All of the Stars

Chapter Two

I WAS A HORRENDOUS DRIVER. And I could tell Hazel Grace had been trying to be polite by keeping her nearly inaudible winces to herself, clutching her tank with white knuckles. "I failed the driving test three times," I told her as I felt pure humiliation surface in the pit of my stomach.

        If osteosarcoma has been a better guy and hit me after I had had experience driving with two legs rather than only one fully-functioning limb and pieces of metal put together, I would have known the difference between normal driving and driving with a prosthetic leg. I would have been tremendously grateful, but cancer's an angry bitch and I couldn't do anything about it.

        "You don't say," she wheezed.

        I laughed with a nod. "Well, I can't feel pressure in 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." I glanced at her direction. "Not me. Anyway, I go in for my fourth driving test, and it goes about like this is going." The stoplight had turned red half a mile away, but I jammed on the brakes, sending Hazel Grace plummeting into the seat belt I had carefully instructed her to keep on at all times. "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. I suspect Cancer Perk." She held onto the dashboard, her face concentrated on the road as the light turned green.

        I slammed the gas, agreeing as I went. "You know they've got hand controls for people who can't use their legs," she said.

        "Yeah. Maybe someday." There was a slightly uncomfortable silence after I sighed, and I knew she could feel it because the next question was expected in situations like those.

        "So, are you in school?"

        "Yeah, I'm at North Central. A year behind, though: I'm a sophomore. You?" I snuck a glance at her as I jerked a swerve to the right.

         "No, my parents withdrew me three years ago."

           "Three years?" Her cheeks were filled with a tinge of embarrassment. Having been withdrawn from school for three years meant only serious things, and that was when she explained.

        She shut her eyes and exhaled a heavy breath. "I was diagnosed with Stage IV when I was thirteen. We were told it was incurable. And I went through a surgery called radical neck dissection, which sucks as much as it sounds, believe me. Then I had radiation, tried some chemo for my lung tumors. They shrank for some time, and then they grew. I was only fourteen, by then."

         Having the second stage of your life taken away from you and replaced with more-than-the-regular hospital visits and going through so much pain, shouldn't be. I could imagine thirteen-year-old Hazel Grace pulled out of school—completely disconnected from the world she socialized and went out with the other girls—and sedated with anesthesia in preparation for surgeries. I agree it being quite difficult for a teenager to open up to his or her peers, much less a teenage cancer patient.

        But then again, I was sat on the driver's seat uncontrollably tossing the girl who'd nearly framed me as an ax-murderer while listening to her tell me about probably the most challenging part of her life.

        "My lungs started to fill up with water. My hands and feet ballooned; my skin cracked; my lips were perpetually blue—I was a corpse, Augustus Waters," she smiled, her eyes fixed on the road. Hazel Grace laughed nervously; I was silent. "They've got this drug that makes you less terrified about the fact you can't breathe, and I had a lot of it flowing into me through a PICC line, along with a dozen other drugs. There's an unpleasantness to drowning for a long period of time. And then I ended up in the ICU with pneumonia."