The Fault in Our Football

Chapter 1

The third best day of my life started out, surprisingly, with an automated voice telling me to hold.

"Welcome to the Customer Service Center for the Genie Foundation. Please hold for the next available representative. A large number of people are seeking assistance at this time, and waits may be longer than normal."

Idly, I wondered about the metaphorical resonance of a hotline for cancer kids telling them to hold. Gus, I imagined, would've found it, something about how ridiculous it was that people who had so little time already had to waste even more of it listening to what could barely pass as music. Then again, does anyone really have time, even non-cancer kids? Like T.S. Eliot said, we were all dying, just some of us with more patience. (Well, he said something like that.)

So while Gus would've found some deeper meaning, I was mostly just irritated. I pulled the ear away from my phone. The music was not quite classical, not quite pop, maybe like a classical song that had passed through a pop music machine, something which I'm sure all the big music executives have stored in their offices. How else do you explain Justin Bieber? No voice that beautiful could be borne to mere man.

But anyway, from this auspicious start came my third-best day.

There might be some people who tell you that you can't have a third best day- that there is only one best day - the same people who tell you that you can only have one best friend. Those people are full of crap. To me, best, in this case, is just a word that signifies how awesome the day was, not a ranking, per say. There's no good, better, best in this case. And there are so many awesome days in life – just like there are so many awesome people – so it only makes sense that you should have more than one best day, and more than one best friend.

If this was the third best day of my life – and I think maybe it was, at least of my life so far – then what was the first? Maybe the day I met my boyfriend – or should I say ex-boyfriend? Is it a break-up if one half of the couple dies? - Or maybe it would be the day said boyfriend (I'm not calling him ex) and I went to Amsterdam, and had champagne that tasted like stars and strolled along the river. But no, I thought, I shouldn't make the best day of my life one with Gus. I didn't want to be one of those girls who made everything about her boyfriend, who gave up all her friends and interests to be with him and then sat in a chair for six months straight after he was gone, not to name names but, cough, Bella Swann.

Maybe the first best day would be the day my parents took me to Disneyworld, and I ate a giant turkey legs and waited in a three hour line to meet Mickey which, in retrospect seems like a waste of my limited amount of minutes, albeit not as much of a waste as holding on a wish hotline. But at the time, well, it is hard to convey my excitement at meeting a man dressed in polyester mouse suit, to convey my pure joy at having his big, gloved white hand around my shoulder, and looking up as his perfectly rounded black ears. It was like winning the lottery and the Olympics and the quiz bowl, all rolled into one. Or maybe the first best day would be the day I took my parents to the bones and we talked about Gus, or a day, just recently, when the three of us had gone to see the Hunger Games at midnight. When Panem flashed on the screen, my mom and I looked at each other, at the exact same moment, and grinned, and in the dark theater, her white teeth seemed to glow. And I loved knowing that, for that brief second, we were both experiencing the exact same thing, both thinking the exact same thing, which was, of course, "Hey, this fake city looks pretty amazing for a place populated by children-killers."

So maybe that was the first best day. Or maybe the second, after Disney. Or, I thought, maybe Gus really was first. Maybe they could all be tied for first. After all, as long as I was breaking the rules about having more than one best thing, why not go a step further, and not even really rank them?

Of course, at the time, I didn't know that it was about to become the third best day, or the tied for first five times best day, or whatever. At the time, it just felt like another day in a string of days that had been so-so, filled with ANTM marathons, doctors' appointments, and dinners I only half-tasted. Most of the days had been like that, in the six months since Gus had died.

In those six months, some people had gotten into the annoying habit of trying to tell me that Gus was around. Not in his corporeal form, of course, but, you know, "there." When something good happened to me – if the bus was on time or I got a high score on Diablo 3 – someone would wink at me, flash a knowing smile and say "I bet Gus had a hand in that," or, "I bet Gus is smiling on you right now." I know they were trying to help, but mostly it just pissed me off. I didn't like people attributing things to Gus when they had no way of knowing if he really did them, and when he wasn't around to correct them. I didn't like them speaking for him while he was eternally silenced. I didn't like it, and it didn't seem like something he'd like either. (Of course, in thinking that, I was speaking for him, and I guess that made me kind of a hypocrite.) And more than that – well, I wasn't sure I believed in an afterlife at all, but if it did exist, I really hoped that Gus wasn't going to spend eternity just hanging around, watching me watch TV. His soul, I thought, was meant for something bigger than that.

So even though I hated to think of Gus spending his eternal life helping me, some small, secret part of me still thinks that he may have had a hand in what happened next. Because what happened next led to a chain of events that led to something of a miracle. A small miracle, not the legendary, waves-parting, water-into-wine kind of thing, but small, everyday miracle, one that was just big enough for me, and just big enough for the spirit of one boy to maybe have dreamed up.

What happened next was this: The music stopped playing. A representative from Genie Foundation said hello. He hoped that I was having a pleasant day and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help me.

Uh, get rid of my cancer, I thought about saying. I wondered how many time he'd heard that one. But instead I said

"Hello, my name is Hazel Grace Lancaster, and I think there's been some kind of mistake."

"What kind of mistake?" He asked, his voice gentle and hesitant. I imagined that he got a lot frantic phone calls in this line of work, dealing with the last wishes of the dying.

"I just got a letter in the mail reminding me that I get a wish from you guys. But well" I hesitated before saying this last thing. But it was better to be honest, I figured. "Well, the thing is, I already used my wish. Several years ago." And then, I thought, I got another wish, kind of, when Augustus Waters used his wish to fulfill my wish, because that was just the kind of stand-up guy he was.

"Really?" He asked. "Are you sure?"

Was I sure? What kind of person would be confused about whether a team of well-meaning people had planned an all-expenses paid vacation for her to the destination of her choice.? What kind of person could just forget a free trip to Mickey's house?

"Uh yeah," I said. "I have cancer, not dementia."

He laughed nervously. "Well there, Hazel, that's good of you to tell us. I think a lot of people would have taken advantage of the situation. Let me just check our records. Can you spell your last name for me?" I did. "And can you verify the last four digits of your social?" I did. "Well…"He trailed off. I heard typing noises on the other end. He was silent for several minutes, and I put the phone on speaker again, to get it away from my ear. Finally, he came back, but I didn't have the chance to switch back to regular phone mode before he started talking, so his voice boomed through my kitchen. "Well, Hazel, it seems you've gotten very lucky," he said, totally without irony. "We have no record of your wish, for some reason, so if you want, you really can have another one. Any ideas about what you'd like to wish for? IF you tell me now, I can get the paperwork started."

I thought for a minute. Something immediately sprang to mind, but I didn't want to rush into this wish. I had felt like I wasted my last wish on Disney World. I remembered how Gus had laughed when I told him. And I was determined not to waste this one – my second chance. How many people got two, technically three, wishes fulfilled in their life? I knew that I was kind of lucky despite, you know, the cancer thing. And maybe I shouldn't have said anything right then. Maybe I should have gotten off the phone, maybe made a few pro/con lists and thought it over, but time's winged chariot was at my back and all that. So I pushed the mental pro-con lists aside and spoke up. "Actually," I told him, "I do have one idea."