"Not your fault, Hazel Grace. We're all just side effects, right?"

"'Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,'" I said, quoting AIA.

"Okay," he said. I gotta go to sleep. It's almost one."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

I giggled and said, "Okay." And then the line was quiet but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

"Okay," he said after forever. "Maybe okay will be our always."

"Okay," I said.

It was Augustus who finally hung up.

"That's too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything memorized?"

"'Let us go then, you and I,'" I started nervously, "'When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.'"

"Slower," he said.

I felt bashful, like I had when I'd first told him of An Imperial Affliction. "Um, okay. Okay. 'Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" / Let us go and make our visit.'"

"I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love Is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you."

"Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

"Also, it was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist."

"If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree."

"I don't think defeatism is honest," Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that."

"So everything happens for a reason and we'll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions?"

Dad smiled. He put a big arm around me and pulled me to him, kissing the side of my head. "I don't know what I believe, Hazel. I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience."

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

He told me again that he was sorry about Gus, and then we went back to watching the show, and the people picked a house, and Dad still had his arm around me, and I was kinda starting to fall asleep, but I didn't want to go to bed, and then Dad said, "You know what I believe? I remember in college I was taking this math class, this really great math class taught by this tiny old woman. She was talking about fast Fourier transforms and she stopped midsentence and said, 'Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.'

"That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it–or my observation of it–is temporary?"

"You are fairly smart," I said after a while.

"You are fairly good at compliments," he answered.

I thought about it. My old stock answer was that I wanted to stay alive for my parents, because they would be all gutted and childless in the wake of me, and that was still true kind of, but that wasn't it, exactly. "I don't know."

"In the hopes that you'll get better?"

"No," I said. "No, it's not that. I really don't know. Isaac?" I asked. I was tired of talking.

Isaac started talking about true love. I couldn't tell them what I was thinking because it seemed cheesy to me, but I was thinking about the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a person yet. What my dad had told me, basically.