At some point in the flight I fell asleep, my head on Augustus’ shoulder, and I woke to the sound of the landing gear coming down.
It was foggy and misty out, but when the plane got low enough, the fog suddenly dissipated and the Netherlands appeared. There were little rectangles of green surrounded on all sides by canals. The plane touched down, and the pilot said, “Welcome to the Netherlands,” and I couldn’t believe that we were actually there.
After we got our bags and cleared customs, Augustus met with the two Dutch voice actors he’d hired to play him and me to accompany Isaac on his trip to “Tokyo.” While the voice actors looked nothing like us, they sounded just like us, because Augustus had sent them recordings of our voices to study several weeks before. The actors had also been poring over guidebooks and websites on Tokyo, so they could describe to Isaac the various “scenery” they were “seeing.” Augustus pointed the actors to where Isaac was standing by the baggage claim, and the actors greeted Isaac, took his luggage, and whisked him off on his Japanese Adventure.
Augustus, Mom, and I headed outside to catch a ride to our hotel. We flagged down a taxi, and the taxi driver put our luggage in the trunk while Mom and I got in. But Augustus just stood there.
“WHY ARE YOU GETTING INTO THIS STRANGE CAR?” Augustus shouted. “WE DON’T EVEN KNOW THIS GUY!”
“Augustus, have you never been in a taxi before?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I got out and kissed his cheek. “You are like, the adorable-est,” I said, and dragged him into the taxi.
***
The taxi ride was very cool. As we drove through Amsterdam we saw centuries-old row houses leaning precariously toward canals, tons of coffee shops, and bicycles everywhere. We eventually arrived at our hotel, the Hotel Laboof, where each room was named after a different movie starring Shia LaBeouf. Mom and I were staying in the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, while Augustus was across the hall in the I, Robot.
When we got to our room and I put my key in the slot, Augustus jumped in between me and the door. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he yelled. “YOU CAN’T JUST GO IN THERE! YOU DON’T LIVE THERE!”
“Augustus, have you never been in a hotel before?” I asked.
He shook his head.
Adorable to the gajillionth power.
The room my mom and I were staying in was small but cozy. Beside one of the beds was an oxygen machine for sleeping and a dozen refillable oxygen tanks. The walls were covered with framed screenshots from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and on the table as we walked in was a signed photo of Shia LaBeouf that said, “Hope you enjoy your stay! –SL”
Hotel LaBoof was right next to the Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s most famous park. Mom wanted to go for a walk and check out the park, but I was worn out from all the travel and needed a nap. So Mom hooked me up to the oxygen machine and I got into bed.
“Mom, just go to the park and I’ll call you when I wake up,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “Sleep tight.”
***
When I woke up a few hours later, however, Mom was sitting in the room, reading a guidebook.
“Morning,” she said. She checked her watch and sighed. “Well actually, late afternoon.”
“Mom, you didn’t have to stay here!” I said. “I wanted you to see the park!”
“I did,” she said. “I just brought you with me.” She took out her phone and showed me pictures of her pushing my bed and the oxygen machine around the Vondelpark.
“Mom, it’s okay if you’re not with me every single second of the trip. I just want you to have fun or whatever, you know?”
“I’ll have plenty of Mom fun tonight when you and Augustus go to dinner,” she said. “I’m gonna walk around town, maybe catch a sex show.”
“You’re not coming to dinner?” I asked.
“And ruin your date with Augustus? Of course not. You two have reservations at a place called Oranjee,” she said. “Peter Van Houten’s assistant set it up. Quite fancy.” She held up a couple guidebooks. “Zagat gave it a twenty-eight out of thirty, and The Guide to Getting Laid in Amsterdam gave it five condoms.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying,” she said. “You should get dressed. I’m thinking maybe the sundress?”
She was referring to my blue print, knee-length Forever 21 dress that I bought last year but had never had occasion to wear. I put it on and looked in the mirror. It looked good, and even showed a little skin.
“You should also take this,” my mom said, handing me a strap-on dildo. “The woman at the sex shop told me it’s the same one Natalie Portman uses.”
“Mom!” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said.
A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. I opened the door to reveal Augustus, looking absolutely stunning in a perfectly tailored black suit. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and it almost fell out when he looked at me. “Hazel Grace,” he said, his eyes slowly moving from my head down, “You look incred–”
His eyes stopped moving when they got to my waist area. Mom came over. “Hazel,” she said, pointing at the strap-on I was wearing, “I meant you should put that on after dinner.”
“Ohhhhhh,” I said.
“Anyway, I hope you two have a fabulous time!” Mom said.
“Thanks, Mrs. Lancaster. You have a wonderful night as well,” Augustus said.
He offered me his arm and we walked out. I looked back at Mom to wave one last goodbye. She smiled and waved, and mouthed the words “no anal.”
***
We took a scenic tram ride to the restaurant, during which we saw Amsterdam’s “spring snow”: showers of whirring elm tree blossoms, falling everywhere and covering the canals. After five stops, we arrived at a street overlooking a beautiful canal, the reflections of the picturesque canal houses rippling in the water.
Oranjee was just a few steps from the tram stop. It had a section of outdoor tables right on the canal. The hostess’s eyes lit up as Augustus and I approached. “Cancer victims number one and two?”
“I guess?” I said.
“Your table is right this way,” she said, leading us over to the best table at the restaurant, inches from the canal. “The champagne is our gift.”
Augustus and I glanced at each other and smiled. He pulled out my chair for me, and scooted it back in when I sat. The view was like a postcard. I took my glass of champagne and clinked glasses with Augustus. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I had never drank champagne before, or any other alcohol besides a few sips from my dad’s beer. I took a sip. The miniature bubbles melted in my mouth and flowed northward into my brain. Sweet. Crisp. Delicious. “That champagne is really, really good,” I said.
“Pardon me, miss, but that is not the champagne,” said a blond-haired waiter who’d approached. “That is the mineral water. This is the champagne,” he said, pointing at a still-unopened green bottle in a bucket of ice. “Welcome to Oranjee. Would you like to see a menu, or will you be having the chef’s choice?”
Augustus looked at me. “The chef’s choice sounds fantastic, but Hazel is a vegetarian,” he said. “Could we maybe do a vegetarian version?”
The waiter frowned. “Let me give you some honest advice,” he said confidentially. “If you’re going to order vegetarian, it’s a bit of a waste to spend your money eating here. Or at any fine restaurant.”
“It’s okay, we’re not paying for it,” Augustus said.
“As you wish,” the waiter said. “Two vegetarian chef’s choices, coming right up.” He popped open our champagne bottle, poured us each a glass, and disappeared.
We raised our champagne glasses. “To Amsterdam,” I said.
“To the rule that if you go on a trip with someone you have to sleep with them,” Augustus said.
We clinked our glasses. A minute later, the waiter returned with our first course, garlic gnocchi with red mustard leaves. It was absolutely amazing. (Although I was comparing it only to other vegetarian food I normally ate, so it’s possible it tasted worse than normal non-vegetarian food.)
A wooden boat with a bunch of people partying approached us in the canal below. One of them, a woman with long blond hair, raised the beer she was drinking toward us and shouted something.
“We don’t speak Dutch,” Augustus shouted back.
One of the other partiers shouted a translation: “Enjoy your shitty vegetarian meal!”
***
The incredible food kept coming: red garlic with leafy gnocchi mustard, followed by garlic gnocchi red mustard with leaves. I wish I’d been hungrier. Finally, the waiter brought dessert: a spectacular mustardy garlic gnocchi leaves with redness.
“I wish these mustardy garlic gnocchi leaves were a person, so I could take it to Vegas and marry it,” I said.
“I wish they were a person, so I could keep it locked in the basement as my sex slave and have it live in a pile of its own feces,” Augustus said.
“Question for you,” I said.
“Shoot,” Augustus replied.
“That suit looks awesome, but aren’t black suits only supposed to be worn at funerals?” I asked, giggling.
Augustus laughed. “It’s not my funeral suit,” he said. “But it is my Death Suit.”
“No way,” I said. It was a common thing for cancer kids to buy the outfit they wanted to be buried in, since they knew that they could die in the very near future. “Why’d you go with black?” I asked. “I figured a nonconformist like you might choose something more colorful.”
“Because it matched my Death Thong,” he said, and pulled down his pants a few inches to reveal a black thong.
The waiter brought over the check. The Genie Foundation was paying for it, so all we had to do was sign. Even though it was 8:30, it was still light outside, and we got up and began to walk along the canal. A few blocks up from Oranjee I needed a rest, so we found a bench with a view of the pink sky, and sat down.
“Can I ask you about Caroline Mathers?” I said.
“Yeah, of course,” Augustus said. “What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know Augustus would be okay if I died. I wanted to know I wouldn’t be a grenade for him. “Just, like, what happened?”
He exhaled for a long time, and popped a cigarette into his mouth. “You know the saying that there’s no place emptier than a hospital playground?” I nodded. “Well when I was at Memorial for a few weeks, getting my leg taken off, my room was on the sixth floor and had a view of the playground. And of course, no one was ever there. But one day this girl started showing up alone at the playground, swinging on the swing by herself, and she kept coming every day. So I asked one of my nurses to get the scoop on her. It was a little awkward because I’d been hooking up with the nurse, but I was kinda hoping for a threeway, you know? Anyway, the nurse brought the girl up to visit, and it turned out to be Caroline. The funny thing is, a few months after Caroline and I started dating, we ran into the nurse at a party, and we ended up having a threeway after all.”
“So what happened at the end, when Caroline got sick?” I asked.
“Whenever people talk about other people who’ve died of cancer, they talk about them as if they were models of perfection,” Augustus said. “Right? But that’s not true. Statistically, cancer kids are just as likely to be assholes as regular kids. And Caroline was an asshole. But I liked it! I liked feeling as if I was the one person in existence she didn’t hate. We’d just hang out and rag on everybody. But then she got this tumor, and the doctors called it the Asshole Tumor because it makes you act like an asshole, and with Caroline it just made her more of an asshole, to the point that she was even being an asshole to me. All she’d do when we hung out is make pegleg jokes, hide my prosthetic leg, secretly cut an inch off my prosthetic leg, try to flush my prosthetic leg down the toilet…”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “Why’d you stay with her?”
“How can you dump someone who’s dying?” he said. “Also, she gave really great bjs. You’re a girl, so you wouldn’t know this, but it’s super-hard to find someone who gives great bjs. Anyway, it took forever, but finally she passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all good, Hazel Grace,” he said. “Just to be clear, when I saw you in Support Group, the thing that attracted me to you was not that you looked like Caroline. I wasn’t searching for a Caroline lookalike to replace her. What attracted me to you was that you were an asshole like Caroline. You, Hazel Grace, are an absolute cunt to everyone in that Support Group. But you didn’t act like an asshole to me. And that made you the ideal kind of asshole: an asshole to everyone but me. Hazel Grace, you are the perfect asshole. My perfect asshole.”
I hugged him, as hard as I’d ever hugged anyone in my life. “Augustus Waters,” I said, “it is a privilege to be your asshole.”
