Characters.

Hazel.
But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim,
who agreed that I was veritably swimming
in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be
adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support
Group.
“You’re like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman.”

Augustus.
A boy was staring at me.
I was quite sure I’d never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the
molded plastic elementary school chair he was
sitting in. Mahogany hair, straight and short. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he
sat with his tailbone against the edge of the
chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.
I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans,
which had once been tight but now sagged in
weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn’t even like anymore. Also my
hair: I had this pageboy haircut, and I hadn’t even
bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side
effect of treatment. I looked like a normally
proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle
situation. And yet—I cut a glance to him, and his
eyes were still on me.

Issac
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long-faced, skinny
guy with straight blond hair swept over one
eye.

Peter Van Houten.

“Fine,” I said.
I just stared out the window awhile. I really didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see them lower
him into the ground in the spot he’d picked
out with his dad, and I didn’t want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass
and moan in pain, and I didn’t want to see Peter
Van Houten’s alcoholic belly stretched against his linen jacket, and I didn’t want to cry in front
of a bunch of people, and I didn’t want to toss
a handful of dirt onto his grave, and I didn’t want my parents to have to stand there beneath
the clear blue sky with its certain slant of
afternoon light, thinking about their day and their kid and my plot and my casket and my dirt.
But I did these things. I did all of them and worse, because Mom and Dad felt we should.
***
After it was over, Van Houten walked up to me and put a fat hand on my shoulder and said,
“Could I hitch a ride? Left my rental at the
bottom of the hill.” I shrugged, and he opened the door to the backseat right as my dad
unlocked the car.

Context
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven
unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side
effect of dying.
We walked down what passes for a hill in Indianapolis to this clearing where kids were
climbing all over this huge oversize skeleton
sculpture. The bones were each about waist high, and the thighbone was longer than me. It
looked like a child’s drawing of a skeleton rising
up out of the ground.
The day before we left for Amsterdam, I went back to Support Group for the first time since
meeting Augustus. The cast had rotated a bit
down there in the Literal Heart of Jesus.
Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the
cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his
heart, which was also made of him.
I suddenly felt conscious that there were all these people watching us, that the last time so
many people saw us kiss we were in the Anne Frank House.
My shoulder hurt. I worried the cancer had spread from my lungs. I imagined the tumor
metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes
into my skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent. “Funky Bones,” Augustus said. “Created
by Joep Van Lieshout.”