55 pages • 1 hour read •
Hopeless
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Chapters 10-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Wednesday, August 29, 2012, 6:15 am”
On her morning run, Sky thinks about Holder. When Holder appears on the sidewalk, Sky is “stupidly, pathetically happy” (81). He assures Sky that he only asked about other boys because he felt from the moment they met that this was something different. The two promise to be honest with each other. Sky asks whether Holder beat up a gay student. Yes, he says, and “if the bastard was standing in front of me right now, I’d do it again” (84). Seeing anger in his eyes, Sky says she cannot run with him today.
Sky receives a long letter from Six in Italy, the first, Six assures her, of many. Six tells Sky she has already met a guy, named Lorenzo, and then she tells Sky how much she misses talking to her.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Friday, August 31, 2012, 11:20 am”
The pranks continue at school, but Sky does not care that much. She decides against trying out for the track team. High school has been pretty much the nightmare she thought it might be. Brecklin tells her that he saw Holder peeling off some of the worst notes left on her locker.
Grayson, one of the boys interested in pursuing Sky, meets Sky at her car after school. The talk is awkward as Sky does not appreciate Grayson’s crude behavior. She tells him, “Can you not take a hint? I told you I’m not going to sleep with you” (93). Undeterred, Grayson tries to kiss Sky. But Sky notices Holder watching them from his car.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Friday, August 31, 2012, 4:50 pm”
Karen is leaving for the weekend to go to a flea market to sell her homeopathic medicines. Sky settles down to bake a cake when Holder appears at the door. Sky is immediately aware of how she must look, dusted with flour and her hair unwashed. Undeterred, Holder asks about Sky’s dad and whether he is alive. Sky explains she has not seen him since Karen adopted her when she was three.
Sky offers Holder a tour of the house. They end up in Sky’s bedroom. Sky notices a change in Holder’s expression. “What do you want, Holder?” (103). Holder lays back on her bed and shares that he had no idea the kid he beat up was gay, that it was not a hate crime. “I beat him up because he was an asshole” (105). And, he tells her, he did not spend a year in juvie—he went to live with his father in Austin. Those were just mean-spirited cafeteria rumors.
Running to the kitchen just in time to prevent the cake from burning, Holder and Sky stand close to each other. Holder asks why she was irritated when Grayson kissed her. She said the kiss did not interest her. She says she has never felt what other kids feel when they make out, nor has she felt a desire to have sex: “I don’t feel anything” (110).
Without TV or the Internet, the two read until Sky falls asleep leaning against Holder on the sofa. When Sky awakens, the kitchen is cleaned, and Holder left a funny, if snarky, note. Sky knows in her heart Holder is something special.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Saturday, September 1, 2021, 5:05 pm”
Holder texts Sky and invites himself over for dinner. He arrives carrying two bags of groceries. He is going cook spaghetti and meatballs. Sky’s heart palpitates: “My knees feel as if they are about to give out” (118). The talk is simultaneously easy and nervous until Sky says, “I don’t know whatever this is but it’s a little more than just two friends hanging out” (121). But when Holder leans in, presumably to kiss her, he stops. “I’m not kissing you tonight” (123), he says. He wants to kiss her, but he wants the first kiss to be special: “I need to know that you’re feeling every single thing that I’m feeling when my lips touch yours” (125).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Saturday, September 1, 2012, 7:15 pm”
Under the guise of playing a game called Dinner Quest, in which a person has to answer a question, Sky asks Holder about his sister. He tells her he and Leslie were twins and that she died by suicide after an overdose of prescription medication just over a year earlier. In turn, Holder asks Sky about her father. Sky says after her mother died in a car accident when Sky was three, her father was not interested in raising her alone. He gave her over to foster care, and she lucked out when Karen adopted her. Sky then asks Holder about his tattoo—the single word “hopeless.” He says, “It’s a reminder of all the people I’ve let down in my life” (133). Without coaxing, Holder tells Sky the boy he beat up had made a crack about his sister, calling her a coward for dying by suicide. Holder adds, “Les was the bravest f***ing person I’ve ever known. It takes a lot of guts to do what she did” (135).
That night as they snuggle on the couch reading, the two begin to flirt with caresses. Finally, Holder kisses Sky: “It feels like the whole room just turned into a Tilt-a-Whirl” (139). The two begin to explore each other bodies. They kiss with increasing passion. For Sky, “it’s game on” (141). As they make out, Sky feels “[l]ike the earth had been shifted off its axis and Holder is now the core” (142). Sky does not want to stop. She digs her heels into the bed and her nails into Holder’s back. When they pause, Sky listens to the warm silence as their breathing calms. After Holder leaves, he sends a text, a single word: “Incredible” (147).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Thirteen Years Earlier”
A girl cries on the porch of her house. A boy and his sister who live next door try to comfort her. The girl offers her a stretchy purple bracelet she made. The boy, struggling to help, whispers to the girl, “Don’t worry…he won’t live forever” (149).
Chapter 16 Summary: “Monday, September 3, 2012, 7:20 am”
Before Sky heads to school, she takes a homemade purple bracelet out of a box where she keeps it. She’s not sure where she got it; she figures it’s from one of the friends she met during her two years in foster care. But today, for some reason, she feels like wearing it.
Seeing Holder at school is a bit awkward. Sky notices Holder has trimmed his hair a bit. Sky fantasizes about kissing Holder right there in the corridor to “show him just how adorable he looks” (155). But that afternoon when Holder notices her bracelet, his attitude changes abruptly. He asks her where she got it. Thinking he assumes it is from some guy, Sky assures him she got it when she was in foster care. But Holder storms off, leaving a stunned and hurt Sky.
That night, a confused Sky wonders whether the Holder she made out with was even the real Holder at all.
Chapters 10-16 Analysis
In these chapters, the novel continues ostensibly to be a typical Young Adult romance. The focus rests on the developing relationship between Sky and Holder. Without knowing the backstory of the two, the reader gets caught up in the flirty and familiar rhythms of their relationship—that is, The Dynamics of First Love.
The elements of first love make necessary their pledge to be completely honest with each other. Given the revelations of their past, the pledge can seem ironic. But the promise to be honest begins the novel’s movement toward revealing The Power of Hope. The promise foretells the closing chapter when the characters rocked by the revelations about their childhood, Sky and Holder reaffirm that they can only begin the difficult work of recovery through the promise that, in a world marked by lies and sustained by secrets, they will be honest with each other.
Their first make-out sessions capture the magical hesitant movements of should-we-shouldn’t-we first love. When Holder comes by and catches Sky dusted with flour and decidedly not stylish, capturing her just the way she is, the two nevertheless find the magnetic pull of young love. Sky recalls, “I pretty much relinquished control to [Holder] the moment he walked through the front door. Now, I’m nothing but putty in his hands” (124).
The novel juxtaposes two other relationships to underscore how rare and beautiful the love between Sky and Holder is: There is the flirtatious Six telling Sky that she is already infatuated with a boy in Italy, even though she has only been there a few days, and there is the crude gamesmanship of Grayson, who fancies himself something of a player. Six wants to explore lots of possibilities, letting her heart direct her. Grayson, in his assumption that Sky certainly finds him sexually irresistible, exposes the typical teenager impulsiveness, all directed by an alpha male who has no clue how offensive his “game” actually is.
Set against those more typical teenage love storylines is the night that Sky and Holder make spaghetti. The conversation is carefree and fun, the brushes against each other flirtatious and tectonic. Holder’s steamy disquisition on the importance of the first kiss marks this relationship as different, weightier, and more consequential. If this is not how love is, it is surely how love ought to be: respectful, passionate, caring, and hungry all at once, the perfect synchronicity of first love.
Again, these chapters are set against the growing feeling of something not quite right. Telling Sky a kind of half-truth about his fight with the student and then revealing he was never sent to juvenile detention is the first evidence of The Corrosive Effects of Secrets. In turn, Sky tries to explain to Holder that despite opportunities, she has never understood what it means to want sex. For some reason, the more a boy tries to make out with her, the less interested she is.
But it is in the first of the novel’s italicized interchapters, set 13 years earlier, that the narrative begins to explore emotions deeper than the magical wonder of first love. Readers are given a vignette of a girl crying inconsolably in the middle of the day and her best friends, twins who live next door, trying without success to ease her pain. The boy’s cryptic reassurance—“he won’t live forever”— is the novel’s first indication that novel is dealing with The Impact of Sexual Abuse.
Only the bracelet that Sky impulsively decides to wear to school links her to the girl crying on the front porch. In turn, Holder’s angry and inexplicable reaction to seeing the bracelet suggests a backstory neither Sky nor the reader has. Readers suspect he has begun to realize that this new girl in school, for whom he has such a powerful feeling, may be more than she appears. It is important to remember that Holder at this point is haunted by two failures: the failure to protect the little girl who lived next door, and his failure to sense the depth of his sister’s pain before she died by suicide. If this is in fact the girl who lived next door, then much of the trauma of his childhood is coming back. Holder’s deep-seated sense of failure underscores his emotional explanation of the tattoo: it represents his sense of letting down the people he most cares about.
Against this rising evidence of secrets, the story of first love begins to evolve into a story of emotional survival.
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