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My dad immediately let go and rushed to connect me to the oxygen. I could see the guilt in his eyes, but he was still angry. “Hazel, apologize to your mother.”
“Fine, I’m sorry, just please let me do this.”
They didn’t say anything. Mom just sat there with her arms folded, not even looking at me. After a while, I got up and went to my room to write about Augustus.
Both Mom and Dad tried a few times to knock on the door or whatever, but I just told them I was doing something important. It took me forever to figure out what I wanted to say, and even then I wasn’t very happy with it. Before I’d technically finished, I noticed it was 7:40, which meant that I would be late even if I didn’t change, so in the end I wore baby blue cotton pajama pants, flip-flops, and Gus’s Butler shirt.
I walked out of the room and tried to go right past them, but my dad said, “You can’t leave the house without permission.”
“Oh, my God, Dad. He wanted me to write him a eulogy, okay? I’ll be home every. Freaking. Night. Starting any day now, okay?” That finally shut them up.
It took the entire drive to calm down about my parents. I pulled up around the back of the church and parked in the semicircular driveway behind Augustus’s car. The back door to the church was held open by a fist-size rock. Inside, I contemplated taking the stairs but decided to wait for the ancient creaking elevator.
When the elevator doors unscrolled, I was in the Support Group room, the chairs arranged in the same circle. But now I saw only Gus in a wheelchair, ghoulishly thin. He was facing me from the center of the circle. He’d been waiting for the elevator doors to open.
“Hazel Grace,” he said, “you look ravishing.”
“I know, right?”
I heard a shuffling in a dark corner of the room. Isaac stood behind a little wooden lectern, clinging to it. “You want to sit?” I asked him.
“No, I’m about to eulogize. You’re late.”
“You’re . . . I’m . . . what?”
Gus gestured for me to sit. I pulled a chair into the center of the circle with him as he spun the chair to face Isaac. “I want to attend my funeral,” Gus said. “By the way, will you speak at my funeral?”
“Um, of course, yeah,” I said, letting my head fall onto his shoulder. I reached across his back and hugged both him and the wheelchair. He winced. I let go.
“Awesome,” he said. “I’m hopeful I’ll get to attend as a ghost, but just to make sure, I thought I’d—well, not to put you on the spot, but I just this afternoon thought I could arrange a prefuneral, and I figured since I’m in reasonably good spirits, there’s no time like the present.”
“How did you even get in here?” I asked him.
“Would you believe they leave the door open all night?” Gus asked.
“Um, no,” I said.
“As well you shouldn’t.” Gus smiled. “Anyway, I know it’s a bit self-aggrandizing.”
“Hey, you’re stealing my eulogy,” Isaac said. “My first bit is about how you were a self-aggrandizing bastard.”
I laughed.
“Okay, okay,” Gus said. “At your leisure.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “Augustus Waters was a self-aggrandizing bastard. But we forgive him. We forgive him not because he had a heart as figuratively good as his literal one sucked, or because he knew more about how to hold a cigarette than any nonsmoker in history, or because he got eighteen years when he should have gotten more.”
“Seventeen,” Gus corrected.
“I’m assuming you’ve got some time, you interrupting bastard.
“I’m telling you,” Isaac continued, “Augustus Waters talked so much that he’d interrupt you at his own funeral. And he was pretentious: Sweet Jesus Christ, that kid never took a piss without pondering the abundant metaphorical resonances of human waste production. And he was vain: I do not believe I have ever met a more physically attractive person who was more acutely aware of his own physical attractiveness.
“But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him.”
I was kind of crying by then.
“And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls’ shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, Godspeed.”
