Cassette 4: Side B
- Hannah starts this tape by talking about poetry. She says she loves reading poems and trying to decode them to get at their deeper meaning. (She was certainly a Shmooper at heart.)
- Clay is frustrated. Since Hannah's talking about poetry, this tape can't be about him.
- He wonders which of the next five tapes he'll be on.
- On the tape, Hannah says that for a while she actually tried to use poetry as therapy.
- Clay thinks that maybe a real therapist would have worked better. (He's starting to get a little fed up, it seems.)
- Hannah says she kept all her poems in a spiral notebook. Almost every day she would go to Monet's and write a few poems. It gave her something to look forward to: she could take whatever emotions she was feeling that day and put them into her poems.
- At this point, Clay notices Tony walking out and wonders why he didn't say good-bye.
- He watches Tony get in his Mustang, turn the lights on, and start the car. But then he just drives to another spot in the parking lot and turns his lights back off. He seems to just be sitting there in his car. Strange.
- Hannah is talking about her increasing desperation. She feels trapped inside herself, with no escape. She says:
- "If you hear a song that makes you cry and you don't want to cry anymore, you don't listen to that song anymore. […] "But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head." (10.43-4)
- Clay can see the Crestmont movie theater through the glass at Rosie's. He wishes he could have a do-over for the summer he worked there with Hannah.
- He remembers that when they were alone, they got along easily. But when other people came around, Clay was careful to show that they were just friends. He was worried about Hannah's reputation rubbing off on him.
- Actually, at a party a few weeks ago, Clay was able to admit his true feelings for Hannah, both to himself and to her. (We don't get any more deets on this yet.)
- Clay hates himself at this moment. He should be on this list. He believed the rumors about Hannah and held himself back from her. Not cool, he thinks.
- If he hadn't cared so much what other people would think, he might have been able to save her.
- He continues listening to the tape.
- Hannah is saying that she had to stop writing poetry for a while. She needed to not think so much about her feelings and emotions.
- But after a few weeks, she started missing it, so she signed up for a free poetry class at the library. The class was called, "Poetry: To Love Life" (10.69).
- Hannah directs listeners to the library on her map, but it's too dark for Clay to go there right now.
- Clay notices that Rosie's is closing in half an hour.
- Back on the tape, Hannah says that the poetry class didn't exactly live up to its name. Most of the other students were unhappy women, writing unhappy, angry poems.
- They wanted Hannah to show her "deepest and [her] darkest" (10.79). Hannah just wanted to get to the happy part of the class.
- She says she wasn't the only high school student in the class. There was also Ryan Shaver, editor of The Lost-N-Found Gazette, a school paper. This tape is for Ryan.
- Uh oh. Clay realizes right away that a certain poem printed in The Gazette must have been written by Hannah.
- Hannah is talking about the poem. Clay remembers it so well; it was even a topic in their English class.
- The Gazette comes out twice a year. It's a collection of things Ryan has found around campus –notes from notebooks, love letters (with the names taken out), photos, things like that.
- Ryan scanned and printed whatever he found, and he also took anonymous submissions.
- Hannah suspects that Ryan stole some of the things he printed. She knows he stole her poem, at least.
- It happened like this:
- After a couple of weeks of poetry class, Hannah and Ryan started sitting outside the library after class, reading some of their poems to each other.
- After the third week, they even traded notebooks and sat outside reading each other's work.
- Hannah said Ryan's poems were like what you read in actual poetry books. She was sure he'd eventually be a famous poet and that his poems would be taught in schools. He was that good.
- Ryan was particularly interested in one of Hannah's poems, which she wrote after the suicide talk in her Peer Communications class.
- He very sensitively analyzed this poem, showing her a meaning that she herself hadn't seen until then.
- He said that, on the surface, the poem was about her mother and a boy, neither of whom paid any attention to her. But he said the poem was really about her not paying attention to or caring for herself.
- Hannah wants to know how Ryan could have stolen her poem and published it in the Gazette even though what a bad state she was in.
- Clay remembers everybody making fun of the poem.
- He confirms what Hannah describes. Students and teachers ripped the poem apart for over a week.
- This might not seem like such a big thing, says Hannah, but when you put it on top of everything else, it was awful
- Clay takes off the headphones and tries to pay for his shake, but the man behind the counter says he can tell Clay is going through a rough time and he refuses to let him pay.
- With that, Clay leaves Rosie's