55 pages • 1 hour read
Hopeless
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Chapters 28-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “Saturday, October 27, 2012, 8:20 pm”
Sky and Holder spend the day together at his house. Sky wants to find out about Hope, figuring she is some ex-girlfriend. When they are walking into Holder’s house, Sky casually asks about Hope. Holder’s reaction is immediate and alarmed. He blames the alcohol and says he has never known anyone named Hope. They kiss, and Sky feels her entire body respond. She wonders whether Holder knows she is a virgin.
The two move to Holder’s bedroom. They begin to make out, Sky “hanging on every single word [Holder’s] saying, not wanting to miss a single second of whatever it is he is doing” (230-31). She feels the hardness in his jeans. Sky twists her body beneath his and, as they continue to kiss, she begins to whimper quietly. Holder hesitates, and Sky insists she knows what she is doing and wants to be here. She says, “This is not me saying yes. This is me saying please” (235). They quickly shed clothes and then, skin to skin, Sky feels their closeness and begins to tremble. Then, out of nowhere, a voice in her head starts to count. She closes her eyes and then starts to cry and shake. She panics and feels herself go limp.
Holder stops. He goes to the kitchen to get Sky some water. Alone, Sky leaves the bedroom and wanders down the hall. She enters a room she determines must be Les’s. It feels eerie, but Sky looks around. She sees a framed photo of Les and Holder and is stunned when she recognizes the white-framed house in the background. Without warning, memories of the house flood back to her: the color of the living room walls, the swing set in the backyard. Then more difficult memories come back of being in the backyard and playing with Holder and Les.
Holder hesitates. He stumbles through an explanation. He knew when he saw Sky’s bracelet who she was: that they had been neighbors growing up in Austin, that Les and Sky were friends, and that Les had given her the bracelet. Angry and confused, Sky asks who Hope was, knowing in her heart that she must be Hope. Holder confirms her suspicion. Sky heads outside, trying to understand what all this means.
In tears, Sky accuses Holder of emotional cruelty and dishonesty: “You knew who I was and for some reason thought it would be funny to string me along” (249). Holder drives her home without any explanation.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Thirteen years earlier”
Hope plays hide and seek with Les and Holder. The game collapses into laughter, and Holder says, “Hope and Les…Hopeless. The two of you are hopeless” (252).
Chapter 30 Summary: “Saturday, October 27, 2012, 11:20p.m.”
Before he drops off Sky, Holder tells her they need to talk. But first, he says, they need to kiss, which they do. Sky fears this might be their last kiss.
Holder tells Sky that they were neighbors back in Austin more than 13 years ago. Her name was Hope, and the three of them were inseparable. Though only six, he had a crush on Hope/Sky. When they first met at the convenience store, however, he hoped that Sky was not Hope because he only knew Hope as a victim of a kidnapping. But the bracelet confirmed it.
He tells Sky that Les gave her the bracelet to cheer her up one day when Sky could not stop crying. Holder noticed how often Hope cried; her father made her so unhappy since her mother’s death. That day, Holder tells Sky, a car pulled up and Hope got in. Holder never tried to stop her but rather just watched the car drive away. He realized too late Hope had been kidnapped.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Saturday, October 27, 2012, 11:57 am”
Sky reels from the revelation that she was kidnapped, not adopted. She wonders why she couldn’t be like a character in a book where the plot makes everything clear. Holder tries to hold her and kiss her, but she slaps him. He tries to calm her down. She thinks, “Everything I thought I knew has been a lie” (265). Holder says he hesitated because he feared revealing that Karen kidnapped her would send Karen to jail and Sky back to her father until she turns 18—her birthday is not for six more months. Holder tells her to take the night to process the news.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Sunday, October 28, 2012, 12:37 am”
The next morning, Sky finds that Karen has returned from her weekend flea market trip. She is upset—she found Sky’s phone and read her sexually charged texts to Holder. Karen forbids Sky from seeing Holder anymore. Sky goes on the defensive. She asks why she has been denied a phone, the Internet, and a television, and why she was homeschooled. Karen says as long as Sky lives under her roof, it will be her rules, not Sky’s. Sky falls back on her bed and counts the stars on her ceiling.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Thirteen years earlier”
Sky remembers the car pulling up and the woman telling her that her father was waiting for her. Trusting, she climbs into the car, and the woman introduces herself as Karen. Karen tells her that for a while the girl will be living with her.
Chapters 28-33 Analysis
In these chapters, against Holder and Sky near-lovemaking night, secrets begin to come out and the lies that have shaped Sky’s sense of herself and her world begin to unravel. She wonders, “Who is Hope?”
In the novel’s centerpiece chapter, Chapter 28, Sky at last reveals The Impact of Sexual Abuse. Unlike the clumsy flirtations and casual advances of the wannabe player Grayson, Holder offers Sky the kind of love she has always dreamed of. The two share interests; they communicate on a deep level; and they share secrets and have formed a bond that in turn delights and terrifies Sky because of its intensity and its absoluteness.
As the two begin to move toward their first night of physical intimacy, everything seems right, it all seems perfect until unwanted thoughts crowd into Sky’s head. Without explanation, just as Holder positions himself between her legs, Sky begins to count. She leaves the moment entirely. Readers know what Sky does not know—that she is hurtling back to those horrific nights when her father raped her. Now, Sky goes from deliriums of pleasure to panic. Suddenly, after enjoying every kiss, she wants only for Holder to finish and leave her alone. The full-blown panic attack stops everything: “I have no idea what just happened” (240).
The novel has reached its tipping point. Sky needs to begin the sobering work of recovering her past, reclaiming her identity, and dealing with her fragmented memories. The process begins when she goes into Les’s bedroom and sees the framed photo and realizes she knows the house, its rooms and its backyard. Holder, as gently as he can, tells Sky the truth about their childhood: that she is Hope, that she was Les’s friend, and that Les gave her the bracelet. The flood of memories are too much for Sky to process. The Corrosive Effects of Secrets leave Sky helpless and confused: “I don’t know if I need to cry or scream or sleep or run” (246).
This section closes with the emergence of Karen, whose heartbreaking story Sky will get only later. Karen’s indignation over her discovery of Sky’s secret phone and the steamy texts Sky sent to Six signals now to Sky not so much the love and concern of an over-protective mother but rather part of a nefarious scheme dating back to before she could remember. No Internet, no phones, no television, no social media, and even homeschooling now appear to be not gestures of love but rather strategies for confinement. Sky sees that Karen ensured that Sky would never chance to hear about poor little Hope Davis, missing now for more than 13 years.
The section then ends with secrets half-revealed, suspicions half-confirmed, and lies half-taken back. Holder is a manipulative liar; Sky’s stepmother a conniving kidnapper; and Sky herself a victim of her own childish trust in getting into a car driven by a friendly lady she did not know, but whose car promised freedom at last from her father.
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