The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
One  morning,  a  month  after  returning  home  from  Amsterdam,  I  drove  over  to  his  house.  His
parents told me he was still sleeping
downstairs, so I knocked loudly on the basement door before entering, then asked, “Gus?”
I  found  him  mumbling  in  a  language  of  his  own  creation.  He’d  pissed  the  bed.  It  was  awful.  I
couldn’t even look, really. I just shouted for his parents and they came down, and I went upstairs while
they cleaned him up.
When I came back down, he was slowly waking up out of the narcotics to the excruciating day. I
arranged his pillows so we could play
Counterinsurgence on the bare sheetless mattress, but he was so tired and out of it that he sucked
almost  as  bad  as  I  did,  and  we  couldn’t  go  five  minutes  without  both  getting  dead.  Not  fancy  heroic
deaths either, just careless ones.
I didn’t really say anything to him. I almost wanted him to forget I was there, I guess, and I was
hoping he didn’t remember that I’d
found the boy I love deranged in a wide pool of his own piss. I kept kind of hoping that he’d look
over at me and say, “Oh, Hazel Grace.
How’d you get here?”
But  unfortunately,  he  remembered.  “With  each  passing  minute,  I’m  developing  a  deeper
appreciation of the word mortified,” he said
finally.

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“I’ve pissed the bed, Gus, believe me. It’s no big deal.”
“You used,” he said, and then took a sharp breath, “to call me A ugustus.”
“You know,” he said after a while, “it’s kids’ stuff, but I always thought my obituary would be in
all  the  newspapers,  that  I’d  have  a  story  worth  telling.  I  always  had  this  secret  suspicion  that  I  was
special.”
“You are,” I said.
“You know what I mean, though,” he said.
I  did  know  what  he  meant.  I  just  didn’t  agree.  “I  don’t  care  if  the  New  York  Times  writes  an
obituary for me. I just want you to write
one,” I told him. “You say you’re not special because the world doesn’t know about you, but that’s
an insult to me. I know about you.”
“I don’t think I’m gonna make it to write your obituary,” he said, instead of apologizing.
I was so frustrated with him. “I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never
be enough for you. But this is all you
get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I’m sorry if it sucks. But you’re
not going to be the first man on Mars, and you’re not going to be an NBA star, and you’re not going to
hunt Nazis. I mean, look at yourself, Gus.” He didn’t respond. “I don’t mean—” I started.
“Oh, you meant it,” he interrupted. I started to apologize and he said, “No, I’m sorry. You’re right.
Let’s just play.”
So we just played.