Monet's Garden Café & Coffeehouse

Monet's Garden Café & Coffeehouse is the downtown meeting place where Hannah Baker, Jessica Davis, and Alex Standall find an early refuge at their new school—and where that fragile sense of safety is later broken by Alex’s “Who’s Hot / Who’s Not” list. The café’s far garden table gathers the three through a ritual of mutual comfort; its return in Hannah’s account, and in a poem she left behind, makes the place a record of both belonging and loss.

Setting and Early Connection

Hannah and Jessica first meet in Ms. Antilly’s office, but Monet's Garden Café & Coffeehouse is where they get to know each other. Hannah recalls that she and Jessica walked past the streets where each could have turned home, choosing to continue talking until they reached downtown. They were not coffee drinkers, but the café seemed a good place to talk. Alex also became part of their meetings there.

Their closeness develops before they would have called one another friends. Hannah says that neither she nor Jessica initially thought of the others as friends, even though each wanted the ease of finding new friendships at a new school. They talked about former friends, how those friendships had begun, and what they hoped to find in new ones. In those first weeks, when any of them struggled to fit in or meet people, they returned to Monet’s. Their chosen spot was the far table in the garden, at the right.

The “Olly-olly-oxen-free” Ritual

At that table, the three establish a small, repeated practice for making room for whoever has had the hardest day. Hannah cannot remember who began it. The person most exhausted would put a hand in the center of the table and say, “Olly-olly-oxen-free.” The other two laid their hands on top, leaned in, and listened while sipping their drinks with their free hands.

Jessica and Hannah usually drank hot chocolate; Alex, over time, worked his way through the entire menu. The details make the café more than a convenient backdrop: the table and the shared gesture give their conversations a dependable setting and a form of welcome. Hannah later acknowledges the ritual’s cheesiness, but also says that Monet’s filled whatever void each of them needed filled at the time. That refuge mattered precisely because none of the three yet had a secure place among their new classmates.

The List Breaks the Haven

The café’s meaning changes when Jessica summons Hannah there after approaching her in a school hallway and saying they need to talk. Hannah understands the destination to be Monet’s, though she only thinks she knows why Jessica wants to meet. Jessica is waiting slumped in a chair, arms hanging at her sides. Hannah sits and reaches toward the familiar center of the table, asking, “Olly-olly-oxen-free?”

Instead of joining the ritual, Jessica lifts a hand, slaps a paper onto the table, and pushes it across. Hannah recognizes the “WHO’S HOT / WHO’S NOT” list that she had previously seen on Jimmy’s desk. Alex has placed Hannah and Jessica on opposing sides, and Jessica now sits opposite Hannah in the very place they had treated as theirs and Alex’s safe haven. Hannah tells her that the list does not matter. But the paper has brought the school’s public ranking into their private refuge, turning a familiar table into the setting for confrontation.

Hannah tries to explain that she knows about Jessica and Alex’s relationship, admits she had been jealous because Alex had been looking at Jessica rather than her, and says she will accept Jessica blaming her for their breakup if that helps. She insists that the accusation is not true. Jessica hears the acceptance of blame, not the distinction Hannah is trying to make. The breakdown of their understanding therefore unfolds at Monet’s as well as elsewhere: the café’s old signals of solidarity no longer secure a shared interpretation of what happened.

Return, Memory, and the Scribble Book

Monet’s remains present in the frame of Hannah’s story. As Hannah rides a city bus, she passes the café, gets off, and walks back half a block to reach it. The location allows her to tell Jessica’s story from the same place where their friendship took shape and where the list’s harm became immediate. The café concentrates the account: it holds the memory of their early conversations alongside the later meeting that exposes how far they have moved from that warmth.

The café also offers a material trace of Hannah beyond the ugliness of the tapes. Later, Clay Jensen searches its shelf of scribble books, including the volume marked for the year he and Hannah were freshmen. Hoping to find a poem or another sign of Hannah’s talents, he turns toward the September pages. In red ink near the top of a page, he finds her words: “Everyone needs an olly-olly-oxen-free.” The line carries their shared ritual beyond the table and into the café’s written record. It preserves Hannah’s belief in the need for a place, or a moment, where someone can be welcomed and heard—even after the refuge she once shared with Jessica and Alex could no longer protect their bond.