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said.
“The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said.
“A nd even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.”
“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.”
“A ugustus Waters,” I said, looking up at him, thinking that you ca
Frank, after all, kissed someone in the A
a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.
“I must say,” Otto Frank said on the video in his accented English, “I was very much surprised by the deep thoughts A
A nd then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my
tiptoes. A s his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth
the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.
“It was quite a different A
The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. “A nd my conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms
with A
I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. A ugustus was staring at me, his blue eyes closer to me than they’d ever been, and
behind him, a crowd of people three deep had sort of circled around us. They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their
hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.
I pulled away from A ugustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down at my Chuck Taylors. A nd then they started
clapping. A ll the people, all these adults, just started clapping, and one shouted “Bravo!” in a European accent. A ugustus, smiling, bowed.
Laughing, I curtsied ever so slightly, which was met with another round of applause.
We made our way downstairs, letting all the adults go down first, and right before we got to the café (where blessedly an elevator took us
back down to ground level and the gift shop) we saw pages of A
happened to be turned to a page of Shakespeare quotations. For who so firm that ca
Lidewij drove us back to the Filosoof. Outside the hotel, it was drizzling and A ugustus and I stood on the brick sidewalk slowly getting wet.
A ugustus: “You probably need some rest.”
Me: “I’m okay.”
A ugustus: “Okay.” (Pause.) “What are you thinking about?”
Me: “You.”
A ugustus: “What about me?”
Me: “‘I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of i
A ugustus: “God, you are sexy.”
Me: “We could go to your room.”
A ugustus: “I’ve heard worse ideas.”
We squeezed into the tiny elevator together. Every surface, including the floor, was mirrored. We had to pull the door to shut ourselves in and then the old thing creaked slowly up to the second floor. I was tired and sweaty and worried that I generally looked and smelled gross, but even so I kissed him in that elevator, and then he pulled away and pointed at the mirror and said, “Look, infinite Hazels.”
“Some infinities are larger than other infinities,” I drawled, mimicking Van Houten.
“What an assclown,” A ugustus said, and it took all that time and more just to get us to the second floor. Finally the elevator lurched to a halt, and he pushed the mirrored door open. When it was half open, he winced in pain and lost his grip on the door for a second.
“You okay?” I asked.
A fter a second, he said, “Yeah, yeah, door’s just heavy, I guess.” He pushed again and got it open. He let me walk out first, of course,
but then I didn’t know which direction to walk down the hallway, and so I just stood there outside the elevator and he stood there, too, his face still contorted, and I said again, “Okay?”
“Just out of shape, Hazel Grace. A ll is well.”
We were just standing there in the hallway, and he wasn’t leading the way to his room or anything, and I didn’t know where his room
was, and as the stalemate continued, I became convinced he was trying to figure out a way not to hook up with me, that I never should have
suggested the idea in the first place, that it was unladylike and therefore had disgusted A ugustus Waters, who was standing there looking at me unblinking, trying to think of a way to extricate himself from the situation politely. A nd then, after forever, he said, “It’s above my knee and it just tapers a little and then it’s just skin. There’s a nasty scar, but it just looks like—”
“What?” I asked.
“My leg,” he said. “Just so you’re prepared in case, I mean, in case you see it or what—”
“Oh, get over yourself,” I said, and took the two steps I needed to get to him. I kissed him, hard, pressing him against the wall, and I
kept kissing him as he fumbled for the room key.
We crawled into the bed, my freedom circumscribed some by the oxygen, but even so I could get on top of him and take his shirt off and
taste the sweat on the skin below his collarbone as I whispered into his skin, “I love you, A ugustus Waters,” his body relaxing beneath mine as he heard me say it. He reached down and tried to pull my shirt off, but it got tangled in the tube. I laughed.
* * *
“How do you do this every day?” he asked as I disentangled my shirt from the tubes. Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear
didn’t match my purple bra, as if boys even notice such things. I crawled under the covers and kicked out of my jeans and socks and then
watched the comforter dance as beneath it, A ugustus removed first his jeans and then his leg.
* * *
We were lying on our backs next to each other, everything hidden by the covers, and after a second I reached over for his thigh and let my
hand trail downward to the stump, the thick scarred skin. I held the stump for a second. He flinched. “It hurts?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. “You’re so hot,” I said, my hand still on his leg.
“I’m starting to think you have an amputee fetish,” he answered, still kissing me. I laughed.
“I have an A ugustus Waters fetish,” I explained.
The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor
particularly ecstatic. There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at. No headboards were broken. No
screaming. Honestly, it was probably the longest time we’d ever spent together without talking.
Only one thing followed type: A fterward, when I had my face resting against A ugustus’s chest, listening to his heart pound, A ugustus
said, “Hazel Grace, I literally ca
“Misuse of literality,” I said.
“No,” he said. “So. Tired.”
His face turned away from me, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to his lungs settle into the rhythm of sleep. A fter a while, I got up, dressed, found the Hotel Filosoof stationery, and wrote him a love letter: