The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Also I don’t, um, eat meat?”

“Animals are just too cute?”

“I want to minimize the number of deaths I am r...

they didn’t even once ask me about the oxygen or my diagnosis, which was weird and wonderful,

“I used to play basketball,”

“You must’ve been pretty good.”

“I wasn’t bad, but all the shoes and balls ar...

“I was all about resurrecting the lost art of the midrange jumper, but then one day I was shooting free throws—just standing at the foul line at the North Central gym shooting from a rack of balls. All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

“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. Anyway, 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.

I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

I started thinking about them running their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

I liked Augustus 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. And 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 Augustus? Me, I was always just Hazel, univalent Hazel.

I have nephews, from my half sisters. But they’re older. They’re like—DAD, HOW OLD ARE JULIE AND MARTHA?” “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.

“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.”

“Hazel Grace, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it.

This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don’t you?”

My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, 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. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

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 love it when you talk medi...

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.

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 About 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,”

“A lovely thought.”

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 Augustus had, too.

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.

“May I see you again?”

“Sure.” “Tomorrow?”

“Patience, grass...

“You don’t want to seem overeager.” “Right, that’s why...

“I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night a...

I rolled m...

“I’m ser...

“You don’t even k...

“How about I call you when I f...

“But you don’t even have my ph...

“I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.” He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you sa...

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.

“Did that boy give it to you?”

“By it, do you mean...

“You are too...

“The book, Hazel. I mean ...

“I can tell you like him,” she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation required some ...

COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!,

“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?”

when it was socially acceptable to name one’s friends after their hue.

“I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what’s cool,”

There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Augustus Waters and the existentially fraught free throws.