CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I woke up to my phone singing a song by The Hectic Glow. Gus’s favorite. That meant he was caling—or someone was caling from his phone. I glanced

at the alarm clock: 2:35 A.M. He’s gone, I thought as everything inside of me col apsed into a singularity.

I could barely creak out a “Hello?”

I waited for the sound of a parent’s annihilated voice.

“Hazel Grace,” Augustus said weakly.

“Oh, thank God it’s you. Hi. Hi, I love you.”

“Hazel Grace, I’m at the gas station. Something’s wrong. You gotta help me.”

“What? Where are you?”

“The Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch. I did something wrong with the G-tube and I can’t figure it out and—”

“I’m cal ing nine-one-one,” I said.

“No no no no no, they’l take me to a hospital. Hazel, listen to me. Do not cal nine-one-one or my parents I wil never forgive you don’t please just

come please just come and fix my goddamned G-tube. I’m just, God, this is the stupidest thing. I don’t want my parents to know I’m gone. Please. I have

the medicine with me; I just can’t get it in. Please.” He was crying. I’d never heard him sob like this except from outside his house before Amsterdam.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m leaving now.”

I took the BiPAP off and connected myself to an oxygen tank, lifted the tank into my cart, and put on sneakers to go with my pink cotton pajama pants

and a Butler basketbal T-shirt, which had original y been Gus’s. I grabbed the keys from the kitchen drawer where Mom kept them and wrote a note in

case they woke up while I was gone.

Went to check on Gus. It’s important. Sorry.

Love, H

As I drove the couple miles to the gas station, I woke up enough to wonder why Gus had left the house in the middle of the night. Maybe he’d been

hal ucinating, or his martyrdom fantasies had gotten the better of him.

I sped up Ditch Road past flashing yel ow lights, going too fast partly to reach him and partly in the hopes a cop would pul me over and give me an

excuse to tel someone that my dying boyfriend was stuck outside of a gas station with a malfunctioning G-tube. But no cop showed up to make my

decision for me.

There were only two cars in the lot. I pul ed up next to his. I opened the door. The interior lights came on. Augustus sat in the driver’s seat, covered in his own vomit, his hands pressed to his bel y where the G-tube went in. “Hi,” he mumbled.

“Oh, God, Augustus, we have to get you to a hospital.”

“Please just look at it.” I gagged from the smel but bent forward to inspect the place above his bel y button where they’d surgical y instal ed the tube.

The skin of his abdomen was warm and bright red.

“Gus, I think something’s infected. I can’t fix this. Why are you here? Why aren’t you at home?” He puked, without even the energy to turn his mouth

away from his lap. “Oh, sweetie,” I said.

“I wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes,” he mumbled. “I lost my pack. Or they took it away from me. I don’t know. They said they’d get me another one,

but I wanted... to do it myself. Do one little thing myself.”

He was staring straight ahead. Quietly, I pul ed out my phone and glanced down to dial 911.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. Nine-one-one, what is your emergency? “Hi, I’m at the Speedway at Eighty-sixth and Ditch, and I need an ambulance. The

great love of my life has a malfunctioning G-tube.”

He looked up at me. It was horrible. I could hardly look at him. The Augustus Waters of the crooked smiles and unsmoked cigarettes was gone, replaced

by this desperate humiliated creature sitting there beneath me.

“This is it. I can’t even not smoke anymore.”

“Gus, I love you.”

“Where is my chance to be somebody’s Peter Van Houten?” He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back,

looking up. “I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.”

According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor til the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his

spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.

But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive,

but not alive enough.

I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which stil lived. “I’m sorry. I wish it was

like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.”

“Me too,” he said.

“But it isn’t,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

“There are no bad guys.”

“Yeah.”

“Even cancer isn’t a bad guy real y: Cancer just wants to be alive.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re okay,” I told him. I could hear the sirens.

“Okay,” he said. He was losing consciousness.

“Gus, you have to promise not to try this again. I’l get you cigarettes, okay?” He looked at me. His eyes swam in their sockets. “You have to promise.”

He nodded a little and then his eyes closed, his head swiveling on his neck.

“Gus,” I said. “Stay with me.”

“Read me something,” he said as the goddamned ambulance roared right past us. So while I waited for them to turn around and find us, I recited the

only poem I could bring to mind, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Wil iam Carlos Wil iams.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Wil iams was a doctor. It seemed to me like a doctor’s poem. The poem was over, but the ambulance was stil driving away from us, so I kept writing

it.

* * *

And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube

erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon this observer of the universe.

Half conscious, he glanced over at me and mumbled, “And you say you don’t write poetry.”

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