Hopeless

When Sky first talks to Holder in the convenience store and struggles against the tantalizing waves of attraction she is feeling for the first time, she notices that Holder’s muscled forearm is decorated with an elaborate tattoo of the word HOPELESS in careful, tiny script. Sky immediately misunderstands the tattoo’s meaning, sure that Holder has branded himself as a warning to any potential friend or girlfriend that he is an unredeemable, hopeless cause.

For Holder, the tattoo means something else. It is a constant reminder of his inadequacies in relationships, and how he always lets down the people he most wants to help. “It’s a reminder of the people I’ve let down in my life,” he says. He admits to Sky that the feeling clouds his every moment.

But what begins as a symbol of Holder’s poor self-esteem and his sense of futility emerges by the end of the novel as a powerful reflection of Holder’s reclaimed identity and the promise, going forward, of finding in love the possibility of redemption and hope. As Sky recovers her memories and Holder begins to see he played a part in her survival, he sees his past as not something he should regret, ignore, or bury. His past need not be his brand—like the tattoo—serving as a constant reminder of his inadequacies.

In a clever bit of wordplay, Holder sees with stunning clarity that his tattoo defines who he is; his self is the result of the intervention of two amazing yet troubled girls: his sister Les and the neighbor girl Hope. He is the sum of his past, as painful as that is. He is Hope + Les, the tattoo now symbolizing his recovery of his fullest identity and his newfound confidence in not dismissing his past nor apologizing for it. Rather, the tattoo now symbolizes how Holder can accept his past—his failure to intuit the depth of his twin sister’s agony and his failure to find a way to help the girl next door.

Les’s homemade bracelet that she gives to Sky when she is a child symbolizes the continuity between childhood and adulthood; for Sky to ever know authentic peace, she must come to terms with her difficult childhood.

The morning after her first intense make-out session with Holder, Sky, feeling nostalgic, digs out from her box of knicks-knacks a bracelet she believes a girl gave her during the two years she was in foster care. Now deliriously happy and certain she has finally found her way to a new life, she feels like connecting with that sad girl who, she remembers, cried a lot. As she slides the bracelet on her wrist, she understands that girl is gone: “That girl isn’t anything like I am today” (150).

It is a redemption too easy. The same bracelet that Holder sees later that day begins Sky’s painful, difficult excavation into the reality of her past. Holder knows what Sky does not: that the bracelet was a gift from his twin sister in the hopes of cheering up the neighbor girl who lived in fear of her father. As such, far from testifying to how easily Sky has transitioned from her childhood, the bracelet demonstrates how much Sky is still trapped by her past, and how far she must go to begin to heal. When Holder sees the bracelet, he knows the truth of what he suspects—that this homeschooled girl in his senior class is the girl who was kidnapped 13 years before.

The bracelet continues to peel away the layers of lies and evasions that have protected Sky from who she really is. In this, the bracelet symbolizes the empathetic concern her friends had over her treatment by her father, and how much they wanted to help her; the bracelet, Les tells Sky/Hope, is to remind her she is never alone. At the moment when Sky believes, wrongly, that her past can somehow be completely over, the bracelet symbolizes that the past must be engaged, explored, and acknowledged if recovery is ever to occur. When Holder sees the bracelet, he understands its import. That moment is the tipping point for Holder, who also learns that the past is always an element of any present moment.

The novel takes place under stars. At critical moments, as she struggles to process the rush of revelations about her childhood, Sky heads out to think under an open Texas night sky, inevitably spangled with stars. This occurs most notably in Chapter 53 when Sky sorts out what Karen told her about her “kidnapping.” When she and Holder spend a magical evening alongside the airport runway, they share the sky full of stars and sink gratefully into a silence so compelling it brings them together, each in their own world, joined at the soul. In addition, Sky has decorated her bedroom with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that, in turn, recall her similarly decorated childhood bedroom.

Stars symbolize a grateful space apart, where both Sky and Holder put their lives on pause and become part of the vast cosmos free-wheeling overhead. In this, stars symbolize perspective, a chance to position a life within that cosmic frame, and an opportunity to put even the most horrific personal traumas and tragedies within a therapeutic context. In a novel in which hearts churn with frightening intensity, the stars offer both Holder and Sky a necessary place apart. Stars settle the soul, quiet the heart, and make open the path to another person. Sky understands, watching Holder get lost in the stars, that calm contemplation alone cannot repair either of them.

Those plastic stars in Sky’s childhood bedroom become her way of stepping out of her young body while her father sexually abuses her: “If I keep thinking about the stars, maybe it will help my heart from beating so hard and my tummy from hurting so much” (303). In the closing chapter, her memory intact, Sky understands the importance of the stars—how they provided her with a privileged space for surviving the horrors of her repeated abuse. During the abuse, she counts the stars and traces their five points in her mind—anything to distract her from the ongoing violation. In this, the stars, whether in the sky or pasted to her ceiling, are powerful agencies of spiritual inspiration. As Sky observes later in the novel, stars “remind [her] of Hope” (400).

The capitalized letter suggests the word refers as much to herself—as a lost and wounded child named Hope—as it does to the will not to surrender.