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“I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months
when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise. A nyway, for the longest time, I just kept sinking free throws. I hit eighty in a row, my all-time best, but as I kept going, I felt more and more like a two-year-old. A nd then for some reason I started to think about hurdlers. A re you okay?”
I’d taken a seat on the corner of his unmade bed. I wasn’t trying to be suggestive or anything; I just got kind of tired when I had to stand a lot. I’d stood in the living room and then there had been the stairs, and then more standing, which was quite a lot of standing for me, and I didn’t want to faint or anything. I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just listening. Hurdlers?”
“Yeah, hurdlers. I don’t know why. I started thinking about them ru
objects that had been set in their path. A nd I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”
“This was before your diagnosis?” I asked.
“Right, well, there was that, too.” He smiled with half his mouth. “The day of the existentially fraught free throws was coincidentally also my last day of dual leggedness. I had a weekend between when they scheduled the amputation and when it happened. My own little glimpse
of what Isaac is going through.”
I nodded. I liked A ugustus Waters. I really, really, really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially fraught free throws. I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin. A nd I liked that he had two names. I’ve always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Gus or A ugustus? Me, I was always just Hazel,
univalent Hazel.
“Do you have siblings?” I asked.
“Huh?” he answered, seeming a little distracted.
“You said that thing about watching kids play.”
“Oh, yeah, no. I have nephews, from my half sisters. But they’re older. They’re like—DA D, HOW OLD A RE JULIE A ND MA RTHA ?”
“Twenty-eight!”
“They’re like twenty-eight. They live in Chicago. They are both married to very fancy lawyer dudes. Or banker dudes. I can’t remember.
You have siblings?”
I shook my head no. “So what’s your story?” he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.
“I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—”
“No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera.”
“Um,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It’s disheartening. Like, cancer is
in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven’t let it succeed prematurely.”
It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to A ugustus Waters, which enthusiasms to embrace, and in the
silence that followed it occurred to me that I wasn’t very interesting. “I am pretty unextraordinary.”
“I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that comes to mind.”
“Um. Reading?”
“What do you read?”
“Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry. Whatever.”
“Do you write poetry, too?”
“No. I don’t write.”
“There!” A ugustus almost shouted. “Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in A merica who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don’t you?”
“I guess?”
“What’s your favorite?”
“Um,” I said.
My favorite book, by a wide margin, was A n Imperial A ffliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. A nd then there are books like A n Imperial A ffliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.
It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird
and impossible ways. A n Imperial A ffliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.
Even so, I told A ugustus. “My favorite book is probably A n Imperial A ffliction,” I said.
“Does it feature zombies?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Stormtroopers?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that kind of book.”
He smiled. “I am going to read this terrible book with the boring title that does not contain stormtroopers,” he promised, and I
immediately felt like I shouldn’t have told him about it. A ugustus spun around to a stack of books beneath his bedside table. He grabbed a paperback and a pen. A s he scribbled an inscription onto the title page, he said, “A ll I ask in exchange is that you read this brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game.” He held up the book, which was called The Price of Dawn. I laughed and took it. Our hands kind of got muddled together in the book handoff, and then he was holding my hand. “Cold,” he said, pressing a finger to my pale wrist.
“Not cold so much as underoxygenated,” I said.
“I love it when you talk medical to me,” he said. He stood, and pulled me up with him, and did not let go of my hand until we reached
the stairs.
* * *
We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch
about halfway between us to let him know that it was okay to hold it, but he didn’t try. A n hour into the movie, A ugustus’s parents came in and served us the enchiladas, which we ate on the couch, and they were pretty delicious.
The movie was about this heroic guy in a mask who died heroically for Natalie Portman, who’s pretty badass and very hot and does not
have anything approaching my puffy steroid face.
A s the credits rolled, he said, “Pretty great, huh?”
“Pretty great,” I agreed, although it wasn’t, really. It was kind of a boy movie. I don’t know why boys expect us to like boy movies. We
don’t expect them to like girl movies. “I should get home. Class in the morning,” I said.
I sat on the couch for a while as A ugustus searched for his keys. His mom sat down next to me and said, “I just love this one, don’t
you?” I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could
We Know Joy?
(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking A bout Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for
centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) “Yes,” I said. “A lovely thought.”
I drove A ugustus’s car home with A ugustus riding shotgun. He played me a couple songs he liked by a band called The Hectic Glow, and
they were good songs, but because I didn’t know them already, they weren’t as good to me as they were to him. I kept glancing over at his
leg, or the place where his leg had been, trying to imagine what the fake leg looked like. I didn’t want to care about it, but I did a little. He probably cared about my oxygen. Illness repulses. I’d learned that a long time ago, and I suspected A ugustus had, too.