The Fault in Our Stars – John Green

The hospital smelled like lemon disinfectant and quiet despair. Room 217 had been Mia’s reluctant second home for the past five months—an off-white cell with a view of a tree that only blossomed on one stubborn branch.

Seventeen years old and riddled with terminal lymphoma, Mia had learned to carry her grief like a quiet companion. She didn’t cry anymore. Tears were for people who thought they could still win. She had moved past that.

Then came **Elias**.

He rolled into Room 217 on a Tuesday morning, pushed by a nurse who smiled too brightly. One leg amputated from a childhood bone cancer that had returned in the lungs, he wore a hoodie covered in Sharpie sketches—planets, wolves, quotes in foreign languages—and carried a paperback copy of *The Little Prince.*

“Hi,” he said simply, wheeling beside her bed. “I’m Elias. I guess we’re roommates now.”

Mia glanced at him. “That sucks for you.”

Elias grinned. “On the contrary. I was told you were fascinating and mean.”

Mia turned her head toward the window, trying not to smile.

---

Elias was like a spark in a dark room. He made everyone laugh—even the nurses. His laugh was the kind that made you want to laugh too, just because it felt like something important was being shared. He asked questions no one had the courage to ask. “What do you want to be remembered for?” “Have you ever really been in love?” “If you had one perfect day left, what would you do?”

They talked for hours. About life and death. About the stars. About her favorite books and his fascination with astronomy. He believed that stars weren’t just burning gases but memory keepers. “Maybe we don’t die. Maybe we just… become part of the light.”

Mia started to feel something like warmth again. Not quite hope—that felt dangerous. But something gentler. Like she was being remembered while still alive.

---

Three weeks after they met, Elias convinced the hospital staff to let them out for a night under the stars.

Wrapped in blankets, they lay on the rooftop, an oxygen tank beside them and the city glowing in the distance.

"Look," Elias said, pointing upward. "That’s Cassiopeia. She’s a queen trapped in the sky for her vanity."

Mia smiled faintly. “Sounds familiar.”

Elias turned to her, his face serious now. “You don’t belong in this story, Mia.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re not just a girl with cancer. You’re a girl who paints worlds with her words. Who memorizes poems. Who listens like she’s gathering pieces of people to keep safe.”

“No one remembers people like me,” she whispered.

“I will,” he said.

---

The cancer spread faster than expected. Elias began coughing blood by mid-October.

“I think I’m running out of stars,” he joked weakly one night, his voice raspy.

Mia sat by his bed, reading aloud from *The Little Prince.* She didn’t say the things she wanted to—like how she had started dreaming again, because of him. Or how her pain felt smaller when he smiled. Or how unfair it was that someone who taught her to live again was now dying in front of her.

She just read.

When he closed his eyes for the last time, his hand still clutched the corner of the page. Mia didn't cry. Instead, she looked at the ceiling tiles, as if trying to see through them into the stars.

---

Elias’s funeral was small. A handful of nurses came. His mother cried silently, holding a folded drawing he had made of Cassiopeia, with Mia's name written in the stars.

A week later, Mia received a package.

Inside was Elias’s sketch-covered hoodie, his marked-up copy of *The Little Prince*, and a letter:

> *Mia,*

>

> *You once said no one would remember someone like you. But that’s not true. You changed me. You made dying feel less like disappearing and more like becoming something greater.*

>

> *Don’t let the stars have the last word.*

>

> *Find a way to leave light behind.*

>

> *–Elias*

---

Years later, long after her cancer had miraculously gone into remission, Mia stood in front of a crowd at a book launch. The title: *When Love Defies the End.*

It was a novel about two teenagers who met in the shadows of life and found light in each other. She had written Elias into every page, not as a boy who died, but as one who taught the world how to live.

She closed her reading with a quote.

> *"We are not the fault in the stars, but the reason they shine."*

That night, as she walked alone under the sky, she looked up and smiled.

There, among the constellations, was Cassiopeia—eternal and beautiful.

And beside it, she imagined one extra star, burning just a little brighter than the rest.

---