The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

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Chapter 15 Summary

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One night, Hazel and her family eat dinner with Augustus and his family. Hazel’s parents exclaim about how good the food is, but Augustus says that it does not taste like the food at Oranjee in Amsterdam. He and Hazel launch into a poetic series of reminiscences about the food at Oranjee, which made them feel like “God himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes….” This lavish description goes on for quite a while. At the end of it, all the parents agree that Augustus and Hazel are “weird.” 

About a week later, Augustus’s condition worsens, and he is admitted to the hospital. When Hazel goes to visit, she compares her own hospital, a children’s hospital, to Augustus’s, which treats people of all ages. The children’s hospital is sort of annoying with all its bright decorations, but the hospital for adults looks barren and sad. 

After Hazel arrives, she talks to Augustus’s mom for a few minutes and learns that Augustus is doing poorly. Hazel asks to see him, but his mom says gently that she only wants the family to visit him now. 

Hazel understands that Augustus’s family wants privacy, but she is worried that she might be losing her last chance to see the boy she loves. She spends a long time just hanging out in the waiting room, staring at the ugly furniture and hoping that she will get to say good-bye. She is wearing the outfit she wore in Amsterdam on the day she and Augustus lost their virginity together. She wishes she could give Augustus a chance to see her like this again. 

While she sits in the waiting room, Hazel scrolls through the pictures on her phone. She starts with the picture of Augustus and Isaac on the day of the egging, and she backtracks to the first picture she ever took of him, at their picnic on the day he invited her to go to Amsterdam. Hazel thinks of the short interval of time between these pictures as a “brief but still infinite forever.” 

Augustus does not die yet, and he gets to go home, but now he is confined to a wheelchair. A couple of weeks later, Hazel takes him to the sculpture garden where they had their first picnic. They drink a bottle of expensive champagne, which Augustus got from one of his doctors because he is “the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to children.” As they sit and watch the kids play on a sculpture of a skeleton, Augustus comments that he used to imagine being one of the kids. These days he feels more like the skeleton.

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