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playground, jumping back and forth among the prosthetic bones.
“Two things I love about this sculpture,” A ugustus 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 ca
“You do love symbols,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation back toward the many symbols of the Netherlands at our picnic.
“Right, about that. You are probably wondering why you are eating a bad cheese sandwich and drinking orange juice and why I am
wearing the jersey of a Dutchman who played a sport I have come to loathe.”
“It has crossed my mind,” I said.
“Hazel Grace, like so many children before you—and I say this with great affection—you spent your Wish hastily, with little care for the
consequences. The Grim Reaper was staring you in the face and the fear of dying with your Wish still in your proverbial pocket, ungranted,
led you to rush toward the first Wish you could think of, and you, like so many others, chose the cold and artificial pleasures of the theme park.”
“I actually had a great time on that trip. I met Goofy and Mi
“I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if you interrupt me I will completely screw it up,” A ugustus
interrupted. “Please to be eating your sandwich and listening.” (The sandwich was inedibly dry, but I smiled and took a bite anyway.) “Okay, where was I?”
“The artificial pleasures.”
He returned the cigarette to its pack. “Right, the cold and artificial pleasures of the theme park. But let me submit that the real heroes of the Wish Factory are the young men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot and good Christian girls wait for
marriage. These young heroes wait stoically and without complaint for their one true Wish to come along. Sure, it may never come along, but at least they can rest easily in the grave knowing that they’ve done their little part to preserve the integrity of the Wish as an idea.
“But then again, maybe it will come along: Maybe you’ll realize that your one true Wish is to visit the brilliant Peter Van Houten in his
A msterdamian exile, and you will be glad indeed to have saved your Wish.”
A ugustus stopped speaking long enough that I figured the soliloquy was over. “But I didn’t save my Wish,” I said.
“A h,” he said. A nd then, after what felt like a practiced pause, he added, “But I saved mine.”
“Really?” I was surprised that A ugustus was Wish-eligible, what with being still in school and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish.
“I got it in exchange for the leg,” he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. “Now, I’m not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it
wouldn’t make sense to meet him without the girl who introduced me to his book.”
“It definitely wouldn’t,” I said.
“So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said A msterdam is lovely in the begi
leaving May third and returning May seventh.”
“A ugustus, really?”
He reached over and touched my cheek and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. My body tensed, and I think he saw it, because he
pulled his hand away.
“A ugustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”
“God, you’re the best,” I told him.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he answered.
CHAPTER SIX
Mom was folding my laundry while watching this TV show called The View when I got home. I told her that the tulips and the Dutch artist and everything were all because A ugustus was using his Wish to take me to A msterdam. “That’s too much,” she said, shaking her head. “We
can’t accept that from a virtual stranger.”
“He’s not a stranger. He’s easily my second best friend.”
“Behind Kaitlyn?”
“Behind you,” I said. It was true, but I’d mostly said it because I wanted to go to A msterdam.
“I’ll ask Dr. Maria,” she said after a moment.
* * *
Dr. Maria said I couldn’t go to A msterdam without an adult intimately familiar with my case, which more or less meant either Mom or Dr.
Maria herself. (My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean
tides. But my mom knew more about differentiated thyroid carcinoma in adolescents than most oncologists.)
“So you’ll come,” I said. “The Genies will pay for it. The Genies are loaded.”
“But your father,” she said. “He would miss us. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and he can’t get time off work.”
“A re you kidding? You don’t think Dad would enjoy a few days of watching TV shows that are not about aspiring models and ordering
pizza every night, using paper towels as plates so he doesn’t have to do the dishes?”
Mom laughed. Finally, she started to get excited, typing tasks into her phone: She’d have to call Gus’s parents and talk to the Genies
about my medical needs and do they have a hotel yet and what are the best guidebooks and we should do our research if we only have three
days, and so on. I kind of had a headache, so I downed a couple A dvil and decided to take a nap.
But I ended up just lying in bed and replaying the whole picnic with A ugustus. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little moment when I’d
tensed up as he touched me. The gentle familiarity felt wrong, somehow. I thought maybe it was how orchestrated the whole thing had been:
A ugustus was amazing, but he’d overdone everything at the picnic, right down to the sandwiches that were metaphorically resonant but tasted terrible and the memorized soliloquy that prevented conversation. It all felt Romantic, but not romantic.
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 A msterdam, 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 A ugustus Waters was no improviser. So what had he been trying to convey? A nd why
hadn’t I wanted to accept it?
A t 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 A msterdam and
A ugustus’s name. “You’re sure he’s hot?” she asked when I was finished.
“Pretty sure,” I said.
“A thletic?”