Thirteen Reasons Why(37)

Or was it a dare? Did they dare you to ask me out?

People did that. Recently someone dared me to ask Hannah out. He worked with both of us at the Crestmont. He knew I liked her and that I never found the nerve to ask her out. He also knew that for the past few months, Hannah hardly spoke to anyone, making it a double challenge.

When I broke out of my daze, and before I left, I listened in on you and your friends. They were teasing you for not getting that date you assured them was in the bag.

I will give you credit where it’s due, Zach. You could have gone back to your friends and said, “Hannah’s a freak. Look at her. She’s staring into Neverland.”

Instead, you took the teasing.

But you must have a slow boil, getting more and more angry—taking it more and more personally—the longer you thought about my nonresponsiveness. And you chose to get back at me in the most childish of ways.

You stole my paper bag notes of encouragement.

How pathetic.

So what tipped me off? It’s simple, really. Everyone else was getting notes. Everyone! And for the most insignificant of things. Anytime someone even got a haircut they got a bunch of notes. And there were people in that class I considered friends who would have put something in my bag after I chopped off most of my hair.

When she first walked by me in the halls, with her hair cut so much shorter, I couldn’t keep my mouth from falling open. And she looked away. Out of habit, she tried brushing the hair out of her face and behind her ears. But it was too short and kept falling forward.

Come to think of it, I cut my hair the very day Marcus Cooley and I met at Rosie’s.

Wow! That’s weird. All those warning signs they tell us to watch out for, they’re true. I went straight from Rosie’s to get my hair cut. I needed a change, just like they said, so I changed my appearance. The only thing I still had control over.

Amazing.

She pauses. Silence. Just static, barely audible, in the headphones.

I’m sure the school had psychologists come in loaded with handouts, telling you what to look for in students who might be considering…

Another pause.

No. Like I said before, I can’t say it.

Suicide. Such a disgusting word.

The next day, when I found my bag empty, I knew something was up. At least, I thought something was up. The first few months of class I received maybe four or five notes. But suddenly, after the telltale haircut…nothing.

So after my haircut, I waited a week.

Then two weeks.

Then three weeks.

Nothing.

I push my glass across the counter and look at the man down by the register. “Can you take this?”

It was time to find out what was going on. So I wrote myself a note.

He shoots me a hard look while counting back change. The girl on this side of the register also looks at me. She touches her ears. The headphones. I’m speaking too loud.

“Sorry,” I whisper. Or maybe it doesn’t come out at all.

“Hannah,” the note said. “Like the new haircut. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.” And for good measure, I added a purple smiley face.

To avoid the major embarrassment of getting caught leaving myself a note, I also wrote a note for the bag next to mine. And after class, I walked to the bookrack and made a show of dropping a note in that other bag. Then I casually ran my hand around the inside of my bag, pretending to check for notes. And I say “pretending” because I knew it would be empty.

And the next day? Nothing in my bag. The note was gone.

Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal to you, Zach. But now, I hope you understand. My world was collapsing. I needed those notes. I needed any hope those notes might have offered.

And you? You took that hope away. You decided I didn’t deserve to have it.

The longer I listen to these tapes, the more I feel I know her. Not the Hannah from the past few years, but the one from the past few months. That’s the Hannah I’m beginning to understand.

Hannah at the end.

The last time I found myself this close to a person, a person slowly dying, was the night of the party. The night I watched two cars collide in a dark intersection.

Then, like now, I didn’t know they were dying.

Then, like now, there were a lot of people around. But what could they have done? Those people standing around the car, trying to calm the driver, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, could they have done anything at all?

Or the people who passed Hannah in the halls, or sat beside her in class, what could they have done?

Maybe then, like now, it was already too late.

So Zach, how many notes did you take? How many notes were there that I never got to read? And did you read them? I hope so. At least someone should know what people really think of me.

I glance over my shoulder. Tony’s still there, chewing a french fry and pumping ketchup on a hamburger.

I admit, during class discussions I didn’t open up much. But when I did, did anyone thank me by dropping a note in my bag? That would have been nice to know. In fact, it might have encouraged me to open up even more.

This isn’t fair. If Zach had any idea what Hannah was going through, I’m sure he wouldn’t have stolen her notes.

The day my self-written note went missing, I stood outside the classroom door and started talking to someone I’d never spoken with before. I looked over her shoulder every few seconds, watching the other students check their bags for notes.