Hold Still

Hold Still Plot Summary

Introduction

The phone call comes at dawn. Caitlin sits dripping wet in a towel, her hair leaving puddles on the sofa cushion as her mother speaks a name she doesn't want to hear. Her heart pounds so loud it drowns out everything else—the careful words about Ingrid, about what happened in the bathroom that morning, about blood in the water. She starts to hum, one drawn-out note, because it's better than screaming, better than listening to what they're telling her about her best friend. Summer dissolves into a blur of Northern California highways and redwood forests, her parents driving her away from the truth as if distance could cure grief. But autumn brings her back to Vista High, where Ingrid's empty desk sits like an accusation and everyone whispers about the girl who slit her wrists at seventeen. In the science building locker that becomes her refuge, Caitlin tapes a photograph of rolling hills over the mirror, erasing her own reflection. She doesn't know yet that under her bed waits a blue journal with a white-out bird on the cover, filled with secrets that will either destroy her or set her free.

Chapter 1: The Empty Space: Finding Ingrid's Journal

School returns like a punishment. Vista High sprawls across manicured lawns where BMWs drop off perfectly dressed teenagers who've spent the summer forgetting that someone died. Caitlin walks the long way, past the strip mall and the empty lot where the bowling alley used to be, avoiding the main entrance where Alicia McIntosh waits with her sequined tank top and practiced tears. The photography classroom hits her like a slap. Ms. Delani, once warm and encouraging, now treats her like furniture—present but invisible, barely worth acknowledging. The walls display last year's work: three of Ingrid's photographs dominate the center, including a portrait of Caitlin herself, intense and unrecognizable. Her own single photograph huddles in a dark corner, forgotten. In the science building, Caitlin claims the northernmost locker, as far from everyone as possible. She tapes Ingrid's hill photograph over the mirror, obliterating her own reflection. The green hills and wildflowers create a window to somewhere peaceful, somewhere that might not even exist anymore. Walking home, she spots a familiar face—Dylan Schuster, the new girl everyone whispers about. Tall and angular with wild black hair and safety-pinned clothes, Dylan moves through the hallways like she owns them. When she asks about good places to eat, Caitlin lies about having homework rather than admit she has nowhere to go and no one to eat with. That night, searching for her stereo remote, Caitlin's fingers find something unexpected under her bed. Hard, flat, dusty. She pulls out Ingrid's journal—blue cover with a white-out bird half chipped away. The bird Ingrid painted during freshman English, when they passed notes and planned their futures. Inside, on the first page, is Ingrid's self-portrait: yellow hair, blue eyes, crooked smile. Above it, in careful handwriting: "Me on a Sunday Morning."

Chapter 2: Fragments of Memory: Isolation and Photography

Caitlin carries the journal everywhere, zipped into her backpack like a heartbeat. Reading it feels like resurrection and torture combined—Ingrid's voice whispers from every page, alive with secrets she never shared. The entries reveal a world Caitlin thought she knew but never understood: depression medication since age nine, cuts hidden under long sleeves, a darkness so deep it had its own gravity. The photography assignments become acts of rebellion. When Ms. Delani assigns still life, Caitlin photographs speeding cars from the sidewalk. For landscapes, she shoots an empty dirt lot, deliberately overexposed and out of focus. Each terrible photograph is a middle finger to the teacher who once cared about her work, who now acts like Caitlin died along with Ingrid. Taylor Riley appears like a ghost from third grade. The popular boy with sun-bleached hair and perfect freckles who once watched her save art supplies in a plastic bag, treasuring scraps of construction paper and dried glue. Now he offers math help and skateboard rides, his presence both thrilling and terrifying. When he asks how Ingrid died, Caitlin tells him with clinical precision: "Slit her wrists, bled to death." Ms. Haas, the school therapist, tries to excavate her feelings with gentle questions and motivational posters. Caitlin sits in the yellow shag-carpeted office, studying an Ansel Adams print that reads "Sky's the Limit," and refuses to cooperate. Some things can't be counseled away with positive thinking and tissue boxes. In the hidden bathroom between the math and science halls, Caitlin eats lunch alone, reading about treehouses built by architects and dreamers. The book shows houses suspended in ancient oaks, complete with kitchens and libraries and windows that frame the sky. She thinks of her backyard oak tree, the pile of lumber her father bought with such hope, waiting for her to build something beautiful from the wreckage.

Chapter 3: New Connections: Dylan and the Treehouse

The confrontation comes during a film strip about landscapes. Ms. Delani clicks through student work, and suddenly Ingrid's hill photograph fills the screen—that perfect meadow with wildflowers and blue sky that Caitlin helped tape inside her locker. The image hits like a fist to her chest. She grips her desk until her knuckles turn white, rage building like a storm. "Did you get permission to use those pictures?" Caitlin's voice cracks the classroom silence like breaking glass. Ms. Delani freezes, chalk suspended mid-sentence. "All of them. All the pictures by students that you showed without even giving them credit, without even saying their names." The room holds its breath. Ms. Delani's perfect composure crumbles, tears pooling behind her red-rimmed glasses. She writes a hall pass with shaking hands and retreats to her office, leaving Caitlin suspended between triumph and shame. In the noodle place that becomes their refuge, Dylan orders bitter coffee and speaks with brutal honesty. She moved from the city where people her age discuss physics and philosophy, not who's dating whom. When Caitlin awkwardly asks if she's gay, Dylan raises an eyebrow and says yes like it's the most natural thing in the world. Her girlfriend Maddy acts in city theaters and sends care packages of radical politics and handwritten letters. The treehouse begins as escape therapy. Caitlin hauls lumber through her backyard, past her parents' orderly garden to the ancient oak that anchored her childhood. She builds a ladder first, then floor beams, then walls with openings for light and air. Her hands learn the weight of wood and the satisfaction of nails driven true. Each evening she climbs higher, the house taking shape around the tree's massive trunk. Her parents worry she's building gallows, not furniture. At the hardware store, her mother sees the rope and goes white with terror, imagining another teenage suicide. Caitlin has to explain about support beams and engineering, about creating rather than destroying. That night they walk to the oak tree together, and her father weeps at the beauty she's building in the branches.

Chapter 4: Confronting Darkness: Truths in the Journal

The journal becomes her confessor, her tormentor, her addiction. Entry by entry, Ingrid's secrets unfold like poisoned flowers. She writes about boys who hurt her by a creek, about carving "FUCK YOU" into her stomach with an X-Acto knife, about pills that made her float through days like a sleepwalker. Each revelation hits Caitlin like a physical blow—how could she have missed so much pain sitting right beside her? Dylan shares her own darkness with characteristic directness. Her three-year-old brother Danny died when she was eleven, his small body failing despite every medical intervention. The family fractured under the weight of loss, parents and daughter each drowning alone until they learned to reach across the grief. Dylan's honesty about death and healing gives Caitlin permission to stop pretending she's fine. At Henry Lucas's house, surrounded by marble floors and absent parents, Caitlin watches the popular kids drink beer and discuss Dylan's sexuality like she's a zoo exhibit. The casual cruelty makes her skin crawl. She escapes to wait on the front steps, where Taylor finds her and offers Ethiopian food as an apology for his friends' behavior. The treehouse grows taller, more ambitious. Caitlin rigs pulleys and rope swings to reach impossible angles, her body learning the language of construction. Tools become extensions of her hands. Wood transforms from raw material to living architecture. In the branches, surrounded by her own creation, she finds the first peace she's known since Ingrid died. But the journal keeps calling. Each entry peels back another layer of deception, revealing a friendship built on her blindness to Ingrid's suffering. The cheerful girl who took photographs and planned their future was performing wellness while dying inside. Caitlin begins to understand that love isn't enough if you can't see what's right in front of you.

Chapter 5: Sharing Grief: Making Copies and Building Bridges

The reconciliation with Ms. Delani happens in the darkroom at dawn. Caitlin breaks in through the loose window, seeking the chemical smell of developing fluid and the red-lit sanctuary where she and Ingrid once worked side by side. She finds her teacher already there, printing motel photographs that glow with neon vacancy signs—loneliness rendered in silver and light. They work in silence, student and teacher acknowledging the grief that binds them. Ms. Delani reveals the depth of her loss: Ingrid was the gifted student every teacher dreams of finding, the one who validates a career spent nurturing potential. Her suicide shattered more than a promising young life—it destroyed faith in the ability to recognize and prevent such devastating pain. The revelation comes with a manila folder thick with photographs. Ms. Delani opens drawer after drawer of Ingrid's work, hundreds of images documenting their friendship through Ingrid's eyes. There is Caitlin reading, sleeping, laughing, lost in thought. There is Caitlin swinging in the rain during their first adventure ditching school, caught mid-flight with pure joy on her face. In image after image, she sees herself as Ingrid saw her: complex, beautiful, essential. The winning photograph stops her cold. It's the portrait that hangs above the fireplace in Ingrid's parents' house—Caitlin in her messy room, surrounded by magazine clippings and scattered clothes, staring at the camera with an expression part defiance, part vulnerability. The national competition certificate bears its title: "Caitlin in her room, by Ingrid Bauer." She never knew she'd won first prize for being someone's inspiration. Taylor becomes her willing accomplice in small rebellions. When he asks her to drive his ancient Datsun home from school, she does it without a license, laughing at the absurdity of following traffic laws when bigger rules have already been broken. They share artichokes at her family dinner table, her parents delighted to see her engaging with another human being who isn't Dylan or dead. The physical attraction surprises them both with its intensity. In her bedroom, supposedly working on a math project about a pirate mathematician named Jacques DeSoir, Caitlin removes her shirt and climbs into Taylor's lap. They kiss with desperate hunger, but something feels borrowed, performed. When he gently stops her, she understands they're both looking for someone else in each other's arms.

Chapter 6: Final Frame: The Theater's Demolition and Letting Go

The old movie theater becomes her pilgrimage site. Hidden behind the strip malls and chain restaurants, the abandoned building stands like a monument to better times. She and Ingrid discovered it freshman year, pressing their faces to dusty windows to glimpse the empty lobby and red velvet seats. They dreamed of buying it someday, reopening it as an art house cinema where outsiders could gather. Now demolition looms. The Los Cerros Tribune announces the date with bureaucratic efficiency: June 25th. Caitlin reads the headline over breakfast cereal, her stomach dropping as another piece of her past is scheduled for erasure. She has until summer to say goodbye to the last place that holds memories of who she and Ingrid were before depression and death rewrote their story. In Copy Cat, Maddy's workplace in the Mission District, Caitlin makes photocopies of every journal entry. The machine hums and flashes, transforming Ingrid's private thoughts into shareable artifacts. Maddy helps her choose quality paper, understanding without explanation that this is sacred work. They create a story together about one of Ingrid's drawings—a girl in a skirt labeled "Brave"—inventing a moment of hope to balance the darkness. The distribution becomes ritual. She visits Ingrid's brother Davey, leaving copies in his mailbox with a note encouraging him to talk about sadness. She sits with Jayson and watches him weep over journal entries revealing how much Ingrid loved him from afar. She drives to Vista High after hours, using her new license like a passport to independence. At Ingrid's parents' house, the hardest visit becomes the most necessary. Susan and Mitch embrace her with desperate gratitude, seeing in her face an echo of their lost daughter. They reveal they have boxes of Ingrid's other journals stretching back to childhood, but they choose to remember her young and excited about life, before illness dimmed her brightness. They let Caitlin keep the final journal, understanding that some gifts can't be returned. The theater break-in happens at 2 AM, five hours before demolition begins. Caitlin crawls through the broken window one last time, carrying marquee letters from the projection room. On the facade she spells out her final message: "I MISS YOU." Then she places Ingrid's journal on a shelf between old film reels and walks away, leaving it in the building that will be dust by sunrise.

Chapter 7: Standing Still: Finding Herself in the Empty Street

Demolition draws crowds like a carnival. Old people in lawn chairs, mothers with children, curious teenagers—half of Los Cerros turns out to watch the past disappear. Caitlin sits cross-legged in the street as the orange machine roars to life, its mechanical jaws biting through walls like paper. The ground shakes beneath her as sixty years of movie magic crumbles into rubble. Jayson finds her in the crowd, offering tissues as she weeps for more than just a building. The theater becomes metaphor for everything lost—friendship, innocence, the future she and Ingrid planned but will never share. When the last wall falls, she's still smiling through her tears, understanding that destruction can feel like liberation when you're ready to let go. The treehouse reaches completion as the journal reaches its end. Six walls, a floor that spans twelve feet, openings for light and air, a rope swing for accessing impossible angles. She furnishes it with Persian rugs from the garage, her dad's old hummingbird feeder, wine crates converted to tables. Black frames hold her photography series "Ghosts"—images of Ingrid's photographs projected onto the theater's movie screen, her past illuminated one last time before the building's destruction. Ms. Delani visits the treehouse gallery, studying the photographs with professional respect. In them, she sees Caitlin's transformation from angry student to artist, using the tools of her grief to create something beautiful. The images show Ingrid's work enlarged and glorified but also hidden behind theater curtains, suggesting secrets that flicker at the edge of understanding. At seventeen, Caitlin takes her driving test and passes easily, muscle memory guiding her through three-point turns and parallel parking. The temporary license in her hands represents more than legal permission to drive—it's proof she can navigate the world independently, carry her own weight, move forward without waiting for permission from the dead.

Summary

In the empty street where the theater once stood, Caitlin sets up her camera for a self-portrait. She adjusts the focus, sets the timer, and walks backward into the frame. When the shutter opens, it captures a girl caught between childhood and adulthood, grief and healing, the past she's releasing and the future she's learning to claim. Her expression defies easy categorization—part sorrow, part hope, entirely her own. The journey through Ingrid's journal taught her that friendship isn't measured by what you prevent but by how deeply you witness another person's experience. She couldn't have saved Ingrid from depression's undertow, but she could honor her memory by living fully, creating boldly, and learning to hold still long enough for the light to find her. In the treehouse she built and the photographs she made, in the relationships she's nurturing and the independence she's claiming, Caitlin discovers that survival isn't just about moving on—it's about carrying love forward while making room for new light to enter the frame.

About Author

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Nina LaCour

LaCour reframes contemporary young adult literature by delving into profound themes like grief, queer identity, and emotional resilience. Her novels, such as "We Are Okay"—which won the Michael L. Printz Award—and "Hold Still" explore these complex subjects with an emphasis on emotional depth and human connection. Meanwhile, LaCour’s educational background, with degrees from San Francisco State University and Mills College, informs her deeply empathetic writing style. Her method combines gentleness and beauty, ensuring that even the most challenging topics are approached with sensitivity and nuance. This approach not only enriches her storytelling but also offers readers an opportunity for reflection and understanding.\n\nReaders benefit from LaCour's works as they provide both entertainment and emotional insight, resonating particularly with those navigating the intricacies of adolescence and identity. Her contributions extend beyond books for young adults; she has also authored children’s literature like "Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle", which further exemplifies her commitment to queer family representation. Furthermore, her debut adult novel, "Yerba Buena", expands her exploration into themes of family dynamics and personal growth. These multifaceted narratives allow her audience to engage with stories that reflect real-world challenges, making her books a valuable resource for those seeking to understand and empathize with diverse experiences.\n\nNina LaCour's success is not limited to her writing; she also imparts her expertise as a faculty member at Hamline University's MFA program, influencing the next generation of writers. Her ability to connect with audiences through both her written work and her teaching underscores her significant impact on the literary field. Her books have not only garnered prestigious awards but also established her as a pivotal voice in contemporary fiction, continuing to inspire and enlighten through her thoughtful narratives.

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