The Fault in Our Stars

bought a Diet Coke. It was 3:21.
I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I
read. There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and
over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Augustus
Waters and the existentially fraught free throws.
Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought
I couldn’t see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some
papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.
At 3:32 precisely, I noticed Kaitlyn striding confidently past the Wok
House. She saw me the moment I raised my hand, flashed her very white and
newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.
She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that
dominated her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her head as she leaned
down to hug me.
“Darling,” she said, vaguely British. “How are you?” People didn’t find the
accent odd or off-putting. Kaitlyn just happened to be an extremely sophisticated
twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in
Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I don’t even know anymore. Is that diet?” I nodded and handed it to her.
She sipped through the straw. “I do wish you were at school these days. Some of
the boys have become downright edible.”
“Oh, yeah? Like who?” I asked. She proceeded to name five guys we’d
attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn’t picture any of them.
“I’ve been dating Derek Wellington for a bit,” she said, “but I don’t think it
will last. He’s such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the
Hazelverse?”
“Nothing, really,” I said.
“Health is good?”
“The same, I guess?”
“Phalanxifor!” she enthused, smiling. “So you could just live forever,
right?”
“Probably not forever,” I said.
“But basically,” she said. “What else is new?”
I thought of telling her that I was seeing a boy, too, or at least that I’d
watched a movie with one, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her
that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly
win the affections of a boy. But I didn’t really have much to brag about, so I just
shrugged.