Okay? Okay.

 Two teenage cancer kids. 

One tragic love story.

Hazel Grace Lancaster meets Augustus 'Gus' Waters at cancer support group in a church basement, talks about how Gus shouldn't be afraid of oblivion, how his pack of cigarettes' is a metaphor, and watches a movie.

“May I see you again?” he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“Patience, grasshopper,” I counseled. “You don’t want to seem overeager.
“Right, that’s why I said tomorrow,” he said. “I want to see you again tonight. But I’m willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.” I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious,” he said.
“You don’t even know me,” I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. “How about I call you when I finish this?”
“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.
“I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book.”
He broke out into that goofy smile. “And you say we don’t know each other.”
~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, Pages 36, 37

17-year-old Hazel has stage 4 terminal thyroid cancer, is under treatment, has an oxygen tank for a best friend and reams of meeting Peter Van Houten, the author of her favourite novel. 18-year-old Gus is a recovered osteosarcoma patient, who now uses a prosthetic leg to move around. 

Around a whirl of An Imperial Affliction, Gus's best friend Isaac, Hazel's worrying parents and a burning desire to go to Amsterdam, the two fall in love. After Hazel falls sick again and has to be in the ICU for a while, Gus uses his Make-A-Wish to bring Hazel to Amsterdam to meet Van Houten, who turns out to be a old non-descript man who smells of smoke and spouts philosophical nonsense in answer to Hazel's questions about the ending of his novel. Disappointed, the two leave the old man, ending on a river bank where Gus tells Hazel about a PET scan he did when Hazel was sick, which revealed that his cancer has come back and has lit up his body 'like a christmas tree' . 

Once home, Gus starts treatment, only for it to be in vain when his body refuses to accept the medication. He stops chemo and tries to make the best out of the remaining days he has with Hazel, having a pre-funeral where he makes Hazel read out his eulogy. Hazel gets a call from Gus late at night the next day, asking her to come to the gas station. Hazel finds Gus in his car, his G-tube infected and delirious, and calls the ambulance despite his protests.

“According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
But this is the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.
I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. ‘I’m sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘But it isn’t,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘There are no bad guys.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Even cancer isn’t a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.”
~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, Pages 245-46

Augustus Waters dies eight days later. 

At his funeral, Hazel is mildly surprised to find Van Houten in the crowd. He meets Hazel and tells her about how Gus reached out to him, how he wrote a letter to him about Hazel before he died which he then gives to Hazel to keep. He talked to Hazel about how his novel was based on his 8-year-old daughter who passed from leukemia many years ago. 

“My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great sat-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I’d hoped that he’d be eulogizing me, because there’s no one I’d rather have…” I started crying. “Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay.”
I took a few deep breaths and went back to the page. “I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a Bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, Page 259-60

Back home, Hazel settles down under the stars in her backyard to read the letter.

"...you don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

"I do, Augustus, I do"

***

Unlike many teenage romances, John Green's The Fault In Our Stars is a raw, realistic story about cancer. It lacks a happy ending, which portrays the sad reality of cancer in a way that captures the reader's heart and wrenches it apart through subtle humor, smiles, tears and delicate undertones of acceptance. Cancer is heartbreaking. There's no way of sugarcoating what these kids go through, and John Green has done an exceptional job of capturing all these emotions within the white-lined pages of this classic. Through Hazel Grace Lancaster, we understand that we get to choose how we tell sad stories sometimes, and that one might say a Peter Gabriel song will take the sadness away, it won't. 

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