55 pages • 1 hour read
Hopeless
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Chapters 17-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Tuesday, September 4, 2012, 6:15 am”
The next morning, Sky awakens uncertain whether she and Holder will run together. When he shows up, Sky is angry. She runs faster and faster ahead of him until, as she nears her house, she collapses. Momentarily the two lie side by side in the grass. Holder quietly threads his pinky into Sky’s fingers.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Friday, September 28, 2021, 12:05 pm”
It has been a month since Sky and Holder made out. Holder maintains a distance now. Sky is confused: “I know he felt it…I know he still feels it” (166).
When Brecklin gives Sky an e-reader as an early birthday present, the two hug. Sky is aware of Holder watching them with an “endearing” smile. As Sky wonders if he is jealous, “[w]aves of sadness crash against [Sky’s] core” (168).
Chapter 19 Summary: “Friday, September 28, 11:50 am”
Tomorrow will be Sky’s 18th birthday. Karen is gone again to a flea market. That night as she struggles to sleep, Sky hears something—maybe someone at her bedroom window. Holder quietly comes in and then slides into bed with her. Sky is confused: “There are parts of him I love, parts of him I hate, parts that terrify me” (171). She tries to tell him how angry she is with him, but he kisses her. He says he understands her anger but that he needs her to want him there more. They make out until Sky can no longer feel her lips. The two fall asleep in each other’s arms.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Saturday, September 29, 2012, 8:40 am”
Holder is not in bed when Sky wakes up; he is downstairs making a pancake breakfast. Feeling daring, Sky asks Holder what is most on her mind: given his unpredictable behavior, she asks if he uses drugs. Holder dismisses the idea. He does not want to let Sky down as he has everyone else he has ever known. Holder is uneasy with the idea of the two being in love. He tells her his anger in the lunchroom was not jealousy or pettiness, but he is not exactly sure what it was. He will not apologize because he is certain he has Sky’s best interests at heart. “This feeling I have is so much more than like” (181), he says. Playfully, the two coin a new word to describe this feeling: They take “like” and “love” and invent the word “live.” “I live you so much” (183), Holder says.
Chapter 21 Summary: “September 29, 2012, 9:20 am”
Sky and Holder spend the day together. They decide they are now officially a couple. They share a kiss—their first official kiss as a couple. Sky feels special: “I’ve never been savored like this before, and it’s absolutely beautiful” (186). After Holder departs to get ready for their day together, Sky calls Six in Italy and tells her all about Holder. “You sound annoyingly happy” (188), Six says.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Saturday, September 29, 2012, 10:25 am”
Holder shows up with Brecklin to take Sky to the flea market where her mother runs her herbal booth. At the outdoor market, the three move about the rows of booths looking for a gift for Sky’s birthday. They meet Karen and her longtime boyfriend Jack. Karen takes Sky aside and expresses her uneasiness over Holder’s age and the fact that she will not be home that night. Sky dismisses her concerns: “I am eighteen and I have a boyfriend. Big deal” (196).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Saturday, September 29, 2012, 10:15 pm”
On the way home from the flea market, Holder drives Sky out to a remote spot outside of town that runs alongside the runway of the town’s tiny airport. They scale the security fence. Holder assures Sky it is okay because his stepfather runs the airport. They settle down next to the runway, lie back, and take in the starry night sky. The quiet envelops them.
When Holder drops off Sky, he says it would be best if he did not stay the night. They exchange a passionate kiss even as Sky begins to “melt into him” (202). Before he departs, Holder says how content he is that he finally found Sky. Sky is puzzled but relishes her new “live life” (204).
Chapter 24 Summary: “Monday, October 22, 2012, 12:05 pm”
A month of happiness with Holder has made Sky certain of her love. But when a kid in the lunchroom taunts Holder about the company he is keeping—namely, Sky—Sky sees the angry Holder come out. She fears a fight, but Holder walks away. He and Sky meet at his car in the parking lot, and Holder tells her the kid was the brother of the student he beat up. He begins to cry. He confesses he should never have beaten up the student for saying what he did about Les, and he does not want Sky to be part of his past.
Caught up in emotions, he tells Sky he cannot forgive his sister for what he perceives as her leaving him, but he still loves her: “I’m so tired of hating her because it’s tearing me down” (211). Sky assures him it is alright to have conflicted feelings about Les, but that Holder needs to break free of the emotional burden of her death. It is exactly what Holder needs to hear. Sky thinks, “This moment has just merged pieces of our soul together” (212).
Chapter 25 Summary: “Friday, October 26, 2012, 3:40 pm”
Sky accidentally sends a text intended for Six to Holder. The text says she thinks she and Holder might at last have sex that night. Holder assures Sky that whatever night they consummate their love will be the “best night of [his] life,” but he needs her to be sure of his love.
Holder comes over that night—Karen is gone again. But Sky notices right away Holder is a bit drunk. He collapses on her bed, but he as he goes to sleep, he mutters, “I love you, Hope” (218). Confused, Sky asks herself, “Who the hell is Hope?” (218).
Chapter 26 Summary: Thirteen years earlier
A girl hides under the heavy blankets of her bed. She dreads hearing the doorknob turn. She is just about asleep when she hears the knob.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Saturday, October 27, 2012, Sometime in the middle of the night”
Sky wakes up crying. Holder tries to comfort her, telling her she was having a bad dream. Sky is not so sure. She clings to Holder.
Chapters 17-27 Analysis
The story of first love in these chapters deepens. Perhaps the most charming—and most telling—moment in the narrative of Sky and Holder is the conversation they have in which Holder despairs that he only has two choices to describe his feelings for Sky: “liking” her seems too shallow, too uncommitted, and too momentary; but “loving” her seems too uncomplicated, too settled, and too conventional. Sky does not want to just love Holder. She wants “to start feeling life the same way he does” and in turn to help this “hopeless boy…who’s pouring his heart out to me” bring feeling back into his life (182). The conception of their feelings now becomes dramatic and even epic. The two struggle, albeit playfully, to find a word that might capture the breadth of their love. If like is too easy and love is too traditional, they fuse the words together into “live.” “I live you,” they say to one another, a suggestion of how completely they have merged their souls. To live, Sky says, they must “live” each other.
No scene better captures The Dynamics of First Love than the scene in which Sky and Holder sneak into the airport’s runway system and lie under the stars, relishing the quiet they share. These stars ultimately recall the plastic stars in Sky’s bedroom as a child that she would concentrate on while her father abused her. In the scene with Holder at the airport, however, Sky taps into her feeling that, in contemplating the sky and sharing the stars, she and Holder are beginning to redefine their emotional life in grand, cosmic terms. That quiet night along the runway, then, becomes a tipping point in Sky finding her way to The Power of Hope. When the two intertwine their fingers, that moment will be echoed in a memory from their childhood and then reintroduced in the closing chapters when Holder and Sky, now both survivors of Sky’s father, commit to each other.
Central to that evolution into “liveness” is Holder’s emotional confession, brought about by the unexpected showdown with the student in the cafeteria, about the circumstances of his sister’s suicide. At first Sky thinks the student is another insensitive kid more than willing to taunt Holder as an outsider. It is more than that. Holder tells a stunned Sky that the boy is the brother of the kid he beat up, and that attacking his brother still haunts him. Holder reveals how he struggles with his conflicted emotions over Les’s death. At this point, Holder does not have the complete story. He does not know yet that his sister was struggling with The Impact of Sexual Abuse, having been a victim of John Davis’ predatory actions. Holder’s confusion and self-loathing are manifestations of The Corrosive Effects of Secrets.
Key to the effects of secrets is Sky’s uneasiness over Holder’s apparent contradictory behavior—his gentleness and sympathy on the one hand and his trigger temper and violent outbursts on the other. She wonders which Holder will show up on which days. Here, when she asks outright if he is on drugs, she implies that she is searching for some kind of conventional answer to what is so puzzling about Holder’s character. He seems to be at war with himself, unable to make his peace. Only later will Sky—and the reader—understand that this volatile personality is not some tough guy persona Holder is playing, nor is it a manifestation of substance abuse. Rather, like Sky and Les, Holder is a survivor of The Impact of Sexual Abuse, perhaps not physically but emotionally. He is collateral damage from the pain inflicted on both his sister and Sky.
Central to that unfolding narrative of sexual abuse is the story relayed in the italicized interludes. In those brief chapters, the novel further exposes The Impact of Sexual Abuse. The story of Sky’s abuse is keyed to the turning of her bedroom’s doorknob. As a five-year-old child, what her father does to her is beyond her understanding. She understands only the most basic element of her abuse: her father, whom she knows she must love, is hurting her. Unable to explain why her father is doing this to her, she creates the only causal explanation her young mind can: when the doorknob turns, her father is coming. That sound encapsulates a child’s feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and trauma.
When in the next chapter (Chapter 27), Sky wakes up in tears, readers understand that the previous interlude is her dream, and that her dreams have returned her to those nights when she waited with growing horror for the sound of the knob turning. For now, Sky refuses to follow the implications of her dreams. “I don’t want to remember it” (221), she tearfully tells Holder. That Holder, comforting her, assures her it was a dream marks that Sky is only beginning her journey to authentic healing.
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