The Fault in Our Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “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—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. 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 Augustus 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!” Augustus almost shouted. “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?”
    “I guess?”
    “What’s your favorite?”
    “Um,” I said.
    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.
    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.
An Imperial Affliction
was
my
book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.
    Even so, I told Augustus. “My favorite book is probably
An Imperial Affliction
,” 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. Augustus spun around to a stack of books beneath his bedside table. He grabbed a paperback and a pen. As he scribbled an inscription onto the title page, he said, “All 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.