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Sergeant Mayhem places his knife to his neck. A re you sure you—
“No,” Isaac said. “Pause. Graham, don’t make me kick your ass.” Graham laughed giddily and skipped off down a hallway.
A s Mayhem and Jacks, Isaac and I felt our way forward in the cavern until we bumped into a guy whom we stabbed after getting him to
tell us that we were in a Ukrainian prison cave, more than a mile beneath the ground. A s we continued, sound effects—a raging underground
river, voices speaking in Ukrainian and accented English—led you through the cave, but there was nothing to see in this game. A fter playing for an hour, we began to hear the cries of a desperate prisoner, pleading, “God, help me. God, help me.”
“Pause,” Isaac said. “This is when Gus always insists on finding the prisoner, even though that keeps you from wi
only way to actually free the prisoner is to win the game.”
“Yeah, he takes video games too seriously,” I said. “He’s a bit too enamored with metaphor.”
“Do you like him?” Isaac asked.
“Of course I like him. He’s great.”
“But you don’t want to hook up with him?”
I shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“I know what you’re trying to do. You don’t want to give him something he can’t handle. You don’t want him to Monica you,” he said.
“Kinda,” I said. But it wasn’t that. The truth was, I didn’t want to Isaac him. “To be fair to Monica,” I said, “what you did to her wasn’t very nice either.”
“What’d I do to her?” he asked, defensive.
“You know, going blind and everything.”
“But that’s not my fault,” Isaac said.
“I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m saying it wasn’t nice.”
CHAPTER TEN
We could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that she couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my parents had gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was supposed to spend its life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and forth to Dayton, where Morris Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often visited.
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase, since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to
A msterdam in the first place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-thirds of the suitcase.
In the end, we both lost. So it goes.
Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty, turning on the light and shouting, “A MSTERDA M!” She ran around
all morning making sure we had international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we had the right number of oxygen tanks to get
there and that they were all full, etc., while I just rolled out of bed, put on my Travel to A msterdam Outfit (jeans, a pink tank top, and a black cardigan in case the plane was cold).
The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat breakfast with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating
before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields. But anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade versions of Egg McMuffins they liked.
“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t we have curry for breakfast?”
“Hazel, eat.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich
without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.”
Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have breakfast for di
“I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for di
eggs for di
“You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind
you.”
“Quite a bit behind you,” my dad added, and Mom laughed.
A nyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.
A fter they finished eating, Dad did the dishes and walked us to the car. Of course, he started crying, and he kissed my cheek with his wet stubbly face. He pressed his nose against my cheekbone and whispered, “I love you. I’m so proud of you.” (For what, I wondered.)
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I’ll see you in a few days, okay, sweetie? I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I smiled. “A nd it’s only three days.”
A s we backed out of the driveway, I kept waving at him. He was waving back, and crying. It occurred to me that he was probably
thinking he might never see me again, which he probably thought every single morning of his entire weekday life as he left for work, which
probably sucked.
Mom and I drove over to A ugustus’s house, and when we got there, she wanted me to stay in the car to rest, but I went to the door with
her anyway. A s we approached the house, I could hear someone crying inside. I didn’t think it was Gus at first, because it didn’t sound
anything like the low rumble of his speaking, but then I heard a voice that was definitely a twisted version of his say, “BECA USE IT IS MY
LIFE, MOM. IT BELONGS TO ME.” A nd quickly my mom put her arm around my shoulders and spun me back toward the car, walking quickly,
and I was like, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
A nd she said, “We can’t eavesdrop, Hazel.”
We got back into the car and I texted A ugustus that we were outside whenever he was ready.
We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of
them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
“Well,” Mom said after a while, “we are pretty early, I guess.”
“A lmost as if I didn’t have to get up at five thirty,” I said. Mom reached down to the console between us, grabbed her coffee mug, and
took a sip. My phone buzzed. A text from A ugustus.
Just CA N’T decide what to wear. Do you like me better in a polo or a button-down?
I replied:
Button-down.
Thirty seconds later, the front door opened, and a smiling A ugustus appeared, a roller bag behind him. He wore a pressed sky-blue button-
down tucked into his jeans. A Camel Light dangled from his lips. My mom got out to say hi to him. He took the cigarette out momentarily and spoke in the confident voice to which I was accustomed. “A lways a pleasure to see you, ma’am.”
I watched them through the rearview mirror until Mom opened the trunk. Moments later, A ugustus opened a door behind me and
engaged in the complicated business of entering the backseat of a car with one leg.
“Do you want shotgun?” I asked.
“A bsolutely not,” he said. “A nd hello, Hazel Grace.”
“Hi,” I said. “Okay?” I asked.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
My mom got in and closed the car door. “Next stop, A msterdam,” she a
Which was not quite true. The next stop was the airport parking lot, and then a bus took us to the terminal, and then an open-air electric car took us to the security line. The TSA guy at the front of the line was shouting about how our bags had better not contain explosives or
firearms or anything liquid over three ounces, and I said to A ugustus, “Observation: Standing in line is a form of oppression,” and he said,