Julian Spitzer

Julian Spitzer is an intelligent eighteen-year-old whose promising academic record is interrupted by a severe depressive episode and an unfinished college application season. At Eastern Community College, he finds little challenge in most of his classes and little company among the middle-aged adults around him, but his encounter with Eve Fletcher and his unexpected reappearance in Brendan Fletcher’s life unsettle the easy story he has told himself about leaving high school behind. His trajectory is marked by a sharp contrast: Julian can be quick to intervene when someone is being mistreated, yet he also carries the consequences of a cruel prank and the isolation of a young person still trying to recover.

Background and Education

Julian moved to Haddington in seventh grade, late enough that Brendan Fletcher and his friends did not get to know him well. In high school, Julian belonged to the skater group, which Brendan remembered cruising through town in a pack. Brendan’s memory fixed on Julian standing unusually straight on his board, hands on his hips, long hair trailing behind him. The image conveys how conspicuous Julian was to Brendan, but it also exposes the narrowness of that early acquaintance: Brendan admits that he knew Julian mostly as a name and a figure on a skateboard.

Julian’s final year of high school was far more difficult than his academic potential suggested. His parents, teachers, friends, and former guidance counselor all considered him capable of a four-year college, and his grades and SAT scores supported that assessment. But Julian was seriously depressed for much of senior year and did not complete his applications in time. He began to feel better only at the start of summer, after several adjustments to his medication finally produced a treatment that helped. With the application window missed, his parents and psychiatrist agreed that he should take classes at Eastern Community College, build confidence and good grades, and potentially transfer to a more challenging school the following year.

That plan placed Julian in a setting he had not expected to value. He regarded his Math class as a joke, dozed in Biology and still earned A-pluses on his first two tests. Gender and Society, however, was a genuine exception: a night class with a varied group of adult students and a professor who had transitioned in her late thirties. Julian recognized a difference between hearing that gender is socially constructed as an abstract claim and hearing it from someone whose life gave the subject personal weight. Eve Fletcher, who was taking one class and spoke enthusiastically about its teacher, students, and reading, eventually mentioned that Julian had said he knew Brendan from high school. Brendan froze at the name, then told his mother he remembered Julian but had not known him well.

High School Conflict and Disappearance

The distance in Brendan’s answer conceals a history he would rather not revisit. At a high-school party at Kim Mangano’s house, Brendan was upstairs with Becca when a conflict unfolded in the kitchen. Wade was trying to talk to Fiona Rattigan, his recently estranged on-and-off girlfriend, and grabbed her arm when she ignored him. Fiona said he was hurting her; when other guests tried to intervene, Wade told them to stay out of it. Julian happened to be in the kitchen by the keg. After filling his cup, he threw the beer into Wade’s face and challenged him for ignoring Fiona’s request to be left alone. The interruption gave other lacrosse players time to restrain Wade, though their concern also included the team’s successful season and the possibility that the party might be broken up or players suspended.

That act of intervention sits beside a more damaging episode. Brendan and others had taped Julian inside a portable toilet, a prank they later feared might be serious enough to bring consequences from Julian’s parents, the police, coaches, or college admissions officers. They heard nothing afterward. When school resumed in September, Julian was mysteriously absent; classmates speculated that he had dropped out or transferred to private school. Brendan was relieved not to see him and gradually erased him from memory. The casual mention of Julian in Eve’s phone call therefore strikes Brendan as an unwelcome return of something he had chosen not to think about. The evidence does not establish what happened to Julian during his absence, leaving the silence itself part of the old conflict’s unresolved shape.

Loneliness and Depression

At the beginning of college, Julian’s recovery remains uncertain. He is under the legal drinking age, but at a Tuesday gathering in the bar called PLAY BALL! the adults do not object when he pours himself a glass from a communal pitcher, then another. Being seated with the bar’s owner lets him pass unnoticed, and he takes advantage of the freedom. At the same time, he resents the surroundings: the older guests talk about dental benefits, kale, and back pain, and he feels as though he has been placed among his parents’ generation. He sends his friend Ethan a picture of the half-empty pitcher, turning the absurdity of the situation into a message to someone elsewhere, at the University of Vermont, having a better time.

Julian’s bravado does not erase his isolation. He knows he had the ability to attend a more prestigious school, and he understands that the depression that derailed his applications helped leave him at a college he considers mediocre. In November, the earlier illness returns to his thoughts with the seasonal change: shorter days, cold wind, and darkness recall the previous winter, when he could not get out of bed or even bring himself to shower. He believes the new medication may prevent a relapse, but cannot be certain. On a chilly night, he arrives by skateboard at the Senior Center, where older people are making their way slowly from the parking lot to the entrance. Julian recognizes the incongruity of being eighteen and seeking entertainment there, but goes in because, as he sees it, he has nothing better to do. The scene makes his loneliness visible without suggesting that he has stopped trying to participate in the world around him.

Relationships and Intimacy

On the drive back from a liquor store, Julian opens up to Amanda Olney about his clinical depression, his hatred of high school, his fear of leaving home for college, and his difficulty talking to girls his own age. Amanda sees in him a painful sense of wasted youth and imagines how she might have encouraged him if she could have been his girlfriend when she was twenty. Her fantasy casts her as a rescuer and reveals the tenderness she feels toward him, but it also makes their age difference unmistakable. Julian’s disclosures are not simply background information: they explain the vulnerability beneath his self-conscious humor and his performance of being unconcerned.

That intimacy leads into an encounter in Brendan’s bedroom. Amanda goes to Julian’s room and calls to him quietly; later, Eve wakes to an unfamiliar silence and opens the door only a crack. She sees Amanda on top of Julian, her dress unbuttoned to the waist, and Amanda turns toward Eve with an unexpectedly calm apology. The moment develops into a brief sexual encounter involving Eve, Amanda, and Julian, an episode Eve cannot fit into a sensible account of her life afterward. It becomes a memory she mostly avoids, or treats like an embarrassing erotic dream. Julian’s part in the encounter is therefore both concrete and difficult for Eve to narrate: he is present in a charged crossing of generations, but the aftermath offers no settled relationship or easy explanation.

Return and Unresolved Connections

Julian and Brendan later attend Eastern Community College at the same time. Brendan, who rarely sees anyone from high school there, repeatedly notices Julian, but they pass one another as if they have never met. The silence is not evidence that the past has been resolved; Brendan still feels creeped out by the memory of finding Julian asleep in his bed that night. Their encounters at college are brief and avoidant, with the old humiliation and the later bedroom episode lingering behind ordinary hallway crossings.

In a rainy parking lot, Eve finds Julian leaning across the console of a Volvo parked tightly beside her minivan. He greets her, and she remarks on how close he has parked. The exchange is brief, but it brings him back into direct contact with her outside the classroom and the bedroom, in an awkwardly ordinary setting that contrasts with the intensity of their previous encounter. Eve’s later conversation with Amanda supplies the clearest account of Julian’s next step: he has transferred to the University of Vermont and is excited about starting a new chapter, particularly living away from home for the first time. Eve calls him a sweet kid; Amanda’s sardonic response makes plain that the phrase cannot contain what happened between them. Julian’s ending is not a fully described departure scene, but a report of forward motion. The transfer offers a concrete break from the circumstances that left him lonely at home and underchallenged at community college, while the unresolved histories with Brendan and Eve remain part of what he carries away.