Brendan Fletcher—Julian Spitzer

Brendan Fletcher—Julian Spitzer is a relationship shaped less by friendship than by a remembered act of group bullying. Brendan once minimized how well he knew Julian, and in one sense the two had never been close; yet Brendan was among the teenagers who trapped Julian inside a portable toilet. His later account follows the gap between that casual, almost erased acquaintance and the fear and remorse he could not erase so easily.

Identity and Background

Julian moved to Haddington in seventh grade, too late, Brendan recalled, to become part of his circle. At high school, Julian belonged to a group of skaters who rode through town together. Brendan remembered seeing them as a pack, and singled out Julian’s upright stance on his board and long hair. This is not the recollection of an intimate friend: Brendan presents Julian as someone he saw around town, a recognizable but distant figure.

That distance mattered when Eve Fletcher mentioned that a student in her class had gone to high school with Brendan and named Julian. Brendan paused before answering, then said he remembered the name but had not known Julian well. His response was technically consistent with the limited acquaintance he described, but the hesitation signals that the name carried more weight than he wanted to disclose. Eve’s ordinary conversation unexpectedly reopens a past Brendan had largely put aside.

The Party and the Intervention

Brendan’s account of an earlier party distinguishes what he saw from what he learned. He was upstairs with Becca when Wade confronted an on-and-off girlfriend in the kitchen. According to the account, Wade held her arm and refused to let go despite her saying he was hurting her. Julian was in the kitchen by the keg. After filling his cup, he threw the beer in Wade’s face and told him to leave her alone. Several lacrosse teammates then restrained Wade.

Brendan did not witness Julian’s intervention firsthand, and the distinction limits what the episode establishes about a direct bond between the two boys. Julian’s action nevertheless precedes their later confrontation: he had publicly stood up to Wade, while Brendan’s subsequent memories place him alongside Wade’s group. The team was in the middle of a successful season, and its members feared that a party broken up over drinking and fighting could lead to suspensions. That concern about consequences for the team forms part of Brendan’s account, but it does not make his later participation less consequential.

The Port-A-John Incident

Some time afterward, Brendan was with Wade and other teammates when they encountered Julian alone on Green Street. Their car cut across his path and blocked the road, forcing him off his skateboard. Wade got out and ordered Julian into the car. Julian challenged the demand, but the group had arranged the encounter on its own terms; Brendan recounts the intimidation as part of the collective action rather than as an incident he merely heard about.

The group took Julian to VFW Park, where Wade demanded his phone. Brendan remembers the four of them standing by a portable toilet near the soccer field. The episode did not become the sort of violent confrontation the teenagers had threatened, but its outcome was still coercive: Julian was shut inside, and Wade left his phone in the grass. Brendan also recalls Julian yelling and pleading as the group walked away. The boys initially tried to celebrate the prank in the car, yet the self-congratulation did not hold. Brendan was about to propose returning for Julian when Troy asked whether Julian could breathe inside. Brendan answered that there were vents, adding that he had checked. His attention to the vents shows that he had considered a physical danger even while remaining part of the act that confined Julian.

Guilt, Absence, and Resurfacing

That night, Brendan could not sleep because he kept thinking about Julian trapped somewhere far from help. He wondered whether Julian’s parents knew he was missing and whether they might be calling the phone abandoned in the grass. Before dawn, around five, Brendan rode his bike back to the park. The place looked different in the early morning than it had in the dark, and the portable toilet was empty, with its tape seal broken. Brendan could not tell whether Julian had been released by someone else or had freed himself. The uncertainty brought relief, but not an explanation of what had happened to Julian during the night.

For several days, Brendan and the others worried that Julian might tell his parents, the police, or his friends. They also considered the possible repercussions with their parents, coaches, and college admissions officers. Nothing came of those fears, and they heard no word about the incident. Brendan does not report an apology or any later conversation between them; the episode instead remains an unaddressed wrong in his memory.

Julian was absent when the boys returned to school in September, the summer before their senior year. Brendan heard different explanations, including that Julian had dropped out or transferred to private school, but did not know which, if any, was true. He was glad not to see Julian and, by graduation, had largely pushed him from his mind. Eve’s later mention therefore creates a sharp contrast: Brendan had treated Julian’s disappearance as a welcome end to an uncomfortable reminder, while the details of his own involvement remained vivid enough to return all at once.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship’s defining imbalance is that Brendan remembers Julian mainly through a moment when Julian was isolated and vulnerable, while Julian’s own response and later understanding of the incident remain unknown. Brendan’s recollection does not turn the two into friends or establish that Julian recognized him in Eve’s class. It does show how a group prank could continue to shape Brendan’s private account of their connection after outward consequences seemed to vanish.

The narrative also refuses to equate the absence of reported injury or punishment with harmlessness. The boys’ joke depended on Julian being trapped, their uncertainty about whether he was safe unsettled their attempt to laugh it off, and Brendan eventually returned to check. Years later, his first answer to Eve is guarded rather than wholly false: he did not know Julian well, but that small measure of truth conceals the much more consequential history that made Julian’s name difficult to hear.