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“Seriously.”
Rather than be searched by hand, I chose to walk through the metal detector without my cart or my tank or even the plastic nubbins in
my nose. Walking through the X-ray machine marked the first time I’d taken a step without oxygen in some months, and it felt pretty amazing to walk unencumbered like that, stepping across the Rubicon, the machine’s silence acknowledging that I was, however briefly, a
nonmetallicized creature.
I felt a bodily sovereignty that I can’t really describe except to say that when I was a kid I used to have a really heavy backpack that I
carried everywhere with all my books in it, and if I walked around with the backpack for long enough, when I took it off I felt like I was
floating.
A fter about ten seconds, my lungs felt like they were folding in upon themselves like flowers at dusk. I sat down on a gray bench just
past the machine and tried to catch my breath, my cough a rattling drizzle, and I felt pretty miserable until I got the ca
Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from
the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention. Mom was looking at me, concerned. She’d
just said something. What had she just said? Then I remembered. She’d asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“A msterdam!” she half shouted.
I smiled. “A msterdam,” I answered. She reached her hand down to me and pulled me up.
We got to the gate an hour before our scheduled boarding time. “Mrs. Lancaster, you are an impressively punctual person,” A ugustus said as he sat down next to me in the mostly empty gate area.
“Well, it helps that I am not technically very busy,” she said.
“You’re plenty busy,” I told her, although it occurred to me that Mom’s business was mostly me. There was also the business of being
married to my dad—he was kind of clueless about, like, banking and hiring plumbers and cooking and doing things other than working for
Morris Property, Inc.—but it was mostly me. Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.
A s the seats around the gate started to fill, A ugustus said, “I’m go
“No,” I said, “but I really appreciate your refusal to give in to breakfasty social conventions.”
He tilted his head at me, confused. “Hazel has developed an issue with the ghettoization of scrambled eggs,” Mom said.
“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”
“I want to talk about this more,” A ugustus said. “But I am starving. I’ll be right back.”
When A ugustus hadn’t showed up after twenty minutes, I asked Mom if she thought something was wrong, and she looked up from her awful
magazine only long enough to say, “He probably just went to the bathroom or something.”
A gate agent came over and switched my oxygen container out with one provided by the airline. I was embarrassed to have this lady
kneeling in front of me while everyone watched, so I texted A ugustus while she did it.
He didn’t reply. Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds of A msterdam trip–ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental
breakdown) and I felt like there was something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked away.
A nd just when the lady behind the ticket counter a
time and every single person in the gate area turned squarely to me, I saw A ugustus fast-limping toward us with a McDonald’s bag in one
hand, his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Line got superlong, sorry,” he said, offering me a hand up. I took it, and we walked side by side to the gate to preboard.
I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us, and whether it would kill us, and how heroic my mom must be,
and everything else. That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other
people. We were irreconcilably other, and never was it more obvious than when the three of us walked through the empty plane, the
stewardess nodding sympathetically and gesturing us toward our row in the distant back. I sat in the middle of our three-person row with
A ugustus in the window seat and Mom in the aisle. I felt a little hemmed in by Mom, so of course I scooted over toward A ugustus. We were
right behind the plane’s wing. He opened up his bag and unwrapped his burger.
“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled eggs—they’re
important.”
“Ludicrous,” I said. The people were starting to file into the plane now. I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at A ugustus.
“I’m just saying: Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special. They have a place and a time, like church does.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing
that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”
“You’re a hard person to comfort,” A ugustus said.
“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said. “You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember.”
For a moment, he said nothing. “You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace.”
“It’s my privilege and my responsibility,” I answered.
Before I broke eye contact with him, he said, “Listen, sorry I avoided the gate area. The McDonald’s line wasn’t really that long; I just . . .
I just didn’t want to sit there with all those people looking at us or whatever.”
“A t me, mostly,” I said. You could glance at Gus and never know he’d been sick, but I carried my disease with me on the outside, which
is part of why I’d become a homebody in the first place. “A ugustus Waters, noted charismatist, is embarrassed to sit next to a girl with an oxygen tank.”
“Not embarrassed,” he said. “They just piss me off sometimes. A nd I don’t want to be pissed off today.” A fter a minute, he dug into his
pocket and flipped open his pack of smokes.
A bout nine seconds later, a blond stewardess rushed over to our row and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke on this plane. Or any plane.”
“I don’t smoke,” he explained, the cigarette dancing in his mouth as he spoke.
“But—”
“It’s a metaphor,” I explained. “He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn’t give it the power to kill him.”
The stewardess was flummoxed for only a moment. “Well, that metaphor is prohibited on today’s flight,” she said. Gus nodded and
rejoined the cigarette to its pack.
We finally taxied out to the runway and the pilot said, Flight attendants, prepare for departure, and then two tremendous jet engines roared to life and we began to accelerate. “This is what it feels like to drive in a car with you,” I said, and he smiled, but kept his jaw clenched tight and I said, “Okay?”
We were picking up speed and suddenly Gus’s hand grabbed the armrest, his eyes wide, and I put my hand on top of his and said,
“Okay?” He didn’t say anything, just stared at me wide-eyed, and I said, “A re you scared of flying?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. The nose of the plane rose up and we were aloft. Gus stared out the window, watching the planet