the fault in our stars - john green

[...]... toward the screen, the controller dancing in his thin-fingered hands “Get it get it get it,” Augustus said The waves of terrorists continued, and they mowed down every one, their shooting astonishingly precise, as it had to be, lest they fire into the school “Grenade! Grenade!” Augustus shouted as something arced across the screen, bounced in the doorway of the school, and then rolled against the door... needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished living room Augustus saw me reading “My parents call them Encouragements,” he explained “They’re everywhere.” His mom and dad called him Gus They were making enchiladas in the kitchen (a piece of stained glass by the sink read in bubbly letters Family Is Forever) His mom was putting chicken into tortillas, which his dad then rolled up and placed in a glass... when I awoke just after four in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head CHAPTER SEVEN I screamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself—as... Together, they ran down the alleyway, firing and hiding at the right moments, until they reached this one-story, single-room schoolhouse They crouched behind a wall across the street and picked off the enemy one by one “Why do they want to get into the school?” I asked “They want the kids as hostages,” Augustus answered His shoulders rounded over his controller, slamming buttons, his forearms taut, veins... 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... found out that they couldn’t For one thing, there was no through So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Kaitlyn or any of my other friends In truth, it always hurt It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation... to get this drained every now and again and get back on the BiPAP, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs But I’d had a total body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no tumor growth No new tumors My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain Heart-working-too-hard pain “Dr Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic,”... morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds you no doubt revile— there is a point to it all “‘I fear there is not, my friend, and that you would receive scant encouragement from further encounters with my writing But to answer your... The Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and bought a Diet Coke It was 3:21 I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I read There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Augustus Waters and the existentially fraught free throws Mom was also in the food court,... Group is coming downstairs Hazel, a gentle reminder: Isaac is in the midst of a psychotic episode.” Augustus and Isaac were sitting on the floor in gaming chairs shaped like lazy Ls, staring up at a gargantuan television The screen was split between Isaac’s point of view on the left, and Augustus’s on the right They were soldiers fighting in a bombed-out modern city I recognized the place from The Price . breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn’t lying,. 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. 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