Hannah, Jessica, and Alex met at Monet Café

The event in which Hannah Baker, Jessica Davis, and Alex Standall meet at Monet’s Garden Café & Coffeehouse begins with a school orientation for newcomers and briefly gives three isolated freshmen a place to belong. Their friendship is never as secure as the café ritual suggests: Alex and then Jessica drift away, while later scenes of public inaction expose how sharply a shared refuge contrasts with Hannah’s unanswered need for help.

Orientation and an Unexpected Meeting

With one week of summer vacation remaining, Ms. Antilly called Hannah at home and invited her to a new-student orientation. Jessica was there too, and neither girl wanted to attend. They expected the counselor to deliver a speech about achievement and equal opportunity, but instead she paired each student with a buddy. The awkward introduction loosened when Jessica apologized for calling Hannah Hillary; Hannah replied that Jessica ought to know her name if they were going to be such fabulous friends. The three laughed together, though Ms. Antilly’s laugh was more nervous than heartfelt.

After the meeting, Hannah and Jessica did keep spending time together. Their first conversation outside campus felt awkward, but each had been glad to talk to someone other than her parents. They walked past the turnoff to Hannah’s home because she did not want to interrupt the conversation, and Hannah later learned that Jessica had also passed her own street for the same reason. Neither wanted to invite the other home before they knew each other well; continuing to walk became an easier way to prolong the meeting.

The Café as a Shared Refuge

Their walk brought them to Monet’s Garden Café & Coffeehouse, identified on Hannah’s map as E-7. Neither girl drank coffee, but the place seemed suited to talking. Alex, another new student, had been watching them; when Jessica asked who he was staring at, he stammered that he was new too and wanted to join the conversation. Hannah and Jessica blushed at the misunderstanding, then welcomed him. The three talked for at least an hour, relieved by the prospect that their first days at school might not mean wandering the halls, eating lunch, or getting lost alone.

They did not call one another friends, even at the beginning, and spoke openly about former friends and what they hoped to find at their new school. Still, for the first few weeks, Monet’s became a safe haven when any of them struggled to fit in or meet people. Their place was a far table in the back garden, at the far right. Whoever had endured the most exhausting day would put a hand in the center and say, “Olly-olly-oxen-free.” The other two placed their hands on top and leaned in to listen. Hannah and Jessica drank hot chocolate; Alex worked his way through the café’s menu.

Drift and the Friendship’s Limits

The refuge did not last. Alex was the first to stop coming. He and Hannah remained friendly when they met in the halls, but their relationship went no further, at least from Hannah’s perspective. Jessica eventually stopped going too. Hannah returned to Monet’s a few more times, hoping one of them might turn up, and then stopped going herself. The café had offered a routine of mutual attention, but it could not ensure that the three would remain close once their paths began to separate.

That distinction matters to Hannah’s account: the three shared a place and a practice without becoming lasting friends. In retrospect, the hands meeting over the table represent a brief, concrete form of support, not a promise that the group could withstand later changes. The gradual end of their visits turns the café from a dependable meeting point into a memory of connection that has already receded by the time Hannah tells its story.

Later Reversals of the Café’s Promise

The memory acquires a harder contrast when Hannah recounts Marcus Cooley touching her at Rosie’s. She looked over the booths and toward the counter, hoping to catch someone’s eye; a few people glanced over, then turned away. Under the table, she tried to pry his fingers off and push him away. She did not want to yell, but her eyes were begging for help. No one asked whether there was a problem. The scene reverses the café’s original pattern: at Monet’s, three newcomers leaned in to listen to whoever had the worst day; at Rosie’s, witnesses notice Hannah and then withdraw their attention.

Hannah later tells Zach Dempsey that he tried to come to her rescue, but insists that this is not why he is on his tape. She asks why someone who discovers that a person cannot be reached would later throw the attempted rescue back in that person’s face. This recollection does not make the early café gathering and the later incidents equivalent; it sharpens their difference. A welcoming ritual can exist among a small group and still fail to become a dependable response when distress appears elsewhere.

The novel’s structure further enlarges the significance of the meeting. Hannah’s tapes direct listeners to places marked on her map, making a location into part of the testimony rather than a passive backdrop. She identifies her old house as the place where she first saw Justin Foley, and explains that the tapes’ events might not have happened had Alex not put her name opposite Jessica’s on his list. Later, she describes a party as the point where the separate stories knot together and the knot grows. Against that chain of consequences, the short-lived friendship at Monet’s stands as an early, fragile instance of people finding one another—and as a measure of the listening and intervention that the story repeatedly shows failing elsewhere.