Страница 7 из 49
A s I pulled up outside of my house, A ugustus clicked the radio off. The air thickened. He was probably thinking about kissing me, and I
was definitely thinking about kissing him. Wondering if I wanted to. I’d kissed boys, but it had been a while. Pre-Miracle.
I put the car in park and looked over at him. He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, my name new and better in his voice. “It has been a real pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Ditto, Mr. Waters,” I said. I felt shy looking at him. I could not match the intensity of his waterblue eyes.
“May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.”
“Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I
rolled my eyes. “I’m serious,” he said.
“You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. “How about I call you when I finish this?”
“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.
“I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.”
He broke out into that goofy smile. “A nd you say we don’t know each other.”
CHAPTER THREE
Istayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Dawn. (Spoiler alert: The price of dawn is blood.) It wasn’t An Imperial Affliction, but the protagonist, Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, was vaguely likable despite killing, by my count, no fewer than 118 individuals in 284 pages.
So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom’s policy was never to wake me up, because one of the job requirements of
Professional Sick Person is sleeping a lot, so I was kind of confused at first when I jolted awake with her hands on my shoulders.
“It’s almost ten,” she said.
“Sleep fights cancer,” I said. “I was up late reading.”
“It must be some book,” she said as she knelt down next to the bed and unscrewed me from my large, rectangular oxygen concentrator,
which I called Philip, because it just kind of looked like a Philip.
Mom hooked me up to a portable tank and then reminded me I had class. “Did that boy give it to you?” she asked out of nowhere.
“By it, do you mean herpes?”
“You are too much,” Mom said. “The book, Hazel. I mean the book.”
“Yeah, he gave me the book.”
“I can tell you like him,” she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation required some uniquely maternal instinct. I shrugged. “I told
you Support Group would be worth your while.”
“Did you just wait outside the entire time?”
“Yes. I brought some paperwork. A nyway, time to face the day, young lady.”
“Mom. Sleep. Cancer. Fighting.”
“I know, love, but there is class to attend. A lso, today is . . . ” The glee in Mom’s voice was evident.
“Thursday?”
“Did you seriously forget?”
“Maybe?”
“It’s Thursday, March twenty-ninth!” she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face.
“You are really excited about knowing the date!” I yelled back.
“HA ZEL! IT’S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HA LF BIRTHDA Y!”
“Ohhhhhh,” I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT’S A RBOR DA Y! LET’S HUG TREES A ND EA T CA KE!
COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMA LLPOX TO THE NA TIVES; WE SHA LL RECA LL THE OCCA SION WITH A PICNIC!, etc. “Well, Happy thirty-third
Half Birthday to me,” I said.
“What do you want to do on your very special day?”
“Come home from class and set the world record for number of episodes of Top Chef watched consecutively?”
Mom reached up to this shelf above my bed and grabbed Bluie, the blue stuffed bear I’d had since I was, like, one—back when it was
socially acceptable to name one’s friends after their hue.
“You don’t want to go to a movie with Kaitlyn or Matt or someone?” who were my friends.
That was an idea. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll text Kaitlyn and see if she wants to go to the mall or something after school.”
Mom smiled, hugging the bear to her stomach. “Is it still cool to go to the mall?” she asked.
“I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool,” I answered.
* * *
I texted Kaitlyn, took a shower, got dressed, and then Mom drove me to school. My class was A merican Literature, a lecture about Frederick
Douglass in a mostly empty auditorium, and it was incredibly difficult to stay awake. Forty minutes into the ninety-minute class, Kaitlyn texted back.
A wesomesauce. Happy Half Birthday. Castleton at 3:32?
Kaitlyn had the kind of packed social life that needs to be scheduled down to the minute. I responded:
Sounds good. I’ll be at the food court.
Mom drove me directly from school to the bookstore attached to the mall, where I purchased both Midnight Dawns and Requiem for
Mayhem, the first two sequels to The Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and bought a Diet Coke. It was 3:21.
I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I read. There was this tu
through over and over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of A ugustus Waters and the existentially fraught free throws.
Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought I couldn’t see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and
reading through some papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.
A t 3:32 precisely, I noticed Kaitlyn striding confidently past the Wok House. She saw me the moment I raised my hand, flashed her very
white and newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.
She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that dominated her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her
head as she leaned down to hug me.
“Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How are you?” People didn’t find the accent odd or off-putting. Kaitlyn just happened to be an
extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her. She sipped through the straw. “I do wish you were at school
these days. Some of the boys have become downright edible.”
“Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we’d attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn’t picture
any of them.
“I’ve been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, “but I don’t think it will last. He’s such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the Hazelverse?”
“Nothing, really,” I said.
“Health is good?”
“The same, I guess?”
“Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. “So you could just live forever, right?”
“Probably not forever,” I said.
“But basically,” she said. “What else is new?”
I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I’d watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a boy. But I didn’t really
have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.
“What in heaven is that?” asked Kaitlyn, gesturing to the book.
“Oh, it’s sci-fi. I’ve gotten kinda into it. It’s a series.”
“I am alarmed. Shall we shop?”
We went to this shoe store. A s we were shopping, Kaitlyn kept picking out all these open-toed flats for me and saying, “These would look cute on you,” which reminded me that Kaitlyn never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes