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“Nah, they’d’ve gotten here.”
“Then maybe they weren’t written for you,” she said. “Maybe . . . I mean, not to depress you or anything, but maybe he wrote them for someone else and mailed them—”
“VAN HOUTEN!” I shouted.
“Are you okay? Was that a cough?”
“Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go.”
I hung up, rolled over, reached for my laptop, turned it on, and emailed lidewij.vliegenthart.
Lidewij,
I believe Augustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebook to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren’t written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can you help?
Your friend,
Hazel Grace Lancaster
She responded late that afternoon.
Dear Hazel,
I did not know that Augustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and so sad.
I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing in the morning to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time, usually.
Your friend,
Lidewij Vliegenthart
p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically restrain Peter.
I wondered why he’d written Van Houten in those last days instead of me, telling Van Houten that he’d be redeemed if only he gave me my sequel. Maybe the notebook pages had just repeated his request to Van Houten. It made sense, Gus leveraging his terminality to make my dream come true: The sequel was a tiny thing to die for, but it was the biggest thing left at his disposal.
I refreshed my email continually that night, slept for a few hours, and then commenced to refreshing around five in the morning. But nothing arrived. I tried to watch TV to distract myself, but my thoughts kept drifting back to Amsterdam, imagining Lidewij Vliegenthart and her boyfriend bicycling around town on this crazy mission to find a dead kid’s last correspondence. How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn.
I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
That is probably true even if you live to be ninety—although I’m jealous of the people who get to find out for sure. Then again, I’d already lived twice as long as Van Houten’s daughter. What he wouldn’t have given to have a kid die at sixteen.
Suddenly Mom was standing between the TV and me, her hands folded behind her back. “Hazel,” she said. Her voice was so serious I thought something might be wrong.
“Yes?”
“Do you know what today is?”
“It’s not my birthday, is it?”
She laughed. “Not just yet. It’s July fourteenth, Hazel.”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No . . .”
“Is it Harry Houdini’s birthday?”
“No . . .”
