Текст книги "The Fault in Our Stars "

Автор книги: John Green

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A msterdamian exile, and you will be glad indeed to have saved your Wish.”

A ugustus stopped speaking long enough that I figured the soliloquy was over. “But I didn’t save my Wish,” I said.

“A h,” he said. A nd then, after what felt like a practiced pause, he added, “But I saved mine.”

“Really?” I was surprised that A ugustus was Wish-eligible, what with being still in school and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish.

“I got it in exchange for the leg,” he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. “Now, I’m not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it

wouldn’t make sense to meet him without the girl who introduced me to his book.”

“It definitely wouldn’t,” I said.

“So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said A msterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed

leaving May third and returning May seventh.”

“A ugustus, really?”

He reached over and touched my cheek and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. My body tensed, and I think he saw it, because he

pulled his hand away.

“A ugustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”

“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”

“God, you’re the best,” I told him.

“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he answered.

CHAPTER SIX

Mom was folding my laundry while watching this TV show called The View when I got home. I told her that the tulips and the Dutch artist and everything were all because A ugustus was using his Wish to take me to A msterdam. “That’s too much,” she said, shaking her head. “We

can’t accept that from a virtual stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger. He’s easily my second best friend.”

“Behind Kaitlyn?”

“Behind you,” I said. It was true, but I’d mostly said it because I wanted to go to A msterdam.

“I’ll ask Dr. Maria,” she said after a moment.

* * *

Dr. Maria said I couldn’t go to A msterdam without an adult intimately familiar with my case, which more or less meant either Mom or Dr.

Maria herself. (My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean

tides. But my mom knew more about differentiated thyroid carcinoma in adolescents than most oncologists.)

“So you’ll come,” I said. “The Genies will pay for it. The Genies are loaded.”

“But your father,” she said. “He would miss us. It wouldn’t be fair to him, and he can’t get time off work.”

“A re you kidding? You don’t think Dad would enjoy a few days of watching TV shows that are not about aspiring models and ordering

pizza every night, using paper towels as plates so he doesn’t have to do the dishes?”

Mom laughed. Finally, she started to get excited, typing tasks into her phone: She’d have to call Gus’s parents and talk to the Genies

about my medical needs and do they have a hotel yet and what are the best guidebooks and we should do our research if we only have three

days, and so on. I kind of had a headache, so I downed a couple A dvil and decided to take a nap.

But I ended up just lying in bed and replaying the whole picnic with A ugustus. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little moment when I’d

tensed up as he touched me. The gentle familiarity felt wrong, somehow. I thought maybe it was how orchestrated the whole thing had been:

A ugustus was amazing, but he’d overdone everything at the picnic, right down to the sandwiches that were metaphorically resonant but tasted terrible and the memorized soliloquy that prevented conversation. It all felt Romantic, but not romantic.

But the truth is that I had never wanted him to kiss me, not in the way you are supposed to want these things. I mean, he was gorgeous.

I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the

realized touch . . . it was all wrong.

Then I found myself worrying I would have to make out with him to get to A msterdam, which is not the kind of thing you want to be

thinking, because (a) It shouldn’t’ve even been a question whether I wanted to kiss him, and (b) Kissing someone so that you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking, and I have to confess that while I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

But then again, he hadn’t tried to kiss me; he’d only touched my face, which is not even sexual. It was not a move designed to elicit

arousal, but it was certainly a designed move, because A ugustus Waters was no improviser. So what had he been trying to convey? A nd why

hadn’t I wanted to accept it?

A t some point, I realized I was Kaitlyning the encounter, so I decided to text Kaitlyn and ask for some advice. She called immediately.

“I have a boy problem,” I said.

“DELICIOUS,” Kaitlyn responded. I told her all about it, complete with the awkward face touching, leaving out only A msterdam and

A ugustus’s name. “You’re sure he’s hot?” she asked when I was finished.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“A thletic?”

“Yeah, he used to play basketball for North Central.”

“Wow. How’d you meet him?”

“This hideous Support Group.”

“Huh,” Kaitlyn said. “Out of curiosity, how many legs does this guy have?”

“Like, 1.4,” I said, smiling. Basketball players were famous in Indiana, and although Kaitlyn didn’t go to North Central, her social

connectivity was endless.

“A ugustus Waters,” she said.

“Um, maybe?”

“Oh, my God. I’ve seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you’re interested in him. But, oh,

sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.”

“Kaitlyn,” I said.

“Sorry. Do you think you’d have to be on top?”

“Kaitlyn,” I said.

“What were we talking about. Right, you and A ugustus Waters. Maybe . . . are you gay?”

“I don’t think so? I mean, I definitely like him.”

“Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands.”

“No, he has kind of amazing hands.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Hmm,” I said.

A fter a second, Kaitlyn said, “Remember Derek? He broke up with me last week because he’d decided there was something fundamentally

incompatible about us deep down and that we’d only get hurt more if we played it out. He called it preemptive dumping. So maybe you have

this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you’re preempting the preemption.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“I’m just thinking out loud here.”

“Sorry about Derek.”

“Oh, I got over it, darling. It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.”

I laughed. “Well, thanks, Kaitlyn.”

“In the event you do hook up with him, I expect lascivious details.”

“But of course,” I said, and then Kaitlyn made a kissy sound into the phone and I said, “Bye,” and she hung up.

* * *

I realized while listening to Kaitlyn that I didn’t have a premonition of hurting him. I had a postmonition.

I pulled out my laptop and looked up Caroline Mathers. The physical similarities were striking: same steroidally round face, same nose,

same approximate overall body shape. But her eyes were dark brown (mine are green) and her complexion was much darker—Italian or

something.

Thousands of people—literally thousands—had left condolence messages for her. It was an endless scroll of people who missed her, so

many that it took me an hour of clicking to get past the I’m sorry you’re dead wall posts to the I’m praying for you wall posts. She’d died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to click through to some of her pictures. A ugustus was in a bunch of the earlier ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in arm at Memorial Hospital’s playground, with their backs facing the camera; kissing while Caroline held the camera out, so you could only see their noses and closed eyes.

The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy, uploaded postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped

and curvy, with long, straight deadblack hair falling over her face. My healthy self looked very little like her healthy self. But our cancer selves might’ve been sisters. No wonder he’d stared at me the first time he saw me.

I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine months after she died, by one of her friends. We all miss you so

much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.

A fter a while, Mom and Dad announced it was time for dinner. I shut down the computer and got up, but I couldn’t get the wall post out

of my mind, and for some reason it made me nervous and unhungry.

I kept thinking about my shoulder, which hurt, and also I still had the headache, but maybe only because I’d been thinking about a girl

who’d died of brain cancer. I kept telling myself to compartmentalize, to be here now at the circular table (arguably too large in diameter for three people and definitely too large for two) with this soggy broccoli and a black-bean burger that all the ketchup in the world could not adequately moisten. I told myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why something a stranger had written on the Internet to a different (and deceased) stranger was

bothering me so much and making me worry that there was something inside my brain—which really did hurt, although I knew from years of

experience that pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.

Because there had not been an earthquake in Papua New Guinea that day, my parents were all hyperfocused on me, and so I could not

hide this flash flood of anxiety.

“Is everything all right?” asked Mom as I ate.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I took a bite of burger. Swallowed. Tried to say something that a normal person whose brain was not drowning in panic

would say. “Is there broccoli in the burgers?”

“A little,” Dad said. “Pretty exciting that you might go to A msterdam.”

“Yeah,” I said. I tried not to think about the word wounded, which of course is a way of thinking about it.

“Hazel,” Mom said. “Where are you right now?”

“Just thinking, I guess,” I said.

“Twitterpated,” my dad said, smiling.

“I am not a bunny, and I am not in love with Gus Waters or anyone,” I answered, way too defensively. Wounded. Like Caroline Mathers

had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.

Dad asked me if I was working on anything for school. “I’ve got some very advanced A lgebra homework,” I told him. “So advanced that I

couldn’t possibly explain it to a layperson.”

“A nd how’s your friend Isaac?”

“Blind,” I said.

“You’re being very teenagery today,” Mom said. She seemed annoyed about it.

“Isn’t this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?”

“Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I are excited to see you become a young woman, making

friends, going on dates.”

“I’m not going on dates,” I said. “I don’t want to go on dates with anyone. It’s a terrible idea and a huge waste of time and—”

“Honey,” my mom said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the

casualties, okay?”

My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.

“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s

nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out more.

A nd I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.”

“Hazel,” Dad said, and then choked up. He cried a lot, my dad.

“I’m going to go to my room and read for a while, okay? I’m fine. I really am fine; I just want to go read for a while.”

I started out trying to read this novel I’d been assigned, but we lived in a tragically thin-walled home, so I could hear much of the

whispered conversation that ensued. My dad saying, “It kills me,” and my mom saying, “That’s exactly what she doesn’t need to hear,” and my dad saying, “I’m sorry but—” and my mom saying, “A re you not grateful?” A nd him saying, “God, of course I’m grateful.” I kept trying to get into this story but I couldn’t stop hearing them.

So I turned on my computer to listen to some music, and with A ugustus’s favorite band, The Hectic Glow, as my sound track, I went

back to Caroline Mathers’s tribute pages, reading about how heroic her fight was, and how much she was missed, and how she was in a better

place, and how she would live forever in their memories, and how everyone who knew her—everyone—was laid low by her leaving.

Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with A ugustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very

clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate—she seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which

made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was

Have Cancer.

A nyway, eventually I started reading Caroline Mathers’s little notes, which were mostly actually written by her parents, because I guess

her brain cancer was of the variety that makes you not you before it makes you not alive.

So it was all like, Caroline continues to have behavioral problems. She’s struggling a lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are frustrated about these things, too, of course, but we have more socially acceptable ways of dealing with our anger). Gus has

taken to calling Caroline HULK SMA SH, which resonates with the doctors. There’s nothing easy about this for any of us, but you take your

humor where you can get it. Hoping to go home on Thursday. We’ll let you know . . .

She didn’t go home on Thursday, needless to say.

So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him—inevitably. A nd that’s what I’d felt as he reached for me: I’d felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

I decided to text him. I wanted to avoid a whole conversation about it.

Hi, so okay, I don’t know if you’ll understand this but I can’t kiss you or anything. Not that you’d necessarily want to, but I can’t.

When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I’m going to put you through. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you.

A nyway, sorry.

He responded a few minutes later.

Okay.

I wrote back.

Okay.

He responded:

Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!

I just said:

Okay.

My phone buzzed moments later.

I was kidding, Hazel Grace. I understand. (But we both know that okay is a very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)

I was very tempted to respond Okay again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and that helped me text properly.

Sorry.

* * *

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the

shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, “You are not a grenade, not to us.

Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never

had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really,” my dad said. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you’re worth, we’d just toss you out on the

streets.”

“We’re not sentimental people,” Mom added, deadpan. “We’d leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.”

I laughed.

“You don’t have to go to Support Group,” Mom added. “You don’t have to do anything. Except go to school.” She handed me the bear.

“I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight,” I said. “Let me remind you that I am more than thirty-three half years old.”

“Keep him tonight,” she said.

“Mom,” I said.

“He’s lonely,” she said.

“Oh, my God, Mom,” I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled with him as I fell asleep.

I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Iscreamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they could do to dim the supernovae exploding

inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself—as I’ve told myself before—that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

Dad drove, talking on the phone with the hospital, while I lay in the back with my head in Mom’s lap. There was nothing to do:

Screaming made it worse. A ll stimuli made it worse, actually.

The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the

Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.

People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years,

and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn’t have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because

I was alone: They don’t let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children’s because it’s an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody’s kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.

A nurse came in seconds later. “Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Hazel. I’m A lison, your nurse,” she said.

“Hi, A lison My Nurse,” I said.

Whereupon I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I

reached up for them and tried to squeeze, but my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain

tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!) of

which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, hey look at

that, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad’s favorite amber ale. Mom told me I was going to go home, that I really was, that I would just have to get this drained every now and again and get back on the BiPA P, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs. But I’d had a total body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no tumor growth. No new tumors. My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain. Heart-working-too-hard

pain.

“Dr. Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic,” Dad said. I liked Dr. Maria, and she didn’t bullshit you, so that felt good to

hear.

“This is just a thing, Hazel,” my mom said. “It’s a thing we can live with.”

I nodded, and then A lison My Nurse kind of politely made them leave. She asked me if I wanted some ice chips, and I nodded, and then

she sat at the bed with me and spooned them into my mouth.

“So you’ve been gone a couple days,” A lison said. “Hmm, what’d you miss . . . A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different

celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.” I smiled. “You can’t go

disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.”

“More?” I asked, nodding toward the white Styrofoam cup in her hand.

“I shouldn’t,” she said, “but I’m a rebel.” She gave me another plastic spoonful of crushed ice. I mumbled a thank-you. Praise God for

good nurses. “Getting tired?” she asked. I nodded. “Sleep for a while,” she said. “I’ll try to run interference and give you a couple hours before somebody comes in to check vitals and the like.” I said Thanks again. You say thanks a lot in a hospital. I tried to settle into the bed. “You’re not gonna ask about your boyfriend?” she asked.

“Don’t have one,” I told her.

“Well, there’s a kid who has hardly left the waiting room since you got here,” she said.

“He hasn’t seen me like this, has he?”

“No. Family only.”

I nodded and sank into an aqueous sleep.

It would take me six days to get home, six undays of staring at acoustic ceiling tile and watching television and sleeping and pain and wishing for time to pass. I did not see A ugustus or anyone other than my parents. My hair looked like a bird’s nest; my shuffling gait like a dementia patient’s. I felt a little better each day, though: Each sleep ended to reveal a person who seemed a bit more like me. Sleep fights cancer, Regular Dr. Jim said for the thousandth time as he hovered over me one morning surrounded by a coterie of medical students.

“Then I am a cancer-fighting machine,” I told him.

“That you are, Hazel. Keep resting, and hopefully we’ll get you home soon.”

On Tuesday, they told me I’d go home on Wednesday. On Wednesday, two minimally supervised medical students removed my chest tube,

which felt like getting stabbed in reverse and generally didn’t go very well, so they decided I’d have to stay until Thursday. I was beginning to think that I was the subject of some existentialist experiment in permanently delayed gratification when Dr. Maria showed up on Friday

morning, sniffed around me for a minute, and told me I was good to go.

So Mom opened her oversize purse to reveal that she’d had my Go Home Clothes with her all along. A nurse came in and took out my IV.

I felt untethered even though I still had the oxygen tank to carry around with me. I went into the bathroom, took my first shower in a week, got dressed, and when I got out, I was so tired I had to lie down and get my breath. Mom asked, “Do you want to see A ugustus?”

“I guess,” I said after a minute. I stood up and shuffled over to one of the molded plastic chairs against the wall, tucking my tank beneath the chair. It wore me out.

Dad came back with A ugustus a few minutes later. His hair was messy, sweeping down over his forehead. He lit up with a real A ugustus

Waters Goofy Smile when he saw me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. He sat down in the blue faux-leather recliner next to my chair. He

leaned in toward me, seemingly incapable of stifling the smile.

Mom and Dad left us alone, which felt awkward. I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to

look at. “I missed you,” A ugustus said.

My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. “Thanks for not trying to see me when I looked like hell.”

“To be fair, you still look pretty bad.”

I laughed. “I missed you, too. I just don’t want you to see . . . all this. I just want, like . . . It doesn’t matter. You don’t always get what you want.”

“Is that so?” he asked. “I’d always thought the world was a wish-granting factory.”

“Turns out that is not the case,” I said. He was so beautiful. He reached for my hand but I shook my head. “No,” I said quietly. “If we’re

gonna hang out, it has to be, like, not that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I have good news and bad news on the wish-granting front.”

“Okay?” I said.

“The bad news is that we obviously can’t go to A msterdam until you’re better. The Genies will, however, work their famous magic when

you’re well enough.”

“That’s the good news?”

“No, the good news is that while you were sleeping, Peter Van Houten shared a bit more of his brilliant brain with us.”

He reached for my hand again, but this time to slip into it a heavily folded sheet of stationery on the letterhead of Peter Van Houten,

Novelist Emeritus.

I didn’t read it until I got home, situated in my own huge and empty bed with no chance of medical interruption. It took me forever to decode Van Houten’s sloped, scratchy script.

Dear Mr. Waters,

I am in receipt of your electronic mail dated the 14th of A pril and duly impressed by the Shakespearean complexity of your tragedy.

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he

had Cassius note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or

Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

While we’re on the topic of old Will’s insufficiencies, your writing about young Hazel reminds me of the Bard’s Fifty-fifth sonnet,

which of course begins, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine

more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.” (Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws

everybody.) It’s a fine poem but a deceitful one: We do indeed remember Shakespeare’s powerful rhyme, but what do we remember

about the person it commemorates? Nothing. We’re pretty sure he was male; everything else is guesswork. Shakespeare told us precious

little of the man whom he entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus. (Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the

present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries,

but does not resurrect. (Full disclosure: I am not the first to make this observation. cf, the MacLeish poem “Not Marble, Nor the Gilded

Monuments,” which contains the heroic line “I shall say you will die and none will remember you.”)

I digress, but here’s the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the

ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn’t impose your will upon another’s decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel’s logic persuasive,

but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I’m sitting, she’s not the lunatic.

Yours truly,

Peter Van Houten

It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a little, so I knew it was really real.

“Mom,” I said. I did not say it loudly, but I didn’t have to. She was always waiting. She peeked her head around the door.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?”