Deborah Schaffer

Deborah Schaffer, known as Debbie, is Bret Ellis’s longtime acquaintance, summer girlfriend, and member of the social circle around Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright. Their relationship begins through a spontaneous encounter at a party, but Bret’s motives are divided: he hopes a girlfriend might ease the pain of being close to Susan and Thom, and he also wants greater access to Debbie’s father, Terry Schaffer. Her story moves from conspicuous confidence and plans for an expansive senior year to distance from Bret, whose later recollection admits that he had misunderstood her complexity.

Identity and Social Setting

Debbie has known Bret since fifth grade and belongs to the affluent Buckley circle whose teenagers gain increasing freedom once they have cars. Bret describes her as having changed from an awkward-looking younger girl into a striking and self-assured adolescent. Her style is notably more defiant than Susan’s: she wears vivid lipstick despite being asked by teachers and Dr. Croft to remove it, while Susan wears little makeup because Thom dislikes it. The contrast makes Debbie’s confidence visible within a school culture where rules about appearance can bend according to who is enforcing them.

Her family’s home is one of the group’s familiar gathering places. At a Sunday evening gathering there before Labor Day, Ryan Vaughn is already by the pool when Bret arrives; Thom and Jeff Taylor are among the guests, and Debbie’s father, Terry, is present. The scene establishes Debbie within a comfortable social world of backyard parties, music, and carefully arranged plans, while also placing her among people whose friendships and private lives are less settled than their surroundings suggest.

Bret and Debbie’s Relationship

The relationship starts at a party at Anthony Matthews’s house, where Debbie initiates a kiss and Bret goes along with it. He later describes himself as passive about the relationship and says he had not set out to find a girlfriend for senior year, except that he might have wanted Susan. Debbie becomes his girlfriend somewhat unexpectedly at the start of summer. Bret’s account presents the relationship less as a deliberate courtship than as an arrangement he accepts while trying to understand his own desires.

Bret also hopes that including Debbie in the existing trio of himself, Susan, and Thom might make his closeness to them less painful, or perhaps provoke jealousy. Neither result follows. He says that he did not want to mislead either a girl or a boy, even though he was not publicly defining himself as bisexual. His relationship with Debbie therefore sits beside, rather than resolves, his concealed attraction to Susan and Thom.

A further motive is his longstanding fascination with Terry. Bret hopes that becoming closer to Debbie might bring him nearer to her father, a well-known figure whom he has felt drawn to but never truly known. This private calculation complicates the apparent simplicity of their teenage relationship: Debbie is both someone Bret has known for years and a possible route into a relationship with her father that remains only an aspiration in the evidence.

Place in the Senior-Year Circle

At the Schaffers’ gathering before Labor Day, Debbie talks enthusiastically about the coming school year. Her plans range across Homecoming, the senior prom, the Christmas party, the yearbook, Grad Nite at Disneyland, and a private event at the Blue Bayou restaurant where Tommy Tutone is booked to perform. She is already helping organize the prom and will co-edit the yearbook. Her catalogue of future events casts senior year as a sequence of social occasions that can be scheduled in advance, even as the relationships among the students are beginning to shift.

The narration places her optimism in a group setting rather than treating it as proof that she understands what will follow. As Debbie continues listing plans, Bret notices that the gathering has thinned to a smaller group; then Susan announces that a new student is arriving. Debbie’s confident vision of the year thus shares the scene with the first hint of a change to the group’s established order.

Distance, Memory, and Reassessment

Debbie’s later place in Bret’s life is marked by estrangement. After the events that leave him socially isolated at Buckley, she does not invite him to Jeff’s eighteenth-birthday party at the Schaffers’ Stone Canyon home. Bret understands the exclusion as part of the wider breakdown in his friendships; he and Debbie rarely speak for the rest of their senior year, and he never speaks to Terry or Liz Schaffer again.

Years later, Bret recalls that he nearly contacted Debbie after hearing that Terry died by suicide in 1992, but believed she would not want to speak with him. He continues to find no peace in that missed possibility. When he revisits the past through writing, he initially expects Debbie to emerge as simply entitled, but the details he remembers make that judgment untenable. The retrospective correction gives her characterization its final emphasis: she cannot be reduced to the social persona Bret once saw, even though their relationship ends without reconciliation.