The Fault in Our Pants: A Parody of The Fault in Our Stars

by Steve Lookner

  I laughed. “What about the movie?”

  “Sorry – I was having an ADD moment,” he said. “So now we’ve talked about me. But what’s your story?”

  “I told you my story,” I said. “At fourteen my lungs–”

  “Not your cancer story. Your story. Like, what are your hobbies?”

  “Sitting on the couch and watching TV.”

  “I don’t know if those count as ‘hobbies,’” he said. “What’s something else you like to do?”

  “Um. Reading?”

  Augustus winced. But then he brightened. “Well they say that if both people in a couple like all the same stuff, it’s kinda boring, right?”

  I had no idea about anything pertaining to couples, but I said, “Right.”

  “Favorite book?” he asked.

  My favorite book, hands down, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like telling people about it. Some books are so good, so special to you, that not only do you not want to tell anyone about them, but you want to destroy all other copies of them. I have personally been responsible for the destruction of over 3,000 copies of An Imperial Affliction.

  Even so, I told Augustus about it. “My favorite book is this book called An Imperial Affliction.”

  “Does it have lesbian sex scenes?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s so good about it?”

  What was so good about it is that its author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to get what it’s like to have cancer more than anyone ever had. He got what it was like to be me. But this seemed a little too heavy, so I just said, “Trust me, it’s really good.”

  Augustus smiled. “I am going to read this terrible book that does not contain lesbian sex scenes, and also requires reading to read it,” he said. “All I ask in return is that you read this.” He spun around and pulled out a book from the mountain of video games.

  “I thought you hated reading,” I said.

  “I do,” he said. “But there’s this one author whose books are so amazing, so fantastic, so incredible, that even I love reading them. This author’s name...is John Green.”

  He handed me John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

  “It’s that good, huh?” I asked.

  “Not just good. The best. I’d loan you my copy, but it’s the kind of book you really need to purchase for yourself, either in fine bookstores everywhere or online at www.amazon.com. And I do mean purchase. While I usually see nothing wrong with illegally downloading all kinds of mass media entertainment, I am convinced that in this one case, the books of John Green, everyone should legally purchase their own copy. And by ‘own copy,’ I mean new and not used.”

  “You mentioned John Green has written other books,” I said. “Where can I find more information about these?”

  “I’m glad you asked. You can find out about John’s other books at www.johngreenbooks.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out John’s super-cool vlog videos! And let me emphasize, what I said about Looking For Alaska holds for John’s other amazing books as well: if you want to read them, you should purchase your own, new copy.”

  “Okay. I will buy my own copy,” I said, and handed him back his copy of Looking for Alaska. In doing so our hands briefly touched. “Cold,” he said, pointing at my hand.

  “Not cold. Underoxygenated. Due to my crappy lungs.”

  “I love it when you talk medical to me,” he said. “Almost as much as I love John Green’s follow-up to Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns.” He took my underoxygenated hand and led me up the stairs.

  ***

  “What movie should we watch?” I asked, as we sat down on the couch in the living room.

  “Have you seen Black Swan?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Really? It’s quite good, and you look just like Natalie Portman in it,” he said.

  I blushed. “Black Swan it is,” I said.

  We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally middle-schooly thing where I put my hand on the couch about halfway between us to let him know I’d consider giving him an hj, but not a bj, at least not today, although it could be in the cards if he bought me dinner, or at least a $5+ dessert. An hour into the movie, Augustus’ parents brought in some of their enchiladas, which were white people enchiladas but still tasted pretty good.

  Black Swan is about this crazy ballerina played by Natalie Portman who gets so stressed out competing for a part that she starts having hallucinations where she stabs people and has lesbian sex. Augustus said that to “get the movie” you have to watch the lesbian sex scene multiple times, so we did. After the movie, Augustus told me I also looked like famous actresses from other movies. To prove this, he showed me the Denise Richards lesbian sex scene from Wild Things, the Naomi Watts lesbian sex scene from Mulholland Drive, and the Ivana Fukalot lesbian sex scene from Muff Munchers 3.

  “Thanks for the film festival and enchiladas,” I said. “But I should probably get home. Class tomorrow.”

  “I’ll grab my keys,” Augustus said. As he left to get the keys, his mom came in and started cleaning up the enchilada plates. She stopped and pointed at the wall. “I just love this one, don’t you?” I looked and saw what she was pointing at: a cat photo with the caption I are future cat, which showed a cat with a lime on its head that had been cut out to look like a space helmet.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s lovely.”

  I insisted on driving Augustus’ car home, with Augustus riding shotgun. We pulled up outside my house, and we kind of just stared at each other. If you ignored the horrific stumpy leg, he really was beautiful.

  “Hazel Grace,” he said – I didn’t correct him again because I was starting to suspect he might be dyslexic – “it’s been a true pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Ditto, Mr. Waters.”

  “May I see you again?” he asked, with a touch of cute nervousness.

  I smiled. “Sure.”

  “In like an hour? I can wait in the car.”

  “Patience, grasshopper,” I said.

  “Hour and a half?”

  I laughed. “How ‘bout I call you when I finish the wonderful John Green novel Looking for Alaska, available for immediate download on Kindle at www.amazon.com?”

  “Sounds good. How long do you think that will take, like two hours?”

  I liked Augustus Waters. I really, really, really liked him. I liked the way he used “metaphor” totally wrong. I liked that he drove his car even though he was physically incapable of doing so safely, putting innocent civilians at risk every time he took the wheel. I liked how he played video games all day instead of studying for his classes. I liked that he went to his friend’s support group to hit on girls. I liked that instead of asking me out on a proper date somewhere in public he immediately asked me back to his house. I liked that he was so desperate he couldn’t even wait a day to ask me out on a second date.

  “I can’t give you an exact time, but I can promise you this,” I said. “I will read it as fast as I’ve ever read a book in my life.”

  And I meant it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I stayed up pretty late that night reading Looking for Alaska. Spoiler Alert: it’s awesome. Buy it.

  The next morning I slept late, and was awakened by Mom’s hands on my shoulders.

  “Hazel? It’s almost eleven,” she said.

  “I was up late reading,” I explained.

  Mom knelt down and unscrewed me from the large, rectangular oxygen concentrator I used every night while I slept. Like my portable tank, I’d given the large oxygen concentrator a name. The name I’d chosen was Fuckhead.

  “Do you know what day it is?” Mom said, clearly excited about whatever day it was.

  “Uh, Thursday?”

  “Did you really forget?”

  “Maybe?”

  “HAZEL! IT’S YOUR ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-SEVENTH MONTHDAY!”

  Mom thought it was unfair that I wouldn’t live long e
nough to celebrate as many birthdays as other people, so we’d started celebrating my monthdays, each of which marked another month that I’d been alive.

  “What do you want to do on your very special day?”

  “Take a very special number of Cancera shits?”

  “Honey, you’re supposed to celebrate,” she said. “Why don’t you do something with Kaitlyn?” Kaitlyn was my friend. We weren’t particularly close, but she was the one I could call on in my times of greatest need: when my parents actually made me leave the house.

  “That’s an idea,” I said. “I’ll text Kaitlyn and see if she wants to meet at the mall after class.”

  “Not before you blow these out,” Mom said, as she carried in a cake with a hundred and ninety-seven candles.

  ***

  My class that day was American Literature…I think. At least it mentioned American Literature. I don’t really pay attention in class. I mean, I’ve got cancer and might die soon, so why bother? Although to be honest, even if I didn’t have cancer, I probably still wouldn’t pay attention.

  After class Mom drove me to the mall, and I headed to the food court to meet Kaitlyn. I got there a little early, so I bought a soda. Soon I heard the distinctive clickety-clack of Kaitlyn’s high heels approaching.

  “Darling! How are you?” Kaitlyn said, kissing me on the cheek. Kaitlyn was an anomaly: a hot girl in Indianapolis.

  “I’m good,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Positively fabulous! Let’s shop.”

  We walked over to Anthropologie, where we looked at some shoes. I was a bit tired from the walking (thanks, cancer lungs) so I took a break and sat on a stool while Kaitlyn checked out the jeans. I had just pulled out my Kindle to start a new incredible John Green novel when Kaitlyn came running over, holding a pair of J Brand jeans.

  “Hazel, I need a ginormous favor.”

  “What?” I asked, even though I knew what was coming.

  “I tried these on, and no joke – they fit my ass better than anything ever has in the history of ass-fitting. But they’re two-fifty, and I don’t really have that right now, so...”

  “So you’d like to use my Cancer Perk?”

  “Pleeeeeeease? I know it’s cheesy, but I wouldn’t ask unless it was an emergency.”

  I wanted to say no, but she’d celebrated my monthday with me. “Sure,” I said.

  “Thank you thank you thank you!” Kaitlyn squealed, giving me a hug. I handed her my oxygen tank and nasal tubes.

  “Make it quick,” I said. “I kinda need this stuff.”

  “Two seconds!” she said. She put the nasal tubes in her nostrils and walked slowly up to the cash register, wheeling the tank behind her. The salesgirl spotted her, and before Kaitlyn could even put the jeans on the counter, the salesgirl said, “You’re all good. It’s on us.”

  Kaitlyn raced back to where I was sitting, now lightheaded from the lack of oxygen. “You’re the best,” I could barely make out her saying. “Uh huh,” I mumbled weakly as I took the nasal tubes back and resumed breathing in a way capable of sustaining human life.

  Kaitlyn suggested heading to Forever 21, but I told her I was kind of tired and probably should head home. I actually wasn’t tired. And I did like Kaitlyn. But hanging out with people who didn’t have cancer kinda bothered me. There always seemed to be this weird gap between us. Then again, hanging out with people who had cancer also bothered me. Basically, hanging out with anyone besides myself bothered me.

  As I was approaching the mall exit, this cute little girl with barretted braids appeared in front of me and said, “What’s that in your nose?”

  “They’re called cannula,” I said. “These tubes give me oxygen, which helps me breathe.”

  “Would they help me breathe, too?” she asked.

  “I dunno, wanna try?”

  “Nah,” she replied, “I don’t wanna look like a weirdo.”

  “Wanna know a secret?” I asked.

  “Yeah!”

  I licked my finger and rubbed it on her arm. “I just gave you cancer,” I whispered. Her face filled with terror and I left the mall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That night, I crawled into bed and started reading An Imperial Affliction for the millionth time.

  AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates) and her dad, who have a normal lower-middle-class life in a little Texas town until Anna gets a rare blood cancer.

  But AIA is not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. In cancer books, the person with cancer always starts some cancer charity, and we’re supposed to feel good at the end of the book when the person dies because the person will leave a cancer-fighting legacy. Right? But AIA is different. In AIA, Anna doesn’t devote her life to fighting cancer. Instead, she devotes her life to promoting cancer. Anna gets a PhD in bioengineering and uses her expertise to develop new, highly lethal forms of cancer, with the hope of infecting and killing off the entire segment of the world’s population that had not previously had cancer.

  Anna is also honest about cancer in a way no other cancer book protagonist is. Unlike typical cancer book characters, Anna sees no great purpose in people having cancer. People with cancer, she says, are side effects of fucking. No couple who fucks plans on having a kid with cancer. Sometimes it just happens. As Anna likes to say, “Cancer comes with the fucking territory.”

  As the story progresses, Anna gets sicker and sicker, and is tragically unable to complete her project of killing off the entire non-cancer population. Meanwhile, her dad falls in love with a Young Adult novelist by the name of Veronica Roth. Veronica Roth has written several bestsellers and has become extremely wealthy, but Anna suspects she might be a con artist. Anna believes that Veronica Roth’s novels are actually written by a large roster of unemployed English PhDs who are barely paid enough to live on and who receive none of the credit for their work. Just as Anna is about to expose Veronica Roth for the talentless literary fraud she is, the book ends right in the middle of a

  I get that it’s seen as a cool device to end a book in the middle, and I get that Anna probably got too sick to keep writing or died or whatever, and I get that Veronica Roth is a talentless literary fraud, but it just seemed too darn unfair that I would never find out what ultimately happened to all the characters. So I’d written fifteen letters to Peter Van Houten, care of the publisher, asking for some answers: whether Anna’s Dad ends up marrying Veronica Roth, what happens to Anna’s stupid (but very smart) hamster, whether one of Anna’s colleagues uses Anna’s research to fulfill Anna’s dream of infecting the entire world’s population with cancer – all that stuff. But Peter Van Houten had never responded to my letters.

  AIA was the only book Van Houten had ever written, and no one knew anything about him except that after the book came out he moved from the U.S. to the Netherlands and became some kind of recluse. I liked to imagine he was working on a sequel set in the Netherlands, where Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling had teamed up to form a gigantic international talentless literary fraud conspiracy. But I had no idea what Van Houten was actually working on, or even if he was working on anything at all, because he had never published a blog post, or posted a Facebook status, or vined a Vine or whatever the fuck you call it when people post something on Vine.

  As I reread AIA that night, I kept getting distracted imagining Augustus reading the same words I was reading. I wondered if he’d like it, or whether he was illiterate. Then I remembered I’d promised to call him after reading Looking for Alaska. I got out my phone and texted him.

  Hi!

  He replied a minute later:

  Bj?

  God, he was hot. Before I could reply, my oxygen tank beeped and I had to change it for a fresh one, which took a few minutes. As I was finishing changing it, I got another text:

  Haaaaaa just kidding haaaaa. Um, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text.

  So I called.

  “Hazel Grace,” he said when he picked up.


  “You were right,” I said. “Looking for Alaska is the best money I’ve ever spent. Now do you have a review for me?”

  “An Imperial Affliction? You just gave it to me yesterday.”

  “Fair enough. How much have you read?”

  “Two-thirds done,” he said. “So, okay, does Veronica Roth not really write her own books? I’m getting a bad vibe from her.”

  “No spoilers,” I said.

  “When can I see you?”

  “Certainly not until you finish the book,” I said. As a female, I enjoyed playing games instead of doing what I really wanted.

  “Then I’d better hang up and keep reading.”

  “Darn right you should,” I said. The line clicked dead without another word.

  Developing a deep relationship with someone through mindless chatter about pop culture was new to me, but I liked it.

  ***

  The next morning I had a class at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes without me listening to a single word of it.

  When I got out of class, Mom’s car was waiting at its usual spot outside.

  “Wanna go see a movie?” I asked. After-class movies were a Lancaster tradition.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to see?”

  “Let’s just do the thing where we go and see whatever starts next,” I said. We drove to the theater and ended up seeing The Lego Movie. It was the fourth straight time we’d seen it using this method of choosing movies.

  When we got out of the movie, I had twenty-three text messages from Augustus.

  Tell me my copy is missing the last fifteen pages or something.

  Hazel Grace, tell me this is not the end of the book.

  OMIGOD DO THEY GET MARRIED AND DID SHE DIE WHAT IS THIS