The movie was about this heroic guy in a mask who died heroically for Natalie Portman, who’s pretty badass and very hot and does not have anything approaching my puffy steroid face.

As the credits rolled, he said, “Pretty great, huh?”

“Pretty great,” I agreed, although it wasn’t, really. It was kind of a boy movie. I don’t know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We don’t expect them to like girl movies. “I should get home. Class in the morning,” I said.

I sat on the couch for a while as Augustus searched for his keys. His mom sat down next to me and said, “I just love this one, don’t you?” I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) “Yes,” I said. “A lovely thought.”