Hopeless

“Why, if I’m not into this, do I let him do it? I’ve never had any emotional connection to guys I make out with. Or rather the guys that make out with me.”

Because she has not begun to reinvestigate her childhood, Sky confesses she is confused why such typical teen experiences do not affect her. She wonders why she does not feel anything for boys, even as Grayson makes his move.

“It’s simply him. Everything about him, from his tousled dark hair, to his stark blue eyes, to that dimple, to his thick arms that I just want to reach out and touch. Sky, get ahold of yourself.”

Love/attraction at first sight defines Sky’s first day in high school. Always homeschooled, she immerses herself in noise—including nasty whispers about her—but the sight of Holder in the crowd mesmerizes her. This is an experience she never had at home, and hence her consternation over its vast impact.

“This is lust? I hate it. I absolutely, positively hate this beautiful, magical feeling.”

Six, who is quite happy to know her best friend is at least capable of feeling that magnetic pull toward boys, convinces Sky what she is feeling for Holder is inevitable and common. The beautiful paradox marks the beginning of Sky’s education into the complexities of the emotional world, foreshadowing her later discovery of complex feelings for the father who abused her.

“If there is one thing you should know about me, it’s that I don’t do vague. I told you I’ll only ever be honest with you, and to me, vague is the same thing as dishonesty.”

Holder appeals to Sky immediately because he professes a refusal to deal in lies or evasions. Although he has yet to share his story about his sister’s death, he comes across to Sky as not merely a hunky boy but one with integrity and values. This moment comes to haunt Holder when Sky learns that he figures out who she is long before he tells her.

“It’s real […]. You can’t get mad at a real ending. Some things are ugly. It’s the fake happily-ever-afters that should piss you off.”

In this thumbnail review of the Sandra Bullock romcom Forces of Nature, Six foreshadows the ending of the novel itself. Holder will caution Sky after her father’s death by suicide that they can be a couple, but he cannot promise a happily-ever-after, which Sky accepts. Life is no fairy tale.

“Unless, of course, he likes me. The thought literally makes me smile and I feel dirty and wrong for hoping a lunatic likes me. I had it coming, though.”

Although in her senior year, Sky, as she assesses her burgeoning relationship with Holder, thinks in rhetoric that sounds more like middle school. She experiments with the emotions she feels and decides, yes, she wants Holder to like her despite his reputation. Because of Karen’s strict code of isolation, Sky feels uneasy about the proposition.

“I need this. I need to know for sure that you’re feeling every single thing that I’m feeling the moment my lips touch yours. Because I want your first kiss to be the best first kiss in the history of first kisses.”

For Holder, there is no careless rush to make out. This is not the heated rhetoric typical of teenagers. In explaining why he is not going to kiss Sky, Holder creates an intimacy of expectation that causes Sky to swoon. His belief that their first kiss must be perfect promises that when they finally do kiss, this will be the kiss of all kisses.

“The moment he separates from me, my chest grows heavy with disappointment and I almost feel like crying. Not because he stopped or because I’m torn about what to do next, but because I never imagined that two people could connect on this sort of intimate level.”

Sky carefully works through the stages of falling in love and the concurrent stages of discovering the realities of sex. When their first intense make-out session ends, Sky knows a new meaning for the word “intimacy.” She feels bound to Holder’s body and to his soul.

“I know my mouth is agape and my eyes are wide, but I’m relieved that hope isn’t a tangible thing, because everyone around me would see mine crumbling.”

Holder demands to know where Sky got her bracelet. His temper tantrum and his storming out of the cafeteria leaves Sky perplexed. She is stunned not so much by the force and theatricality of his reaction but to the sobering reality that she is not entirely sure who she is falling in love with. Which Holder is Holder, she wonders. The certainty that he is her soul mate crumbles.

“I need you to be mad at me, Sky. But I think I need you to still want me here with you even more.”

Holder refuses to apologize for the cafeteria scene and even insists that their relationship would be stronger if Sky did not simply forgive him for his outburst. Taught difficult lessons about the heart with his childhood experiences, Holder offers a very adult sensibility: Love must be entangled with other darker emotions to give it depth and purpose. There are no fairy-tale simplicities here.

“I didn’t want to let you down, Sky. I’ve let everyone down in my life that’s ever loved me…I left you before you could start loving me. Otherwise, any effort to try not to disappoint you would be hopeless.”

If Sky is haunted by what she cannot remember, Holder is haunted by what he cannot forget. He allowed the little girl next door to be kidnapped, and then, more tragically, he never grasped the pain his own twin sister was enduring. He has learned only to blame himself, hence the arm tattoo that brands him as hopeless—as in a useless disappointment to anyone who tries to love him. This is the demon Sky will exorcize.

“I want to tell you exactly how I feel but there isn’t a single goddamned word in the entire dictionary that can describe this point between liking you and loving you, but I need that word. I need it because I need you to hear me say it.”

It is the privilege of first love that those involved believe earnestly and honestly this sort of love has never existed before—a belief both hopelessly naïve and wonderfully romantic. Here, Holder struggles for a word to describe his feelings for Sky as they mature from liking each other to loving each other. The two will end up coining the word “live,” a fusion of like and love, to represent their intimacy.

“All I can do is take my trust and place it back into his hands. I just hope he knows that it’s all the trust I have left to give him.”

Sky has yet to recover her past. By the airport runway under the stars, Sky knows that despite Holder’s tendency toward emotional outbursts and his sense of aloofness, she is willing to give him all her trust. This confession suggests Sky’s vulnerability.

“Whatever connection we thought we had before this, it doesn’t compare to this moment. No matter what happens between us in life, this moment has just merged pieces of our soul.”

Any book that attempts to define love always runs up against the threat of resorting to cliches. Holder has just opened up about his anger toward his twin sister for dying by suicide, and how tired he is of resenting her absence. That moment of confession bonds the two in ways that outweigh the physical intimacy they still have yet to share.

“I love you, Hope.”

This is the novel’s tipping point. A lightly drunk Holder, collapsing into sleep, calls Sky “Hope.” To this point, Sky’s two lives have been separate. Going forward, Sky begins the irresistible spiral into recovering her past. This moment cannot be undone—although Holder tries a clumsy lie the next morning. In Sky’s reclaiming of Hope, however, the novel also reclaims hope.

“If I remind myself that the sky is beautiful no matter what, I can think about that and forget how ugly this is. I don’t want to open my eyes, so I can just silently count inside my head.”

Sky’s disturbing thoughts, which occur while Sky and Holder are moving finally toward consummating their love, come into her mind without warning, seamlessly fusing with her thoughts about her growing anticipation and her love of Holder’s body. Without warning, everything goes negative. These thoughts enter her head without her control. They throw her back to those agonizing nights when her father sexually abused her, revealing how far she has to go for authentic healing.

“I don’t want the memories to keep coming, because with every confusing memory comes an even more confusing question…Everything I thought I understood after all these years is unraveling, revealing things I don’t want to know.”

The novel captures the confusion, anxieties, and emotional stress of a survivor of childhood sexual assault turning years later to face the memories they have so deliberately worked to bury. Sky wants answers, but she knows that every answer only leads to more questions. Nevertheless, these are questions she knows she must ask and get answered.

“You were always crying because of him and it made me hate him. I don’t remember anything about the guy, other than I hated his guts for making you feel like you did. I was only six years old.”

Holder recalls his helplessness as Sky’s neighbor. Early on, Holder felt a protective love for the fragile, lonely girl next door who was always crying. Though too young to understand exactly what was going on, Holder knew intuitively that somehow it was Hope’s father who was responsible for the tears of a beautiful girl he had a hopeless crush on.

“I don’t want her to know that I’m happy my daddy isn’t coming with us.”

The kidnapping of Hope from her father is the novel’s last mystery to unravel. Holder has blamed himself for more than a dozen years for not stopping the woman in the red car from taking the girl he had a crush on. Even as local interest in the kidnapping cooled, Holder never forgave himself, although at the time he was only six. As Hope drives off with a woman she does not know, her only thought is not her safety but rather that she is safe now away from her father.

“Things began to slowly return to normal for everyone in the neighborhood. Everyone but Les and me. It was like all of our hope was taken right along with our Hope.”

Losing Hope to a kidnapping has shaped Holder’s low self-esteem. He is sure that the little girl next door needed him and that he did nothing to stop her from being taken. He remembers watching from his yard as the car pulled up and Hope went away. The novel uses Hope’s name to suggest the dimension of what Holder lost that afternoon and what he is only now reclaiming.

“If I keep thinking about the stars and the sky, maybe it will help my heart to stop beating so fast and my tummy to stop hurting so much.”

In this interlude, a young Hope fixates on the plastic stars on the ceiling and walls of her bedroom. Thinking about the stars becomes her escape, a strategy for handling a trauma beyond her ability to process. Only when she recovers her past and accepts her identity will Sky find the night sky she shares with Holder therapeutic.

“I’m touching you because I want to make you happy. When I kiss you, I’m kissing you because you have the most incredible mouth I’ve ever seen and you know I can’t not kiss it.”

Holder is adamant. He will not let their love be used by Sky as a way to dodge her past. She is just beginning to process her memories of her father’s abuse. When she begs him to make love to her, he knows she is trying to find in sex a way to beat down the past, a dead-end exercise in self-medication.

“I don’t want to remember how much I hate him and I especially don’t want to remember how much I loved him. There’s nothing like the guilt you feel when there’s room in your heart to love evil.”

This emotional dilemma between love and hate is the crux of Sky’s psychological predicament. Being raped by the dominant figure of trust in her young life raises complications about whether loving him is right or wrong. A child, Sky knows, should love her father, and yet her father was capable of such terror and pain.