Chapter 15 Summary
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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