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unpleasant and frequently hurtful. But, I mean, you can’t dump a girl with a brain tumor. And her parents liked me, and she has this little
brother who is a really cool kid. I mean, how can you dump her? She’s dying.
“It took forever. It took almost a year, and it was a year of me hanging out with this girl who would, like, just start laughing out of
nowhere and point at my prosthetic and call me Stumpy.”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah. I mean, it was the tumor. It ate her brain, you know? Or it wasn’t the tumor. I have no way of knowing, because they were
inseparable, she and the tumor. But as she got sicker, I mean, she’d just repeat the same stories and laugh at her own comments even if she’d
already said the same thing a hundred times that day. Like, she made the same joke over and over again for weeks: ‘Gus has great legs. I
mean leg.’ And then she would just laugh like a maniac.”
“Oh, Gus,” I said. “That’s . . .” I didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t looking at me, and it felt invasive of me to look at him. I felt him
scoot forward. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared at it, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger, then put it back.
“Well,” he said, “to be fair, I do have great leg.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all good, Hazel Grace. But just to be clear, when I thought I saw Caroline Mathers’s ghost in Support Group, I was not entirely
happy. I was staring, but I wasn’t yearning, if you know what I mean.” He pulled the pack out of his pocket and placed the cigarette back in it.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Me too,” he said.
“I don’t ever want to do that to you,” I told him.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”