Okay. I took a deep breath, or as close to one as I could and read over the title page again.

A side-effect by Peter Van Houten.

So far so good, I thought then felt my heart plummet when I got to the dedication page.

This book is dedicated to four people, whom affected my life in ways I cannot hope to explain.

To the little girl, who suffered beautifully.

To the assistant, who loved to use my credit card.

To the boy, who taught me how to write again.

To the girl, who inspired both of us.

I shut my eyes, feeling tears running down my slightly puffed up cheeks. I know exactly who these people are, even though he hasn't named them. His daughter, Anna, his assistant, Lidewij, Augustus and I guess, me.

I can do this. I can do this. If I keep repeating the words over and over, maybe they'll come true. Okay. Okay.

I flip the page, and I read.

I fell in love because of an awkward half blind teenager.

I smirk. Isaac.

This teenager, whom could only see out of one eye, was my best friend Isaac. The two of us did all the usual stuff two guys did, even if both guys had cancer, like we did. (Him having the kind of cancer that would take his sight away, me having the kind of cancer that took my leg away) which basically was playing video games and talking about our lives. And it was in one of these conversations, that the topic of group therapy came up.

The realization hits me like a train. This isn't Peter Van Houten writing, this is Gus.

"It's so depressing." Isaac said, his floppy blonde hair falling over his bad eye. I called it that, because it was made of glass and didn't really serve as much purpose as his good eye, the real one that could actually see, did. "We all sit in a circle in this church shaped like a cross, in the literal middle of it, like if Jesus was strapped to the cross, we'd be in his heart, and talk about our lives and how we feel."

"Then why do you go?" I'd asked, as Max Mayhem, my videogame character, threw himself in the pathway of a raining stream of bullets to deflect them from a dozen pixel children live. Isaac always said that I got too intense in video games, but I liked the feeling of being the hero.

He shrugged. "It helps I guess? Maybe you should come. The next meetings on Wednesday. I'm going to talk about the surgery and, I could use the support."

I knew he was kidding about the last bit, or at least he think he was, but I also knew how scared shitless he was about the whole thing. He was going to fall asleep and wake up blind, who wouldn't be scared? So, that's why in that late winter, I decided why not.

"Sure, I'll go." I said with a grin, an unlit cigarette dancing from my lips.

I never knew that's how he decided to go. I knew that Isaac had asked him, but reading about them playing Price of Dawn, talking like they used to, it was like I was seeing a knew side of Augustus that I'd never gotten to see. And it felt like he was talking to me again, and thinking about that hurt, even worse than having lungs filled with two and a half liters of fluid, which hurt a lot.

Wednesday finally came and I made my way to the literal heart of Jesus with my soon to be blind friend. The entire way there, he was clutching onto the seat of my Toyota SUV, cursing me and my horrific driving.

"Did you lose feeling in both your legs?" Isaac yelled as I slammed on the breaks at a red light. "Jesus!"

"That's where we're heading." I said, slamming, maybe a bit too hard, on the gas. Finally, we pulled into the parking lot of the old Episcopal Church and Isaac climbed out with a one eye glare at me.

"I'm just going to get Monica to pick me up after." He said as I limped beside him, even with a few months of using the prosthetic, walked a little crooked, but nobody seemed to mind. "She doesn't drive half as bad as you do and I've gotta look at her as long as I can."

"I happen to take offense to that." I said. "I happen to be stunningly good to look at and you should remember that."

Isaac rolled his good eye and led the way into the basement. Where, I suddenly realized, my friend had not been exaggerating.

It was depressing as hell.

There was a little circle of chairs, the kind you'd sit in when you were in elementary school, some filled with people I recognized from Memorial, the hospital that I went to, as did Isaac and many other fellow cancer persons and a few I didn't recognize. Near one corner, someone had set up a small array of sad looking chips ahoy cookies and droopy looking Dixie cups.

"Wow," I said as Isaac smirked next to me.

"Told you, depressing as hell."

As he sauntered over to the questionable food, I decided to sit down in one of the small chairs and wait the allotted five minutes until group therapy started at five o clock. And as I was waiting and wondering why I had ever agreed to come with my friend to this depressing event, in walked a ghost.

Not just any ghost however, the ghost of my ex-girlfriend.

I blink, remembering Augustus telling me how I looked like his old Girlfriend, Catherine Mathers who had died a year before. Our cancer selves could have been sisters, without pale skin and short brown hair. I tried not to be too upset by the fact that the first time he saw me he thought of her, but it still stung a little.

Now, when you see the ghost of your ex-girlfriend who had died of a massive brain tumor, (caused by, guess what, yep Cancer.) you'd tend to stare. And while you are staring at this poltergeist and wondering why the hell she has decided to haunt you, you realize that this really isn't the dead girl you used to date, but a very pretty girl resembling mid 2000's Natalie Portman, dragging along a small tank dispending oxygen, hooked to a transparent cannula around her very pretty face.

I guess I'd been staring a bit too long, because before I knew it, she was looking back at me, then looking away. I realize I should have stopped staring, it would've been the polite thing to do, but my mind was currently occupied on other such things, such as how do I get this beautiful girl to talk to me.

And then, she started walking toward me.

No, she was walking toward the empty chair next to Isaac, who was now sitting next to me and eating a questionable looking cookie.

Finally, Patrick, the leader of this circle of support regaled us with the tale of his battle with the heinous foe cancer and how he emerged, one ball less. And all the while I'm staring at this gorgeous pixie haired mistress with a two foot tall liter of oxygen by her side when I realized that she was staring back.

Now, when you are staring at someone, though it's a bit creepy, nothing is more awkward until they look up and you maintain the hell called, eye contact. So, I offered her a smile and looked immediately away. And when I look back, that girl is smirking.

Dang.

"Isaac," Patrick says. "Perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a troubling time."

"Yeah," Isaac said. "I'm Isaac." Why, yes you are. "I'm seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse," Like the inevitable cease of consciousness, but I don't say anything. "But yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Augustus. So, yeah. There's nothing you can do about it."

For the last part of his speech, he stared down at his hands and Patrick smiles sympathetically.

"We're here for you Isaac," He says. "Let Isaac here it guys."

"We're here for you,"

Next, a boy named Michael who was twelve years old said that he was okay. Then Lida, who suffered from appendicular cancer who felt strong, and a few others who felt basically the same, okay, then me.

"My name is Augustus waters. I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm here today at Isaac's request."

"And how are you feeling?" Patrick asked.

"Oh, I'm grand." I say with a smile. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

Next was the smiling girl who only said. "My name is Hazel. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay."

Explains the oxygen, I think as the group started to talk. Fights were told, families grieved and celebrated, tears were shed when Patrick said.

"Augustus, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."

I blink. "My fears?"

"Yes,"

"I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

Isaac grinned. "Too soon."

"Was that insensitive?" I asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."

While Isaac started to laugh Patrick tried to rein control. "Augustus, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did."

"Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"

Then, she raised her hand in that awkward, i-kind-of-want-to-be-picked-but-at-the-same-time-don't-look-at-me way, and Patrick pounced on her. "Hazel!"

And she looked straight at me and said. "There will come a time, when all of us are dead. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you." Ouch. "Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this." She gestured to the group. "Will be for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe its millions of years way, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be a time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

Damn. This beautiful girl, was not only such but smart, smarter than I was and probably smarter than most of the people I would ever get to know. She just pointed out that the world was going to end and that this was all pointless, in an eloquent and simple set of words.

And she was till watching me.

"Goddamn," I said quietly, when I'd finally found my voice. "Aren't you something else."

And at that point, I knew. I wanted, no needed, to know Hazel.