Bret and Susan Reynolds

Bret and Susan Reynolds have a long-standing friendship that is intimate but not fully reciprocal: Bret is Susan’s closest male friend and loves her in secret, while she understands at least part of his attachment without naming it. Their bond persists beside Susan’s relationship with Thom Wright, but in the fall of 1981 a change in Susan’s manner and her connection to Robert Mallory turn friendship into a vantage point from which Bret watches, interprets, and sometimes misreads her. The relationship’s significance lies in that tension between closeness and exclusion: Bret knows much about Susan, yet cannot assume that her private life is his to know.

A Friendship Built on Closeness

Bret has been Susan’s closest male friend since they met at Buckley in seventh grade. Over five years, he learns about her family difficulties, her frustrations, and her crushes. Susan seems to recognize that he is secretly in love with her, but she does not address it directly; instead, when Bret pays her either too much or too little attention, she sometimes teases him. He is pleased when other people mistake them for a couple and does little to correct the impression until Thom enters the picture.

The friendship develops within a tight social circle. Susan and Thom, both popular and wealthy, become a couple in 1979 and are often together as a unit. Bret is drawn to both of them, but understands his feelings for Susan as love that he has not confessed. By the time the three have cars and can spend weekends together, Bret’s desire seems to him to have become pointless: Susan is with Thom, and Bret occupies the position of their close friend rather than her partner.

That position gives Bret an unusual kind of access without granting him authority over Susan’s choices. He knows her well enough to notice changes in her mood and habits, and to remember the details of their shared history. But the friendship’s intimacy does not make them transparent to each other. The gap between knowing Susan and being entitled to her confidences becomes increasingly important as she begins to keep parts of her life from him.

The Circle Around Thom and Susan

Bret’s friendship with Susan is shaped by her relationship with Thom. The two have dated since their sophomore year and are regarded as the most popular couple at Buckley. Bret is their close companion, but his closeness to them also defines his own position in the school’s social order: he is known partly through his proximity to the pair. He describes himself as their sidekick, someone whose place in the group comes from being near them rather than from athletic status or extracurricular distinction.

The three-person arrangement is emotionally uneven. Bret’s attachment to Susan is real but concealed, while Susan’s bond with Thom is public and established. By September 1981, Bret senses a general malaise in Susan after two years with Thom, though he initially thinks the jealousy that had once troubled him is fading. He believes that she may feel closer to him than to Thom in some respects, but recognizes that their relationship is different from her romantic partnership. His confidence in this closeness does not prevent him from feeling displaced when Susan’s attention shifts elsewhere.

The school’s visible hierarchies sharpen the contrast. Buckley’s uniforms and small classes are meant to discourage distinctions among students, yet Susan and Thom remain central figures in the student body’s imagination. Bret’s access to them is both genuine friendship and social position. As Susan’s life becomes less legible to him, the same proximity that once seemed to offer intimacy begins to expose its limits.

A New Distance in the Fall of 1981

When Bret encounters Susan at school in early October, he notices that she seems withdrawn in a way he has not seen before. He suggests going to a movie in Westwood, offering several options, but she declines and says she wants to return to Beverly Hills, finish homework, and continue reading Rabbit, Run. Bret remembers that Robert is reading the same book and immediately connects the two details, even though the novel is assigned to the class and he is reading it too. He recognizes that he is turning coincidence into a hidden sign, a habit tied to the suspicious, dramatizing version of himself he is trying to put aside.

After they walk to the parking lot and hug beside Susan’s car, she remains in her BMW while Bret waits in his Mercedes. He eventually leaves rather than continue waiting. He imagines what she might be doing and thinking, but the scene gives him no confirmation. The cars make the separation concrete: they depart from the same school, but her reasons and destination remain hers, beyond Bret’s knowledge.

The next morning, Susan casually greets Bret in class and asks what is wrong when he stares at her. She tells him Debbie has been looking for him. Bret considers asking what Susan had discussed with Robert the previous afternoon, after seeing Robert approach her car, but holds back. His restraint is deliberate, part of the new attitude he is trying to maintain. It does not resolve his curiosity; it makes visible how much the friendship now depends on questions he chooses not to ask.

Secrets, Performance, and Exclusion

The limits of Bret’s place in Susan’s confidence become unmistakable in a school restroom conversation between Susan and Debbie. The two discuss Susan’s reluctance to be Homecoming Queen and the pressure to follow through because she agreed to be student-body president after Thom asked her. Bret realizes they both know something connected to Robert that they believe he does not know. He asks what is going on, but Debbie trails off and directs her attention back to Susan, as if expecting Bret to excuse himself.

The moment unsettles Bret because it reverses the role he thinks he holds. He is accustomed to being the friend Susan can confide in, and believes that in another version of events he might have been precisely that person. In this situation, however, he feels like an impostor: close enough to be present, but not included in what matters. The scene does not establish exactly what Susan and Debbie know or what Susan has chosen to withhold. Its force comes from Bret’s awareness of the boundary itself.

At the same time, Bret’s own conduct is shaped by concealment. His feelings for Susan remain unspoken, and he watches her interactions with Robert while trying to appear detached. His friendship is therefore not a simple opposition between a candid Susan and an excluded Bret. Each has a private life the other cannot fully see, and Bret’s desire to read Susan’s actions for meaning sometimes turns ordinary details into evidence.

Later Memory and the Relationship’s Afterlife

The older Bret’s account returns to Susan not only as a friend but as a formative presence in his understanding of desire and artistic work. Looking back, he describes her emotional numbness as an aesthetic influence and acknowledges that his earlier conception of the book he was writing had been too narrow. He had thought it would concern the events leading to the attacks they survived on November 7; remembering Susan’s desires and detachment altered what the book meant to him. Their friendship thus persists in memory as more than a high-school bond: Susan’s way of being becomes part of how Bret interprets and narrates the past.

That retrospective account also preserves the asymmetry between them. Bret can describe his love, jealousy, and longing in detail, but the relationship does not become a completed romance or a mutual confession. His closeness to Susan gives him lasting knowledge of her presence in his life; it does not erase the secrets, distance, or uncertainty that defined their friendship at the time. The bond endures precisely as an unresolved mixture of affection, desire, trust, and exclusion.