Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed,

presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same

book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to

thinking about death.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list

depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of

cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost

everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see

my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and

totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I

should attend a weekly Support Group.

This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumordriven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.

The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the

basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle

right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of

Jesus would have been.

I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person over

eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how

we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ's very sacred heart and

whatever.

So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled

in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust,

and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life

story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't

die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in

America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living

by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that

will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to

give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his

nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!

Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we're doing today.

I'm Hazel, I'd say when they'd get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an

impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.

Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to share. And

then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and

winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Patrick, he let us talk about dying, too.But most of them weren't dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had.

(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody

wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize

that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of

living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around

and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)

The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long-faced,

skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.

And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer.

One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses

that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his

whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I

could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had

placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.

Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone

discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at

me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.

So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming

about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Augustus

Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with

my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season's America's

Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.

Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."

Mom: "One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities."

Me: "Please just let me watch America's Next Top Model. It's an activity."

Mom: "Television is a passivity."

Me: "Ugh, Mom, please."

Mom: "Hazel, you're a teenager. You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make

friends, get out of the house, and live your life."

Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a

fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot."

Mom: "You don't take pot, for starters."

Me: "See, that's the kind of thing I'd know if you got me a fake ID."

Mom: "You're going to Support Group."

Me: "UGGGGGGGGGGGGG."

Mom: "Hazel, you deserve a life."

That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the

definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5

episodes of ANTM I'd be missing.

I went to Support Group for the same reason that I'd once allowed nurses with a mere

eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I

wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting

it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle

with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.

"Do you want me to carry it in for you?"

"No, it's fine," I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I

had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me. It delivered two liters of oxygen to

me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck,

wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary

because my lungs sucked at being lungs.

"I love you," she said as I got out.

"You too, Mom. See you at six."

"Make friends!" she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.

I didn't want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of

activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some

lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.

A boy was staring at me.

I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the

molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and

short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge

of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.

I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old

jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt

advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut,

and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat

chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned

person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And

yet—I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.

It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.

I walked into the circle and sat down next to Isaac, two seats away from the boy. I

glanced again. He was still watching me.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is,

at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Patrick started us out with the

serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the

courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The guy was

still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a

monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Patrick

acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring

contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When

he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.

He shrugged. Patrick continued and then finally it was time for the introductions.

"Isaac, perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time."

"Yeah," Isaac said. "I'm Isaac. I'm seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get

surgery in a couple weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I

know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My

girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Augustus." He nodded toward the boy, who now

had a name. "So, yeah," Isaac continued. He was looking at his hands, which he'd folded

into each other like the top of a tepee. "There's nothing you can do about it."

"We're here for you, Isaac," Patrick said. "Let Isaac hear it, guys." And then we all,

in a monotone, said, "We're here for you, Isaac."

Michael was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He'd always had leukemia. He

was okay. (Or so he said. He'd taken the elevator.)

Lida was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy's eye. She was a

regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known

existed. She said—as she had every other time I'd attended Support Group—that she felt

strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.

There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came.

His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. "My name is Augustus Waters," he said. "I'm

seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here

today at Isaac's request."

"And how are you feeling?" asked Patrick.

"Oh, I'm grand." Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller

coaster that only goes up, my friend."

When it was my turn, I said, "My name is Hazel. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in

my lungs. I'm okay."

The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be

lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that

friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Augustus Waters nor

I spoke again until Patrick said, "Augustus, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the

group."

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial

blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"Too soon," Isaac said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive?" Augustus asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's

feelings."

Isaac was laughing, but Patrick raised a chastening finger and said, "Augustus,

please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did," Augustus answered.

Patrick seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"

I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends.

My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person—

not the hand-raising type.

And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Patrick, his

delight evident, immediately said, "Hazel!" I was, I'm sure he assumed, opening up.

Becoming Part Of The Group.

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see

through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are

dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to

remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no

one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and

built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"—I gestured

encompassingly—"will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe

it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not

survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there

will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you

to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van Houten, the

reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a

Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a)

understand what it's like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread

all the way across Augustus's face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be

sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. "Goddamn," Augustus

said quietly. "Aren't you something else."

Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to

hold hands, and Patrick led us in a prayer. "Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in

Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we

know ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for

Isaac's eyes, for Michael's and Jamie's blood, for Augustus's bones, for Hazel's lungs, for

James's throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your

peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we

knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and

Abigail and Angelina and Taylor and Gabriel and . . ."

It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Patrick droned

on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my

eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name

would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped

listening.

When Patrick was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING OUR

BEST LIFE TODAY—and it was over. Augustus Waters pushed himself out of his chair

and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over me, but he

kept his distance so I wouldn't have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. "What's your

name?" he asked.

"Hazel."

"No, your full name."

"Um, Hazel Grace Lancaster." He was just about to say something else when Isaac

walked up. "Hold on," Augustus said, raising a finger, and turned to Isaac. "That was

actually worse than you made it out to be."

"I told you it was bleak."

"Why do you bother with it?"

"I don't know. It kind of helps?"

Augustus leaned in so he thought I couldn't hear. "She's a regular?" I couldn't hear

Isaac's comment, but Augustus responded, "I'll say." He clasped Isaac by both shoulders

and then took a half step away from him. "Tell Hazel about clinic."

Isaac leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. "Okay,

so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I'd rather be deaf than

blind. And he said, 'It doesn't work that way,' and I was, like, 'Yeah, I realize it doesn't

work that way; I'm just saying I'd rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I

realize I don't have,' and he said, 'Well, the good news is that you won't be deaf,' and I

was like, 'Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel

so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.'"

"He sounds like a winner," I said. "I'm gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so I

can make this guy's acquaintance."

"Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Monica's waiting for me. I gotta look at

her a lot while I can."

"Counterinsurgence tomorrow?" Augustus asked.

"Definitely." Isaac turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Augustus Waters turned to me. "Literally," he said.

"Literally?" I asked.We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said. "I thought we were in a church

basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus."

"Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children

with cancer in your heart."

"I would tell Him myself," Augustus said, "but unfortunately I am literally stuck

inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." I laughed. He shook his head, just

looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Augustus half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people,

and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief

awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as

you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."

I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then

said, "I'm not beau—"

"You're like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."

"Never seen it," I said.

"Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can't help but

fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It's your autobiography, so far as I can tell."

His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that

guys could turn me on—not, like, in real life.

A younger girl walked past us. "How's it going, Alisa?" he asked. She smiled and

mumbled, "Hi, Augustus." "Memorial people," he explained. Memorial was the big

research hospital. "Where do you go?"

"Children's," I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded. The

conversation seemed over. "Well," I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out

of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. He

limped beside me. "So, see you next time, maybe?" I asked.

"You should see it," he said. "V for Vendetta, I mean."

"Okay," I said. "I'll look it up."

"No. With me. At my house," he said. "Now."

I stopped walking. "I hardly know you, Augustus Waters. You could be an ax

murderer."

He nodded. "True enough, Hazel Grace." He walked past me, his shoulders filling

out his green knit polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly to the right as

he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg.

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the

rest.

I followed him upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a

field of expertise for my lungs.

And then we were out of Jesus's heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the

cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.

Mom wasn't there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost always waiting

for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy brunette girl had Isaac pinned against

the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively. They were close enough to

me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him

saying, "Always," and her saying, "Always," in return.

Suddenly standing next to me, Augustus half whispered, "They're big believers in

PDA."

"What's with the 'always'?" The slurping sounds intensified.

"Always is their thing. They'll always love each other and whatever. I would

conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in

the last year."

A couple more cars drove up, taking Michael and Alisa away. It was just Augustus

and me now, watching Isaac and Monica, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning

against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it,

his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn't seem

like it would, but I decided to forgive Isaac on the grounds that he was going blind. The

senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.

"Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital," I said quietly. "The last time you'll

ever drive a car."

Without looking over at me, Augustus said, "You're killing my vibe here, Hazel

Grace. I'm trying to observe young love in its many-splendored awkwardness."

"I think he's hurting her boob," I said.

"Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast

exam." Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack

of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the

whole thing."

"Which whole thing?" he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the

unsmiling corner of his mouth.

"The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly

in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and

compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there

is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING

CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET

MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe?

SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."

"A hamartia?" he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a

hell of a jawline, unfortunately.

"A fatal flaw," I explained, turning away from him. I stepped toward the curb,

leaving Augustus Waters behind me, and then I heard a car start down the street. It was

Mom. She'd been waiting for me to, like, make friends or whatever.

I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't

even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to

smack Augustus Waters and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn't suck at being

lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen

tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand

grab mine.

I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

"They don't kill you unless you light them," he said as Mom arrived at the curb.

"And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your

teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."

"It's a metaphor," I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

"It's a metaphor," he said.

"You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances . . ." I said.

"Oh, yes." He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. "I'm a big believer in metaphor,

Hazel Grace."

I turned to the car. Tapped the window. It rolled down. "I'm going to a movie with

Augustus Waters," I said. "Please record the next several episodes of the ANTM marathon

fo me".