Bret Ellis—Susan Reynolds Relationship

Bret Ellis and Susan Reynolds share a close friendship that begins in seventh grade and lasts through their years at Buckley. For Bret, that intimacy holds an unspoken love: Susan knows him unusually well, senses some of what he feels, and occasionally tests the limits of his carefully maintained silence. Their bond gives Bret a place beside Susan and Thom Wright, but it cannot make his desire or his secrets fully speakable. After the attacks that alter their lives, a visit to Susan’s bedroom brings their long history into the open while exposing the danger of what Bret still refuses to tell her.

Friendship and the Secrets Between Them

Susan has been Bret’s closest male friend since they met at Buckley in seventh grade. Over the next five years he learns the particulars of her life, from her worries about her mother to her imagined slights and earlier crushes. Susan, in turn, knows things about Bret that he has told almost no one, though the friendship has limits: he keeps important parts of himself hidden.

Bret is infatuated with both Susan and Thom, but does not admit to either that his feelings amount to love. Susan appears to recognize his attraction to her. When Bret pays her too much attention—or, at other times, not enough—she teases him, without directly naming what she understands. Their intimacy is therefore both unusually frank and carefully bounded: Susan confides in Bret, while he protects himself through omission.

The friendship also operates in public. At Buckley, Susan and Thom are among the most prominent students, and Bret’s own standing is tied to his closeness to them. The school’s uniforms and small classes are meant to soften visible distinctions, but popularity still gathers around Susan’s looks and Thom’s athleticism and ease. Bret is known in part through his proximity to the couple, a position that grants him access without changing the imbalance between their public relationship and his private feelings.

Thom, Unspoken Love, and Testing the Boundary

Susan and Thom have dated since their sophomore year and are generally seen as a pair. Their two-year relationship is part of the social world Bret inhabits, even as he remains Susan’s confidant and carries an unspoken love for Thom as well. He recalls the jealousy the couple once provoked in him, and later feels that it is beginning to subside. By September 1981, however, a vague weariness has entered Susan and Thom’s relationship, while Susan and Bret remain close in a different way.

Bret’s guarded attachment surfaces in a conversation with Susan. After he defends Thom, Susan tells him that he is attractive too. Bret answers that he is not Thom, then jokingly asks whether dating Thom is a possibility. Susan replies with casual finality that she does not think so. Bret insists he is kidding, although he is not; he asks how she knows Thom would not be interested. Susan responds that she hopes Bret will be happy and that his secret is safe with her. Bret laughs that she does not know his secrets. The exchange makes their mutual awareness palpable without resolving it: Susan recognizes a private truth, but neither of them makes it fully explicit.

Violence, Recognition, and the Final Visit

The attacks on Susan and Thom turn their private and public lives into a shared aftermath. Six days after the Canon Drive attack, Bret visits Susan in her bedroom. They try to hug, wince, and then cry together. Without needing to explain every source of grief, they acknowledge what has happened to Thom and Robert, the violence each has survived, and the losses gathered around them. Susan tells Bret that Thom will be all right; the two make quiet promises to one another.

During this visit, Susan tells Bret that she knows he loved her and Thom, and hopes they never hurt him. She adds that, under different circumstances, it could have been him. Then she asks how he managed to play his role so well. Bret pretends not to understand, but Susan names the role. Her words recast years of friendship as a performance she has observed, while leaving its emotional reality intact: she knows of his love, yet their history cannot simply become the relationship he wanted.

Susan also asks what really happened in Robert’s apartment on Saturday night. Bret does not answer. Instead, he places a finger to her lips, repeating a familiar gesture between them that means neither needs to say what the other already knows. The gesture preserves their old intimacy, but now it also closes off a question whose answer matters. When Susan notices a deep wound on Bret’s forearm, she believes it is a bite mark in the same place where she bit the intruder during the attack. Her recognition brings the concealed danger into the room, and the mood between them changes abruptly.

Separation and the Relationship’s Afterlife

Bret reassures Susan that Robert is gone and she is safe, then asks whether his secret is safe with her. He repeats the question while gripping her hand with such force that he injures it. Susan faints; Bret tells the household attendant that she has taken too many painkillers and fallen, and helps move her to another room. The scene ends their direct contact. Bret assumes Susan never told anyone what she suspected, and says he never speaks with her again.

Susan does not return to Buckley. She finishes her senior year at Marymount and graduates in June. Bret does not see her again until many years later, when they encounter one another at the Palihouse Hotel. In retrospect, their last bedroom conversation remains a point of unresolved knowledge: Susan had recognized Bret’s performed role and suspected the significance of his wound, but he neither confirms nor explains what she saw. Their relationship began with the trust of childhood confidences and ends with a secret enforced rather than shared.

The relationship also shapes Bret’s later account of his youth. Susan’s ability to see the role he has played becomes part of a broader pattern of intimacy shadowed by concealment: she knows him, but that knowledge cannot protect her from his fear or make him tell the truth. The final scene does not resolve what passed between them. It leaves their closeness, her recognition, and his silence together as the defining terms of a friendship that survives in memory more clearly than it can survive in person.