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“Thank you, Hazel. That means everything to me.”
I nodded. I was crying. I couldn’t get over how happy I was, crying genuine tears of actual happiness for the first time in maybe forever,
imagining my mom as a Patrick. It made me think of A
A fter a while we turned on the TV and watched A NTM. But I paused it after five seconds because I had all these questions for Mom. “So
how close are you to finishing?”
“If I go up to Bloomington for a week this summer, I should be able to finish by December.”
“How long have you been keeping this from me, exactly?”
“A year.”
“Mom.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you, Hazel.”
A mazing. “So when you’re waiting for me outside of MCC or Support Group or whatever, you’re always—”
“Yes, working or reading.”
“This is so great. If I’m dead, I want you to know I will be sighing at you from heaven every time you ask someone to share their
feelings.”
My dad laughed. “I’ll be right there with ya, kiddo,” he assured me.
Finally, we watched A NTM. Dad tried really hard not to die of boredom, and he kept messing up which girl was which, saying, “We like
her?”
“No, no. We revile A nastasia. We like A ntonia, the other blonde,” Mom explained.
“They’re all tall and horrible,” Dad responded. “Forgive me for failing to tell the difference.” Dad reached across me for Mom’s hand.
“Do you think you guys will stay together if I die?” I asked.
“Hazel, what? Sweetie.” She fumbled for the remote control and paused the TV again. “What’s wrong?”
“Just, do you think you would?”
“Yes, of course. Of course,” Dad said. “Your mom and I love each other, and if we lose you, we’ll go through it together.”
“Swear to God,” I said.
“I swear to God,” he said.
I looked back at Mom. “Swear to God,” she agreed. “Why are you even worrying about this?”
“I just don’t want to ruin your life or anything.”
Mom leaned forward and pressed her face into my messy puff of hair and kissed me at the very top of my head. I said to Dad, “I don’t
want you to become like a miserable unemployed alcoholic or whatever.”
My mom smiled. “Your father isn’t Peter Van Houten, Hazel. You of all people know it is possible to live with pain.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. Mom hugged me and I let her even though I didn’t really want to be hugged. “Okay, you can unpause it,” I said.
A nastasia got kicked off. She threw a fit. It was awesome.
I ate a few bites of di
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Iwoke up the next morning panicked because I’d dreamed of being alone and boatless in a huge lake. I bolted up, straining against the BiPA P, and felt Mom’s arm on me.
“Hi, you okay?”
My heart raced, but I nodded. Mom said, “Kaitlyn’s on the phone for you.” I pointed at my BiPA P. She helped me get it off and hooked
me up to Philip and then finally I took my cell from Mom and said, “Hey, Kaitlyn.”
“Just calling to check in,” she said. “See how you’re doing.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’m doing okay.”
“You’ve just had the worst luck, darling. It’s unconscionable.”
“I guess,” I said. I didn’t think much about my luck anymore one way or the other. Honestly, I didn’t really want to talk with Kaitlyn about anything, but she kept dragging the conversation along.
“So what was it like?” she asked.
“Having your boyfriend die? Um, it sucks.”
“No,” she said. “Being in love.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. It was . . . it was nice to spend time with someone so interesting. We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?”
“A las, I do not. The boys I’m acquainted with are vastly uninteresting.”
“He wasn’t perfect or anything. He wasn’t your fairy-tale Prince Charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes, but I liked him
best when that stuff fell away.”
“Do you have like a scrapbook of pictures and letters he wrote?”
“I have some pictures, but he never really wrote me letters. Except, well there are some missing pages from his notebook that might have
been something for me, but I guess he threw them away or they got lost or something.”
“Maybe he mailed them to you,” she said.
“Nah, they’d’ve gotten here.”
“Then maybe they weren’t written for you,” she said. “Maybe . . . I mean, not to depress you or anything, but maybe he wrote them for
someone else and mailed them—”
“VA N HOUTEN!” I shouted.
“A re you okay? Was that a cough?”
“Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go.”
I hung up, rolled over, reached for my laptop, turned it on, and emailed lidewij.vliegenthart.
Lidewij,
I believe A ugustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebook to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (A ugustus) died. It is very important
to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren’t written for me. Regardless, they must be
read. They must be. Can you help?
Your friend,
Hazel Grace Lancaster
She responded late that afternoon.
Dear Hazel,
I did not know that A ugustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and
so sad.
I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing
in the morning to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time, usually.
Your friend,
Lidewij Vliegenthart
p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically restrain Peter.
I wondered why he’d written Van Houten in those last days instead of me, telling Van Houten that he’d be redeemed if only he gave me my
sequel. Maybe the notebook pages had just repeated his request to Van Houten. It made sense, Gus leveraging his terminality to make my
dream come true: The sequel was a tiny thing to die for, but it was the biggest thing left at his disposal.
I refreshed my email continually that night, slept for a few hours, and then commenced to refreshing around five in the morning. But
nothing arrived. I tried to watch TV to distract myself, but my thoughts kept drifting back to A msterdam, imagining Lidewij Vliegenthart and her boyfriend bicycling around town on this crazy mission to find a dead kid’s last correspondence. How fun it would be to bounce on the
back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn.
I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with A ugustus Waters. But thinking about
Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the
thought that everything might be done better and again.
That is probably true even if you live to be ninety—although I’m jealous of the people who get to find out for sure. Then again, I’d