Thirteen Reasons Why: Cassette 4: Side A Summary & Analysis

Clay runs from the movie theater back to Rosie’s. He looks for Clay’s mom’s car in the parking lot: it’s not there yet. He takes a breath and heads into Rosie’s. The booth furthest back—where Hannah sat with Marcus—is occupied. Clay sits at the empty counter and looks at a menu. Nothing looks appealing to him. He decides to wait 15 minutes before ordering, just like Hannah instructed. He wonders whether his mom worked out that something was wrong when she called him, and whether that prompted her to listen to the tapes.

Clay hears Clay’s mom’s voice beside him: she’s brought the tapes. She asks where his friend is—weren’t they working on a project together? Clay says he’s in the bathroom. His mom gives him a ten-dollar bill to buy a milkshake. Someone comes out of the bathroom but sits down at a booth, and Clay’s mom works out he was lying about his friend. She smiles, but she looks hurt. Clay tells her it might be a while until he comes home. When she leaves, he opens the shoebox of tapes: they’re still packaged up, which means she hasn’t touched them.

Clay plays the next tape. To begin, Hannah describes Peer Communications, which she calls “everyone’s favorite required class.” It doesn’t have much homework, and students are encouraged to call out in class; it was Hannah’s safe haven where nobody was allowed to touch her or tease her. Each day, the class would discuss an article about a social issue like bullies, drugs, or relationships. As Clay listens, he puts the remaining tapes into his pockets and returns the ones he’s already heard to the shoebox, which he puts in his backpack.   

Hannah explains that, at the back of the Peer Communications classroom, there was a wire rack on which each student pinned a paper bag with their name on it. If someone appreciated something someone else had said in class or wanted to give them any kind of compliment or encouragement, they could put a note into their bag. As far as Hannah knew, nobody ever dropped a mean or sarcastic note into someone’s bag—but on the tape, she addresses Zach Dempsey and asks him, “What’s your excuse?”

In the present, Clay looks up to see Tony standing beside him. Tony asks him if the Walkman is his. Clay can’t tell if Tony is angry or confused, but he realizes he’s actually concerned. He confirms that the Walkman is Tony’s and lies that he asked him if he could borrow it. Tony replies that he must have forgotten in all the car-fixing chaos. He tells Clay to keep the Walkman for as long as he needs, takes a menu, and sits down in a booth. Clay resumes the tape, feeling feverish.

Hannah begins her story about Zach with the afternoon at Rosie’s. After Marcus leaves, Zach walks over to Hannah and sits down opposite her. Hannah ignores him, thinking about all the events that have snowballed to bring her here. Zach lets Hannah ignore him for a long time before clearing his throat and asking if she’s all right. He apologizes for whatever happened with Marcus and offers to buy Hannah another milkshake. Hannah doesn’t respond, though she doesn’t know why. She can’t work out if Zach is hitting on her—she doesn’t trust him. Zach leaves some money on the table and goes back to sit with his friends.

Hannah tears up but she stays focused on the table, unable to speak. This is the moment when she first starts to consider suicide, though she can’t say the word out loud. After Zach goes back to his friends at Rosie’s, Hannah overhears them teasing him for not securing a date with her. She imagines that he wanted to get back at her—and after that, he does, stealing her notes of encouragement from her paper bag at the back of Peer Communications class. Hannah becomes suspicious after she comes to school with a new haircut and doesn’t receive any notes in her paper bag. Usually if someone got a haircut, they get a lot of notes. Three weeks go by after Hannah’s haircut with no notes, so she writes herself a note to work out what’s happening. She drops it in her bag, but the next day, there’s nothing in there.

On the tape, Hannah tells Zach he probably didn’t think the notes were a big deal, but for her, they were the only hope she held onto at that point. As Clay listens to Hannah’s tape, he realizes that he’s beginning to feel close to Hannah, and it reminds him of being close to another dying person the night of the car crash he witnessed outside Hannah’s house. Then, there was nothing anyone could do to help the victim, and Clay wonders if it was the same for Hannah—could anyone at school have done anything for her?

On the tape, Hannah asks Zach how many notes he took from her, and whether he read them. She wishes she could have known whether anyone wrote to her after she opened up in class—it would’ve encouraged her to share more. Clay thinks Hannah is being unfair: if Zach had known how hopeless Hannah felt, he might not have stolen the notes.

Hannah continues her story. The day Hannah’s note goes missing, she stays after class and sees Zach looking into her paper bag. He finds nothing there and leaves without checking his own bag. The next day, Hannah secretly tapes her bag to the rack with a flimsy piece of tape and puts a note inside. After class, she watches Zach open her bag and reach inside. The bag falls to the floor, but Zach still takes the note. He runs into Hannah as he leaves the classroom but walks away without saying anything. Hannah watches him walk down the hallway and open her note. She realizes he doesn’t think she deserves an explanation.

Hannah tells the listeners that she addressed the note to Zach, telling him that he had stolen the encouragement she needed. As he walks down the hallway, she yells after him, “Why?” and begins to cry. Clay remembers people talking about that moment as though Hannah broke down without any reason. At this point in the tape, Hannah tells Zach that she knows her parents love her, but they’ve been stressed and distant since a huge shopping center went up a year ago, threatening downtown stores like theirs. Because of this, when Hannah cut her hair, Hannah’s mom didn’t notice.

On the tape, Hannah continues her story. After Hannah finds out that Zach has been stealing her notes, she leaves a note in the teacher’s paper bag suggesting a topic for the class to discuss: suicide. She doesn’t really know why she suggests it, but looking back, she wonders whether it was a cry for help.

Clay remembers that a few days before Hannah died, she seemed to brighten: she greeted people in the hallway and looked them in the eye, and it felt like a huge change. He wonders whether he could’ve seen how Hannah had been feeling if he’d looked closely enough.

Hannah continues her story. When the class discusses the topic of suicide, Hannah realizes her classmates are annoyed that someone suggested the topic. They assume that whoever it was is just looking for attention and that they’d have come forward if they were serious. They suggest different things they could do to help the person, but they seem focused on finding out who wrote the note—which never happened when people suggested other topics in the past. The teacher brings up some facts about suicide, including that many suicides are wrongly reported as accidents, so many people are unaware of the true statistics in their community. She also passes out a flyer called “The Warning Signs of a Suicidal Individual.” One of the top five warning signs is “A sudden change in appearance,” which Hannah reads as she touches her newly cut hair.