Thirteen Reasons Why(42)

No?

Fine. But you’ve already read it. It’s very popular at our school.

I allow my eyelids, my jaw, to relax.

The poem. We discussed it in English. We read it aloud many times.

And Hannah was there for it all.

Some of you may recall it now. Not word for word, but you know what I’m talking about. The Lost-N-Found Gazette. Ryan’s semiannual collection of items found lying around campus.

Like a love letter tossed under a desk, never discovered by its intended love. If Ryan found it, he’d scratch out the give-away names and scan it for use in an upcoming gazette.

Photographs that fell out of binders…he scanned them, too.

History notes covered in doodles by an extremely bored student…he scanned them.

Some people may wonder how Ryan found so many interesting items to scan. Did he really find them at all? Or did he steal them? I asked him that very question after one of our poetry meetings. And he swore that everything he printed was found purely by chance.

Sometimes, he admitted, people did slip items they found into his locker. Those, he said, he couldn’t vouch for one hundred percent. That’s why he scratched out names and phone numbers. And photographs, as a rule, couldn’t be too embarrassing.

He’d gather five or six pages of good, quirky material and print up fifty copies. Then he’d staple them together and drop them off at random places throughout school. Restrooms. Locker rooms. On the track.

“Never in the same spot,” he told me. He thought it was fitting for people to stumble across his magazine of stumbled across items.

But guess what? My poem? He stole it.

I pull a napkin out of the holder and wipe the abrasive paper across my eyes.

Each week, after our poetry group, Ryan and I would sit on the library steps and talk. That first week, we simply laughed about the poems the other people had written and read. We laughed about how depressing they all were.

“Wasn’t this supposed to make us happy?” he asked. Apparently, he signed up for the same reason as me.

I look up. The man behind the counter tugs on the strings of a heavy trash bag. It’s closing time.

“Can I get a glass of water?” I ask.

After the second week of class, we sat on those library steps and read some of our own poems to each other. Poems we’d written at different points in our lives.

He looks at my eyes, at the skin rubbed raw by the napkin.

But only happy poems. Poems about loving life. Poems we would never read to that depression-loving group of miserable poets inside.

And, as poets never do, we explained ourselves. Line for line.

The third week, we took the biggest chance of all and handed each other our entire notebooks of poetry.

He pushes a glass of ice water in front of me. Except for that glass and the napkin dispensers, the entire length of the counter is empty.

Wow! That took a lot of courage. For me, definitely. I’m sure for you, too, Ryan. And for the next two hours, with the sun going down, we sat on those concrete steps, turning pages.

His handwriting was horrible, so it took me a bit longer to read through his poems. But they were amazing. Much deeper than any of mine.

His stuff sounded like real poetry. Professional poetry. And someday, I’m sure of it, kids will be forced to analyze his poems out of a textbook.

I touch the cold glass, wrapping my fingers around it.

Of course, I had no idea what his poems meant. Not exactly. But I felt the emotions precisely. They were absolutely beautiful. And I felt almost ashamed at what he must have been thinking as he went through my notebook. Because reading through his, I realized how little time I’d spent on mine. I should have taken the time to choose better words. More emotional words.

But one of my poems grabbed him. And he wanted to know more about it…like when I wrote it.

But I didn’t tell him.

I don’t drink the water. I watch a single drop slide down the glass and bump against my finger.

I wrote it the same day a group of students got angry that someone had the nerve to ask for help regarding suicide. Remember why they got upset? Because whoever wrote the note didn’t sign her name.

How insensitive.

It was anonymous. Just like the poem that appeared in the Lost-N-Found.

So Ryan wanted to know why I wrote the poem.

With that one, I told him, the poem had to speak for itself. But I was interested in knowing what he thought it meant.

On the surface, he said, the poem was about acceptance—acceptance from my mother. But more than that, I wanted her approval. And I wanted certain people—in this case a boy—to stop overlooking me.

A boy?

At the base of the glass, the water creates a delicate suction, then lets go. I take a sip and let a small cube of ice slip into my mouth.

I asked if he thought it meant anything deeper.

I hold the ice on my tongue. It’s freezing, but I want it to melt there.

Part of me was joking. I thought he’d figured out my poem exactly. But I wanted to know what a teacher assigning the poem might want his or her students to discover. Because teachers always overdo it.

But you found it, Ryan. You found the hidden meaning. You found what even I couldn’t find in my own poem.

The poem wasn’t about my mom, you said. Or a boy. It was about me. I was writing a letter to myself…hidden in a poem.

I flinched when you told me that. I got defensive—even angry. But you were right. And I felt scared, and sad, by my own words.