In a small town called Crestmont, a boy named Clay Jensen walks out his door to find a wrapped box with his name on it, but no return address. He takes off the wrapping to find a shoebox filled with seven tapes, each side numbered until the last with only one side number-thirteen numbers in total. Clay borrows his father’s boombox to listen to the tapes, and he’s shocked to find out they Hannah Baker created them, the girl who committed suicide a few weeks prior to him receiving the tapes. Because his mother interrupts him, he tells her he has to leave to help his friend Tony on a school project and would be out late, and then he leaves to Tony’s house. At Tony’s house, he steals his Walkman cassette player, not wanting to explain why he had …show more content…
Clay listens, following the rules and at one point, Tony approaches him and states that Clay has his Walkman. Clay creates an excuse saying that he had asked earlier that day and Tony goes along with it. The narrating of the story switches back and forth between Clay and Hannah on the tapes. Hannah tells what happened to her since she moved to Crestmont and how each event was a reason to why she killed herself. In Clay’s narrating, he goes from flashbacks dealing with the stories he’s hearing from her on the tape to what he is doing in the present time. After listening to the eighth tape at Rosie’s, a popular hangout for the high schoolers, Clay leaves to find Tony waiting for him. Tony confesses he is the one with the second set of tapes and that he wouldn’t answer any of the questions Clay had until he listened to the next tape. The ninth tape is finally Clay, and Hannah states that he had nothing to do with her suicide, but she needed to include him in order to tell her story. He was kind to her and they had kissed at a party, but she stopped him when she began to think of all the people who hurt her. She had hurt his feelings by telling him to leave and that’s when the next two reasons