Страница 40 из 49
flower bed on their way to the little patch of grass in Gus’s backyard. They immediately commenced to play a game that involved throwing
one another to the ground.
“Kids!” Julie shouted vaguely.
“I can only hope,” Julie said, turning back to Gus, “they grow into the kind of thoughtful, intelligent young men you’ve become.”
I resisted the urge to audibly gag. “He’s not that smart,” I said to Julie.
“She’s right. It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”
“Right, it’s primarily his hotness,” I said.
“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.
“It actually did blind our friend Isaac,” I said.
“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”
“You ca
“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”
“Not to mention your body.”
“Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s
breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.
“Okay, enough,” Gus’s dad said, and then out of nowhere, his dad put an arm around me and kissed the side of my head and whispered,
“I thank God for you every day, kid.”
A nyway, that was the last good day I had with Gus until the Last Good Day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
One of the less bullshitty conventions of the cancer kid genre is the Last Good Day convention, wherein the victim of cancer finds herself with some unexpected hours when it seems like the inexorable decline has suddenly plateaued, when the pain is for a moment bearable. The
problem, of course, is that there’s no way of knowing that your last good day is your Last Good Day. A t the time, it is just another good day.
I’d taken a day off from visiting A ugustus because I was feeling a bit unwell myself: nothing specific, just tired. It had been a lazy day, and when A ugustus called just after five P.M., I was already attached to the BiPA P, which we’d dragged out to the living room so I could watch TV with Mom and Dad.
“Hi, A ugustus,” I said.
He answered in the voice I’d fallen for. “Good evening, Hazel Grace. Do you suppose you could find your way to the Literal Heart of Jesus
around eight P.M.?”
“Um, yes?”
“Excellent. A lso, if it’s not too much trouble, please prepare a eulogy.”
“Um,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
“A nd I you,” I answered. Then the phone clicked off.
“Um,” I said. “I have to go to Support Group at eight tonight. Emergency session.”
My mom muted the TV. “Is everything okay?”
I looked at her for a second, my eyebrows raised. “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
“But why would there—”
“Because Gus needs me for some reason. It’s fine. I can drive.” I fiddled with the BiPA P so Mom would help me take it off, but she didn’t.
“Hazel,” she said, “your dad and I feel like we hardly even see you anymore.”
“Particularly those of us who work all week,” Dad said.
“He needs me,” I said, finally unfastening the BiPA P myself.
“We need you, too, kiddo,” my dad said. He took hold of my wrist, like I was a two-year-old about to dart out into the street, and gripped
it.
“Well, get a terminal disease, Dad, and then I’ll stay home more.”
“Hazel,” my mom said.
“You were the one who didn’t want me to be a homebody,” I said to her. Dad was still clutching my arm. “A nd now you want him to go
ahead and die so I’ll be back here chained to this place, letting you take care of me like I always used to. But I don’t need it, Mom. I don’t need you like I used to. You’re the one who needs to get a life.”
“Hazel!” Dad said, squeezing harder. “A pologize to your mother.”
I was tugging at my arm but he wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t get my ca
was an old-fashioned Teenager Walkout, wherein I stomp out of the room and slam the door to my bedroom and turn up The Hectic Glow
and furiously write a eulogy. But I couldn’t because I couldn’t freaking breathe. “The ca
My dad immediately let go and rushed to co
apologize to your mother.”
“Fine, I’m sorry, just please let me do this.”
They didn’t say anything. Mom just sat there with her arms folded, not even looking at me. A fter a while, I got up and went to my room
to write about A ugustus.
Both Mom and Dad tried a few times to knock on the door or whatever, but I just told them I was doing something important. It took me
forever to figure out what I wanted to say, and even then I wasn’t very happy with it. Before I’d technically finished, I noticed it was 7:40, which meant that I would be late even if I didn’t change, so in the end I wore baby blue cotton pajama pants, flip-flops, and Gus’s Butler shirt.
I walked out of the room and tried to go right past them, but my dad said, “You can’t leave the house without permission.”
“Oh, my God, Dad. He wanted me to write him a eulogy, okay? I’ll be home every. Freaking. Night. Starting any day now, okay?” That
finally shut them up.
It took the entire drive to calm down about my parents. I pulled up around the back of the church and parked in the semicircular driveway
behind A ugustus’s car. The back door to the church was held open by a fist-size rock. Inside, I contemplated taking the stairs but decided to wait for the ancient creaking elevator.
When the elevator doors unscrolled, I was in the Support Group room, the chairs arranged in the same circle. But now I saw only Gus in
a wheelchair, ghoulishly thin. He was facing me from the center of the circle. He’d been waiting for the elevator doors to open.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, “you look ravishing.”
“I know, right?”
I heard a shuffling in a dark corner of the room. Isaac stood behind a little wooden lectern, clinging to it. “You want to sit?” I asked him.
“No, I’m about to eulogize. You’re late.”
“You’re . . . I’m . . . what?”
Gus gestured for me to sit. I pulled a chair into the center of the circle with him as he spun the chair to face Isaac. “I want to attend my funeral,” Gus said. “By the way, will you speak at my funeral?”
“Um, of course, yeah,” I said, letting my head fall onto his shoulder. I reached across his back and hugged both him and the wheelchair.
He winced. I let go.
“A wesome,” he said. “I’m hopeful I’ll get to attend as a ghost, but just to make sure, I thought I’d—well, not to put you on the spot, but I just this afternoon thought I could arrange a prefuneral, and I figured since I’m in reasonably good spirits, there’s no time like the present.”
“How did you even get in here?” I asked him.
“Would you believe they leave the door open all night?” Gus asked.
“Um, no,” I said.
“A s well you shouldn’t.” Gus smiled. “A nyway, I know it’s a bit self-aggrandizing.”
“Hey, you’re stealing my eulogy,” Isaac said. “My first bit is about how you were a self-aggrandizing bastard.”
I laughed.
“Okay, okay,” Gus said. “A t your leisure.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “A ugustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a
heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more.”
“Seventeen,” Gus corrected.
“I’m assuming you’ve got some time, you interrupting bastard.
“I’m telling you,” Isaac continued, “A ugustus Waters talked so much that he’d interrupt you at his own funeral. A nd he was pretentious:
Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. A nd he