The Fault in Our Stars

“She may soon be the youngest nonmartyr saint ever beatified by the Catholic Church. She had the same cancer that Mr. Waters had,

osteosarcoma. They removed her right leg. The pain was excruciating. A s A ntonietta Meo lay dying at the ripened age of six from this

agonizing cancer, she told her father, ‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?”

I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.”

“But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back. I cut the music. “I’m sorry I ruined your trip. You were too young. You were—” He broke

down. A s if he had a right to cry over Gus. Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late

lamentation on his wall.

“You didn’t ruin our trip, you self-important bastard. We had an awesome trip.”

“I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I

considered the honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t speak to me in A msterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his shittiness around me and A ugustus; his aching question about the relationship between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man who’d been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn’t know: Half of marriages end in the year after a child’s death. I looked back at Van Houten. I was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and asked, “You had a kid who died?”

“My daughter,” he said. “She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be beatified.”

“She had leukemia?” I asked. He nodded. “Like A

“Very much like her, yes.”

“You were married?”

“No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we lost her. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“Did you live with her?”

“No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that

increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.”

A fter a second, I said, “So it’s like you gave her this second life where she got to be a teenager.”

“I suppose that would be a fair assessment,” he said, and then quickly added, “I assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot’s Trolley

Problem thought experiment?”

“A nd then I show up at your house and I’m dressed like the girl you hoped she would live to become and you’re, like, all taken aback by

it.”

“There’s a trolley ru

“I don’t care about your stupid thought experiment,” I said.

“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”

“Well, hers either,” I said.

“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But

eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. A nd I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. A nd she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

A fter a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”

He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”

I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are

lucky enough to be so good at something.”

He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled

out his mostly empty fifth of whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door. “Good-bye, Hazel.”

“Take it easy, Van Houten.”

He sat down on the curb behind the car. A s I watched him shrink in the rearview mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it

looked like he would leave it on the curb. A nd then he took a swig.

It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a cloud. It was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air when the walk from his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the doorbell, and Gus’s mom answered.

“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.

She made me eat some eggplant lasagna—I guess a lot of people had brought them food or whatever—with her and Gus’s dad. “How are

you?”

“I miss him.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t really know what to say. I just wanted to go downstairs and find whatever he’d written for me. Plus, the silence in the room really bothered me. I wanted them to be talking to each other, comforting or holding hands or whatever. But they just sat there eating very small

amounts of lasagna, not even looking at each other. “Heaven needed an angel,” his dad said after a while.

“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and piled into the kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and

then watched the kids run around the kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and movement, excited molecules bouncing against

each other and shouting, “You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I tagged you you didn’t tag me you missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s a time-out DA NIEL DO NOT CA LL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not allowed to use that word how come you

just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then, chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s parents were now

holding hands, which made me feel better.

“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The kids were still singing their dumb-butt song.

“We can check his computer,” his mom said.

“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.

“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the basement, Mark?”

“No idea.”

“Well,” I said, “can I . . .” I nodded toward the basement door.

“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can.”

I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the TV. His computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it

up and then searched for his most recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most recent thing was a response paper to Toni

Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves, looking for a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through

his copy of A n Imperial A ffliction. He hadn’t left a single mark in it.

I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem, the ninth sequel to The Price of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp,

the corner of page 138 turned down. He’d never made it to the end of the book. “Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,” I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.

A nd then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out

my ca

couldn’t distinguish among the pains.

I sat up in the bed after a while and reinserted my ca

in response to his parents’ expectant looks. The kids raced past me. One of Gus’s sisters—I could not tell them apart—said, “Mom, do you