Losing Hope

Holder meets Sky in front of her house the next morning to run before school. She admits to being unnerved about how much he knows about her. She seems afraid that he is stalking her. He assures her that he is not and tries to talk her into staying in school even though she hates it. Sky reminds him that he mentioned quitting school. They decide to both make an effort. At school later, Sky tells Holder that she has heard rumors about him, the most disconcerting of which being that he was sent to “juvi” after beating up a gay student the previous year. As they talk, Grayson arrives and stands by Sky as if they are a couple.

At lunch, Holder eats with Daniel. They discuss the school gossip about Sky, and Holder—still touchy about the rumors surrounding him and Les—decries the fact that the students won’t stop gossiping. Seeing Sky, Holder then confronts her, asking if she and Grayson are together. Offended by his personal questions, Sky implies that if Holder thinks that Grayson is an “asshole” then maybe Holder is one, too.

Later that day, Holder heads to his car to find Grayson leaning against it. Grayson then tells Holder that Sky is “off-limits.” Wanting to start a fight but realizing that Grayson is not really a threat and not worth the trouble that would come from a confrontation, Holder gets in his car and drives away.

In a dream sequence, Holder is confused when he sees Les on the kitchen floor because she has been dead for 13 months. She begs for his help, calling him Dean, then her voice transforms into that of a child. In Les’s place, Hope is now there. She exclaims that Holder has “found” her, only it is not the voice of a little girl any longer. She speaks with Sky’s voice.

Holder wakes in his bed covered in sweat and gasping for breath after his nightmare.

Unable to sleep after the nightmare, Holder tosses and turns in bed, then puts on his running shoes and begins the run to Sky’s house early in the morning, even though he previously decided against running with her again. He arrives at her house. As they stretch for their run, Sky makes Holder think that she believes the school rumors about him. She assumes that he believes that she is a “slut” because that is the rumor going around about her. Neither gets what they want from the conversation and both decide that they don’t want to run together that morning. Holder regrets not fully explaining himself to her and questions why he cares what Sky things of him.

In a letter to Les, Holder apologizes for making her be friends with girls in the past because he liked them. Then he wishes that she were still alive so that he could ask her to get close to Sky. As he writes, he has the idea to go back to Sky’s house and set things right.

That next Friday night, Holder shows up at Sky’s house unannounced and finds her making cookies. Holder asks Sky questions about her family and finds out that her mother is very young and her father is out of the picture. This worries him because the gaps in her past make it more likely that she is Hope. He makes a joke about her bedroom window, implying that she sneaks out a lot. She takes it the wrong way, thinking that he is calling her a “slut” like the other students do, and asks him to leave. When she tries to pull him out of her room, Holder notices that she grows flustered by their closeness. They then lay on her bed and he explains that he only found out that the guy he beat up was gay after the fact. He also makes clear that he does not think that she is promiscuous, but he asks her why she lets Grayson kiss her if she doesn’t like him. Sky tells Holder that she has never felt sexual attraction and instead feels numbness when she makes out with a guy. She likes feeling the numbness. However, when she is with Holder, there is real attraction. They lie on the bed together and she reads to him from a romance novel until she falls asleep. As she sleeps, Holder kisses her gently on the lips before leaving.

In a letter to Les, Holder tells her how much he likes Sky but admits that he is worried that she is sometimes emotionally detached. He is afraid that when they kiss, she won’t feel what he is feeling. He wants her to “feel everything” when they kiss because he knows that he will.

The chapter begins with a series of texts between Holder and Daniel, then Holder and Sky. Holder tells Daniel that he has a date with Sky, then Sky tells Holder to cook her dinner. Later, in her kitchen, Holder playfully teases Sky by getting close to her, knowing that she is attracted to him. She is anxious about their first kiss, but Holder tells her that he will not kiss her that night because he wants to ensure that, when they finally do kiss, she feels everything that he feels. Over dinner, they play a question and answer game. Sky asks Holder who she reminded him of when they first met, but he avoids answering. He does tell her, however, about his sister’s death by suicide. When it is Holder’s turn to ask a question, he wants to know more about her father. Sky reveals that she was in foster care as a young child, then adopted, though she has no memories from that time. This concerns Holder because it is yet another clue that she could be Hope. When Sky asks about Holder’s tattoo, “Hopeless,” he explains that it is a reminder of the people he has let down.

Later, she reads to him in bed again, and he has to fight the urge not to kiss her. Instead of kissing her lips, he kisses her neck and jawline, then the corners of her mouth. They move on to heavy petting and Sky has her first orgasm as their clothed bodies move together. Lying beside her afterward, Holder grabs onto her pinky with his pinky, something that he used to do with Hope when they were children. He is then overwhelmed with the familiarity of Sky, afraid that she is really Hope, which would complicate their relationship and her life. He decides that, without proof, he will continue to believe that she is just Sky.

In a letter to Les, Holder reminds her of the time that they went to Disneyland when they were eight. He recalls that on a wait for a ride, he heard a girl scream his name. He followed the sound of the girl’s cries until he had broken away from their parents. He kept looking for the girl through the crowds until their mother joined him and she began looking, too, believing, as Holder did, that the cries came from the kidnapped Hope. However, when they found the girl, it was not Hope. The girl was looking for someone else named Dean. From this point on he has gone by Holder because the name Dean is too fraught with pain from Hope’s disappearance.

At school the next Monday, Holder meets Sky for their first class, and she introduces him to a student sitting with her, Breckin, who tells Holder that he is a gay Mormon. At lunch, the three of them sit together and Holder notices a bracelet on her wrist that looks exactly like the bracelet that Les gave to Hope the day that she disappeared. When Holder asks Sky who gave her the bracelet, Sky gets defensive, thinking that Holder is jealous of the person who gave it to her. In reality, he knows that the bracelet was handmade and that there were only two of them: one for Hope and one for Les. Unable to lie to himself any longer, Holder realizes that Sky is Hope and that she has no memories of her past. Afraid to be the one to blow up the peaceful life that she has with her adoptive mother, Karen, Holder leaves the lunchroom without another word.