With david levithan dutton books

Caroli
ne 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 
ta
ken to calling Caroline HULK SMASH, 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, need
less to say. 
So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him
—
inevitably. 
And 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 t
o put you through. Maybe 
that doesn’t make sense to you.

---

Anyway, 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 gren
ade, 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 o
f 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.