The Heartbreaking Stories Behind Each of Hannah Baker's 13 Reasons Why, In Case You Forgot

13 Reasons Why, Netflix's adaptation of Jay Asher's bestselling 2007 YA novel, is a devastating account of what drives a high school student named Hannah Baker to take her own life. The premise for the show is a heartbreaking but interesting one: Clay (played by Dylan Minnette) mysteriously receives a box of 13 cassette tapes from Hannah (Katherine Langford), his classmate and crush who killed herself a few weeks earlier. Each cassette, and each of the show's episodes, reveals a person (aka one of the titular "reasons") she sees as somehow responsible for her eventual decision to commit suicide. Hannah has another classmate, Tony, ensure everyone included on the tapes passes them on to the next person one by one, or else he'll release a copy of them to the public.

Since the reasons range from cruel bullying to rape, it's obvious why the people on the tapes want their secrets to stay under wraps. The show's narrative structure — a mix of presuicide flashbacks and the present day aftermath — makes it feel less like a drama and more like a tense mystery. Who, or what, killed Hannah Baker? Season one introduces all of the major players, but hopefully season two is where we'll see justice for what happened.

Note: major spoilers ahead!

01
Justin
Netflix

Justin

Hannah's life first begins to unravel after meeting Justin. As a star athlete with a killer smile, the new girl at school is helpless against his charm. He invites her to a playground one night to hang out, where he snaps a photo of her gleefully sailing down a slide in a skirt. When she gets to the bottom, they share a cute kiss. Pretty innocent, right?

Unfortunately Justin shows off the photo he took to his group of friends the next day (her skirt had blown up, showing off her underwear), and one of them, Bryce, takes his phone and sends the photo to the whole school. People assume Justin and Hannah hooked up, and she quickly gets a "slut" reputation at school. No matter how many time she says nothing happened, no one believes her.

02
Jessica
Netflix

Jessica

Trying to put her issues with Justin behind her, Hannah strikes up a friendship with Jessica, another new girl at school. They're fast friends (Hannah calls it "a hot chocolate friendship, maybe not perfect for all seasons"), and spend all of their time together. Soon they meet another loner, Alex, and the three meet every day for coffee at the town's cafe, Monet's.

Things fall apart when Jessica and Alex start to date behind Hannah's back. The new couple starts distancing themselves from her, but the final nail in the coffin comes courtesy of Alex. He circulates a list ranking the body parts of girls in school, and gives Hannah the distinction of "Best Ass." Jessica, who wasn't ranked at all, is furious, and slaps Hannah at Monet's. Their friendship comes to an abrupt, heated end.

03
Alex
Netflix

Alex

Because of Alex's list, Hannah's reputation as being an easy hook-up is magnified. She blames him for being objectified daily by the guys at school (especially Bryce, who goes so far as to grab her butt at a convenience store, to Hannah's horror) and for the end of her friendship with Jessica. Alex is the first person in the group of Hannah's accused that shows real remorse for his actions and tries to convince everyone else to come clean about what they've done.

04
Tyler
Netflix

Tyler

While walking to and from school each day, Hannah starts to hear the clicking of a camera. She convinces herself she's crazy, until finally she sees someone taking pictures of her while she gets changed in her home's ground floor bedroom. It turns out the culprit is mousy Tyler, her high school's yearbook photographer. Along with straight-laced Courtney, she devises a plan to catch him in the act.

They do, and an embarrassed Tyler skulks away. Hannah accuses him of taking away her sense of security and instructs everyone listening to the tapes to creep outside of Tyler's window late at night and break it with a rock. She wants him to feel the same constant unease she did.

05
Courtney
Netflix

Courtney

The trap Hannah and Courtney set for Tyler doesn't exactly go as planned. Hannah mixes them up some potent drinks from her parents' liquor cabinet, and in her drunken state, Courtney starts daring Hannah to take off her shirt and kiss her, which is when Tyler snaps a photo. Although they catch him and figure out his identity, he later sends a photo of them making out to the whole school.

Despite the fact their faces aren't in the picture, a few of their classmates start asking Courtney if it's her and Hannah. Courtney, who's a lesbian but refuses to come out of the closet at the risk of upsetting her high-strung fathers or tarnishing her golden reputation, lies and says it's Hannah and "her girlfriend Laura." She also says they asked her to have a three-way. Hannah loses another friend and falls farther from grace in the eyes of her peers.

06
Marcus
Netflix

Marcus

When the school's Dollar Valentine Quiz results come back, Hannah's top match is Marcus, the driven student body president. He asks her out on a date at a local diner, where he shows up an hour late with a group of basketball players in tow. He tries to stick his hand up her skirt, which Hannah, embarrassed and pissed off, loudly rejects. He screams at her in the middle of the restaurant about being a tease and storms out with his friends.

07
Zach
Netflix

Zach

After Marcus's tirade in the diner, Hannah sits in the booth quietly crying. Marcus's friend and basketball star Zach comes back shortly after the group leaves to make sure she's OK. They sit there in silence for a while, and Hannah is deeply relieved that he seems like a nice guy. Of all the people on the list, Zach seems like the most genuinely kindhearted and well-intentioned (with the exception of Clay, of course), but when he asks Hannah out and she turns him down (she assumes he's doing it on a dare from his friends), his ego takes a hit.

The two have a communications class together, where they each have baskets assigned to them where fellow classmates can leave nice, anonymous notes for each other. To get back at Hannah, Zach steals all of the kind messages out of her basket. She figures out he's the reason her basket has been empty and writes him a long note in return explaining why she really needed words of encouragement and why his actions hurt her. She sees him read the note in the hallway, and says on the tape that she watches him crush it up and throw it on the ground.

Later on, Zach reveals to Clay that Hannah was wrong — he never threw the note away. He's been carrying it around in his wallet ever since Hannah gave it to him, and even takes it out to show him.

08
Ryan
Netflix

Ryan

Feeling more lost than ever, aspiring writer Hannah agrees to attend a poetry workshop after hearing about it at a college fair at school. It's there that she bumps into Ryan, the author of the school's unsanctioned literary magazine. Hannah begs him to help her with her poetry and he agrees and later praises her for the deep, profound poem she reads in front of the poetry group.

Hannah shows up at school the next day only to hear her poem, which contains a few eyebrow-raising lines about skin and lacy underwear, being read aloud and mocked by people in the hallway. Ryan had secretly torn the poem out of the page in her journal after she refused to let him publish it and put it in his publication anyway. After seeing her personal thoughts made fun of, her dreams for the future are further squashed.

09
Sheri
Netflix

Sheri

Hannah reluctantly agrees to go to a party hosted by Jessica one night in hopes of seeing Clay, her crush. She ends up alone after drinking too much at the end of the night, and Sheri offers to drive her home since she's going that way anyway. Sheri swears she's good to drive, but crashes into a stop sign while digging around in her purse for a charger for Hannah's dead phone.

The stop sign falls over, and Hannah tells Sheri they have to alert the police, otherwise someone could get into an accident. Sheri refuses, scared that it will ruin her future, and drives off without Hannah. Hannah runs to a nearby convenience store to find a phone and call the cops, but it's too late — their classmate Jeff (one of Clay's close friends and an all-around sweetheart) dies at that intersection because of the missing sign. Hannah blames Sheri for the constant guilt she carries around afterward.

10
Justin, Again
Netflix

Justin, Again

While at Jessica's party, Hannah hooks up with Clay in an upstairs bedroom. Even though she really likes him and wants to continue, she pushes him away since she can't stop thinking about how terrible all of the guys in school have been, and starts to have anxiety about it (she's pretty drunk). He leaves, and after a few minutes Justin and Jessica (who have just started dating) drunkenly stumble in. Hannah hides in the closet while the two hook up, but Justin leaves to get Jess some water since she's clearly wasted.

After Justin leaves, Hannah hears him and Bryce talking outside the door. The next thing she knows, Bryce comes in and starts raping a mostly unconscious Jessica (she mumbles "no" a few times, obviously distressed). Justin attempts to stop it, but Bryce shoves him out of the room. Hannah says on the tapes that Justin should have done more but put his friendship with Bryce before Jessica's well-being.

11
Clay
Netflix

Clay

Hannah admits on Clay's tape that she always wanted something more between them, and only put him on her list so that he'd understand what really happened that night at the party. When she pushed him away during their hook-up, he was confused, so she uses his tape as a way to apologize and explain herself.

12
Bryce
Netflix

Bryce

Pretty much from the get-go, it seems that Hannah and Bryce's paths are doomed to collide. In the penultimate episode (and second-to-last tape), Hannah explains that she was feeling extremely depressed in the days following the events at Jessica's party and decided to take a walk to clear her head. She ends up walking into Bryce's neighborhood and overhears the party he's throwing in his backyard. She wanders in and ends up in the hot tub in her underwear with Jessica, Justin, Zach, and another girl. Soon they go inside the house, and Hannah is left enjoying the hot tub by herself, staring up at the stars.

Soon Bryce joins her, and after a little small-talk, he forces himself on her. To say the rape is brutal would be an understatement. On Bryce's tape (which Clay refuses to give to him), she says he's the one who broke her soul. After he rapes her, she walks home, soaking wet and in shock, and comes up with her idea for the tapes.

13
Mr. Porter
Netflix

Mr. Porter

Hannah is all but convinced that she's going to kill herself when she says she feels "a shift." She realizes she needs to try to get real help, at least once. She sits down with her school's counselor, Mr. Porter, and their conversation is repeatedly interrupted by his phone ringing. He finally gets her to confide that she's been raped, but his advice is completely unhelpful (he tells her if she won't admit her rapist's name, she needs to just "move on").

Frustrated that he's not giving her the attention or help that she so desperately needs, Hannah tearfully walks out of his office. She secretly records their whole session and tells her listeners that he should have come after her to make sure she was OK. Instead, he picks up his phone and forgets all about their conversation.

He's the last person on her tapes and is shocked and horrified (mostly by his own inability to help a student in need) when Clay gives them to him and fills him in on everything that's been happening at the school over the last few weeks.