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celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn’t get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither A ugustus Waters nor I spoke again until Patrick said, “A ugustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.”
“My fears?”
“Yes.”
“I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”
“Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile.
“Was that insensitive?” A ugustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.”
Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said, “A ugustus, please. Let’s return to you and your struggles. You said
you fear oblivion?”
“I did,” A ugustus answered.
Patrick seemed lost. “Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?”
I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know
I existed. I was a fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.
A nd yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Patrick, his delight evident, immediately said, “Hazel!” I was, I’m sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.
I looked over at A ugustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. “There will come a
time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. A ll of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember A ristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for
naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not
survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. A nd if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
I’d learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van Houten, the reclusive author of A n Imperial A ffliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s
like to be dying, and (b) not have died.
A fter I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across A ugustus’s face—not the little
crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. “Goddamn,” A ugustus said quietly.
“A ren’t you something else.”
Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. A t the end, we all had to hold hands, and Patrick led us in a prayer. “Lord
Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we know
ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for Isaac’s eyes, for Michael’s and Jamie’s blood, for A ugustus’s bones, for Hazel’s lungs, for James’s throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your peace, which passes all understanding. A nd we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph
and Haley and A bigail and A ngelina and Taylor and Gabriel and . . .”
It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. A nd while Patrick droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way
onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.
When Patrick was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING OUR BEST LIFE TODA Y—and it was over. A ugustus Waters
pushed himself out of his chair and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over me, but he kept his distance so I wouldn’t have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Hazel.”
“No, your full name.”
“Um, Hazel Grace Lancaster.” He was just about to say something else when Isaac walked up. “Hold on,” A ugustus said, raising a finger,
and turned to Isaac. “That was actually worse than you made it out to be.”
“I told you it was bleak.”
“Why do you bother with it?”
“I don’t know. It kind of helps?”
A ugustus leaned in so he thought I couldn’t hear. “She’s a regular?” I couldn’t hear Isaac’s comment, but A ugustus responded, “I’ll say.”
He clasped Isaac by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. “Tell Hazel about clinic.”
Isaac leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. “Okay, so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling
my surgeon that I’d rather be deaf than blind. A nd he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ and I was, like, ‘Yeah, I realize it doesn’t work that way; I’m just saying I’d rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don’t have,’ and he said, ‘Well, the good news is that you won’t be deaf,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn’t going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.’”
“He sounds like a wi
“Good luck with that. A ll right, I should go. Monica’s waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can.”
“Counterinsurgence tomorrow?” A ugustus asked.
“Definitely.” Isaac turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
A ugustus Waters turned to me. “Literally,” he said.
“Literally?” I asked.
“We are literally in the heart of Jesus,” he said. “I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.”
“Someone should tell Jesus,” I said. “I mean, it’s gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.”
“I would tell Him myself,” A ugustus said, “but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won’t be able to hear me.” I
laughed. He shook his head, just looking at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
A ugustus half smiled. “Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the
simpler pleasures of existence.” A brief awkward silence ensued. A ugustus plowed through: “I mean, particularly given that, as you so
deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.”
I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, “I’m not beau—”
“You’re like a mille
“Never seen it,” I said.
“Really?” he asked. “Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can’t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It’s your
autobiography, so far as I can tell.”
His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn’t even know that guys could turn me on—not, like, in real life.
A younger girl walked past us. “How’s it going, A lisa?” he asked. She smiled and mumbled, “Hi, A ugustus.” “Memorial people,” he
explained. Memorial was the big research hospital. “Where do you go?”
“Children’s,” I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded. The conversation seemed over. “Well,” I said, nodding vaguely
toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. He limped beside me. “So, see you next time, maybe?” I asked.