The Stars Shine For You

I drove Hazel to my house, and let’s just say I’m not the best driver. Okay, that’s an overstatement. I drive horrifically. Everything just happens at a tremendous jolt as my Toyota SUV drives down the street. But hey, cut me some slack, I mean, I only HAVE one foot.

We went about a mile in jagged silence before I broke it.

“I failed the driving test three times.”

“You don’t say.” Hazel replied sarcastically.

I laughed, nodding. “Well, I can’t feel pressure in the old Prosty, and I can’t get the hang of driving left-footed. My doctors say most amputees can drive with no problem, but…yeah. Not me. Anyways, I go in for my fourth driving test, and it goes about like this is going.”

A traffic light turns red about a half mile in front of us and I slam on the brakes, tossing Hazel into the seat belt. “Sorry, I swear to God I am trying to be gentle. Right, so anyway, at the end of the test, I totally thought I’d failed again, but the instructor was like, ‘Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn’t technically unsafe.’”

“I’m not sure I agree,” Hazel said. “I suspect Cancer Perk.” A cancer perk being little things cancer kids get that regular kids don’t: basketballs signed by sport heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver’s licenses, etc.

“Yeah.” I say. The light turns green and I slam on the gas.

“You know they’ve got hand controls for people who can’t use their legs,” Hazel points out.

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe someday.”

“So, are you in school?” asks Hazel.

“Yeah,” I reply. “I’m at North Central. A year behind, though: I’m a sophomore. You?”

“No, my parents withdrew me three years ago.”

“Three years?” I ask, astonished.

“Basically,” Hazel began. “I was diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. It was, we were told, incurable. I had a surgery called radical neck dissection, which is about as pleasant as it sounds. Then radiation. Then they tried some chemo for my lung tumors. The tumors shrank, then grew. By then, I was fourteen. My lungs started to fill up with water. I was looking pretty dead- my hands and feet ballooned; my skin cracked; my lips were perpetually blue. They’ve got this drug that makes you not feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can’t breathe, and I had a lot of it flowing into me through a PICC line, and more than a dozen other drugs besides. But even so, there’s a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months. I finally ended up in the ICU with pneumonia. Everyone figured I was finished, but my Cancer Doctor Maria managed to get some of the fluid out of my lungs, and shortly thereafter the antibiotics they’d given me for the pneumonia kicked in. I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous in the Republic of Cancervania for Not Working. The drug was Phalanxifor, this molecule designed to attach itself to cancer cells and slow their growth. It didn’t work in about 70 percent of people. But it worked in me. The tumors shrank. And they stayed shrunk. Huzzah, Phalanxifor! In the past eighteen months, my mets have hardly grown, leaving me with lungs that suck at being lungs but could conceivably, struggle along indefinitely with the assistance of drizzled oxygen and daily Phalanxifor.”

Hazel told her cancer story to Augustus, painting the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the miracle.

“Wow.” I breathed.

After a short silence, I spoke up.

“So now you gotta go back to school.”

“I actually can’t,” Hazel explained, “Because I already got my GED. So I’m taking classes at MCC,”

“A college girl,” I said, nodding. “That explains the aura of sophistication.” I smirked at Hazel, and she shoved my upper arm playfully.

I made a wheels-screeching turn into a subdivision with eight-foot-high stucco walls. My house was the first one on the left. A two-story colonial. We jerked to a stop in my driveway.

Hazel followed me inside. A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in cursive with the words Home Is Where The Heart Is. Good Friends Are Hard To Find and I’m Impossible to Forget read an illustration above the coatrack and True Love Is Born from Hard Times promised a needlepointed pillow in our antique-furnished living room. I saw Hazel reading.

“My parents call them Encouragements,” I explained. “They’re everywhere.”

“Gus!” My parents called me from the kitchen. We walk over to see them making enchiladas in the kitchen (a piece of stained glass by the sink read in bubbly letters Family Is Forever). My mom was putting chicken into tortillas, which my dad then rolled up and placed in a glass pan. They didn’t seem too surprised by Hazel’s arrival.

“This is Hazel Grace,” I said, by way of introduction.

“Just Hazel,” she said.

“Hows it going, Hazel?” my dad asked. He was tall- almost as tall as me- and skinny in a way that parentally aged people usually aren’t.

“Okay,” said Hazel.

“How was Isaac’s Support Group?”

“It was incredible,” I said sarcastically.

“You’re such a Debbie Downer,” my mum said. “Hazel do you enjoy it?”

Hazel paused a second. “Most of the people are really nice,” she finally said.

“That’s exactly what we found with families at Memorial when we were in the thick of it with Gus’s treatment,” my dad said. “Everybody was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life.”

“Quick, give me a throw pillow and some thread because that needs to be an Encouragement,” I said, and my dad looked a little annoyed, but then I wrapped my arm around his neck and said, “I’m just kidding, Dad. I like the freaking Encouragements. I really do. I just can’t admit it because I’m a teenager.” My dad rolled his eyes.

“You’re joining us for dinner, I hope?” asked my mum, who was small and brunette, and vaguely mousy.

“I guess?” Hazel said. “I have to be home by ten. Also I don’t um, eat meat?”

“No problem. We’ll vegetarianize some,” mum said.

“Animals are just too cute?” I asked.

“I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for,” Hazel said.

I opened my mouth to respond but then stopped myself.

My mum filled the silence. “Well, I think that’s wonderful.”

We talked for a bit about how the enchiladas were Famous Waters Enchiladas and Not to Be Missed and about how my curfew was also ten, and how they were inherently distrustful of anyone who gave their kids curfews other than ten, and if Hazel was in school – “she’s a college student,” I interjected- and how the weather was truly and absolutely extraordinary for March, and how in spring all things are new.

“Hazel and I are going to watch V for Vendetta so she can see her filmic doppelganger, mid two-thousands Natalia Portman.” I said.

“The living room TV is yours for the watching,” my dad said happily.

“I think we’re actually gonna watch it in the basement.”

My dad laughed. “Good try. Living room.”

“But I want to show Hazel Grace the basement,” I said.

“Just Hazel,” she said.

“So show Just Hazel the basement,” said my dad. “And then come upstairs and watch your movie in the living room.”

I puffed out my cheeks, balanced on my leg, and twisted my hips, throwing the prosthetic forward. “Fine,” I mumbled.

Hazel followed me down carpeted stairs to a huge basement bedroom. A shelf reached all the way around the room, and it was stuffed solid with basketball memorabilia: dozens of trophies with gold plastic men mid-jump shot or dribbling or reaching for a layup toward an unseen basket. There were also lots of signed balls and sneakers.

“I used to play basketball.” I explained.

“You must’ve been pretty good.”

“I wasn’t bad, but all the shoes and balls are Cancer Perks.” I walked toward the TV, where a huge pile of DVD’s and video games were arranged into a vague pyramid shape. I bent at the waist and snatched up V for Vendetta. “I was, like, the prototypical white Hoosier kid,” I said. “I was all about resurrecting the lost art of the midrange jumper, but then one day I was shooting free throws- just standing at the foul line at the North Central gym shooting from a rack of balls. All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

“I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and voer again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise. Anyway, for the longest time, I just kept sinking free throws. I hit eighty in a row, my all time best, but as I kept going, I felt more and more like a two-year-old. And then for some reason I started to think about hurdlers. Are you okay?”

Hazel had taken a seat on the corner of my unmade bed.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just listening. Hurdlers?”

“Yeah hurdlers. I don’t know why. I started thinking about them running their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever though, you now, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

“This was before your diagnosis?” she asked.

“Right, well, there was that, too.” I smiled with half of my mouth. “The day of the existentially fraught free throws was coincidentally also my last day of dual leggedness. I had a weekend between when they scheduled the amputation and when it happened. My own little glimpse of what Isaac is going through.”

Hazel nodded. “Do you have siblings?” I asked.

“Huh?” I answered, 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?”

Hazel shook her head no.

I sat down next to Hazel, at a safe distance.

“So,” I began. “What’s your story?”