Fall of 1981

Fall of 1981 is the season at the center of Bret Ellis’s memories of his senior year at Buckley: a time when ordinary school routines and plans for the future became inseparable from secrecy, suspicion, and danger. The adult narrator returns to it across decades, revising what the season meant. What first appeared to be a story about the Trawler and the attacks came to encompass desire, friendship, and the young people whose futures were shaped by what they could not say openly.

A Season of Attachments and Uneasy Futures

The emotional landscape of the fall was already in place before its threats became legible. Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds had been together since their sophomore year and were among the most popular students at Buckley. For roughly two years, they had seemed to move through school and social life as a couple, almost always together. The narrator was close to Susan from the time they met in seventh grade, and he had been in love with her without admitting it. He was also drawn to Thom, whose ease and apparent lack of self-consciousness made him both a friend and the object of a private, unreturned longing.

The narrator’s feelings for Thom had sharpened after Thom returned from a summer with his father in 1979, newly confident in his appearance. But by the time the three friends had cars, the narrator’s crushes on both Thom and Susan seemed, in his words, pointless: Thom was resolutely heterosexual, and Susan was with him. Their friendship formed a close-knit social arrangement whose apparent stability would make its later strain especially painful. In retrospect, the narrator identifies that autumn as the moment when one of the long-standing couple stopped being in love, setting further events in motion.

Ryan Vaughn represented another possible future, though one that could not be publicly claimed. The narrator understood Ryan to share his attraction to men, while Ryan’s low-profile manner and plans to leave Los Angeles for college offered a way to imagine starting over elsewhere. Ryan described their contact as requiring subterfuge, and the narrator accepted the secrecy as part of their connection. Looking back, he frames their situation as a consequence of their time: in 1981, he believed, they could not simply be themselves. The future seemed to promise escape, but it also postponed the possibility of an open life until after high school.

Suspicion and the Beige Van

As the season unfolds, the narrator’s attention turns increasingly toward Robert Mallory and the possibility that events are linked. In October, he follows Robert’s Porsche from school to the house in Benedict Canyon, waits while Robert goes inside, and then trails him toward Beverly Hills. Robert slows near Susan’s home, though her car is absent. The narrator interprets the stop as evidence that Robert is trying to understand something about the house or Susan, but he cannot know what Robert is thinking. The episode makes following and watching part of the narrator’s own response to the uncertainty surrounding Robert.

The beige van gathers significance through a different kind of repetition. In Palm Springs, the narrator recalls seeing it at three places during the fall: in the Buckley parking lot on the night the Griffin was desecrated, in the Sherman Oaks Galleria garage when Robert followed him across Ventura Boulevard, and in an alley near the space on Melrose on the night of an attack. He distinguishes these remembered sightings from other flashes that may have been imagined. The pattern does not prove a connection, but it makes the van feel sinister to him, a recurring sign of a season that is coming apart. He begins to associate it with Robert without knowing why, or what the link could be.

That uncertainty is important to the season’s remembered character. The narrator does not present every suspicion as established fact: memory supplies some sightings, doubt qualifies others, and fear supplies a possible meaning before evidence can confirm it. The van therefore stands both for a possible external threat and for the narrator’s effort to turn scattered episodes into a pattern. Its recurrence does not resolve the mystery; it makes the limits of what he knows part of the story.

The Cost of Watching and Keeping Secrets

Thom’s request that the narrator keep an eye on Susan changes how the narrator understands their friendship. After Thom leaves, the narrator is shaken: he wonders whether Thom senses a danger in Susan and Robert’s connection, or whether he is simply worried about leaving his girlfriend alone for a week. Thom’s assumption that his romantic rival is not a threat because the narrator is gay makes the request more complicated still. The narrator agrees to help and begins thinking about possible plans with Susan, but recognizes that looking after her could also mean spying on her. Care and surveillance have begun to occupy the same role.

At school, the narrator sees Ryan and Robert together and chooses not to ask Ryan where he has been or to disclose what he has observed. He fears that a question would make him appear unreasonable and end any hope of becoming closer to Ryan. The decision to remain silent preserves the immediate appearance of friendship while deepening his distrust. In this way, secrecy is not limited to a hidden romance: it shapes what the narrator can ask, what he can admit, and how much confidence he can place in the people around him.

Memory, Retelling, and the Season’s Afterlife

The narrator’s later life does not leave the fall behind. In 1999, while touring for Glamorama, he encounters Thom at a signing in Boston College. He invites Thom to dinner, but Thom declines, and although the narrator gives him his New York number, Thom never calls. The brief reunion underscores the distance that has accumulated since their school years; the narrator later describes it as the last time he saw Thom. In another retrospective account, he says that Ryan barely spoke to him for the rest of senior year. They exchanged a few words at graduation in June 1982, and decades later he heard that Ryan had become an architect in San Francisco and lived with a partner. The news wounded him, despite the many years since their kiss, revealing how incompletely the earlier attachment had ended for him.

Writing the book becomes another way the season returns. The narrator says that he began this version after years of earlier attempts, when the facts were receding but his emotional understanding of being seventeen had become clearer. The story’s center shifted: it was no longer only the Trawler’s victims and the attacks, but also Matt Kellner, whose memory haunted him, his complicated desire for Susan, and his love for Thom. He also reconsidered Debbie Schaffer, whom he had once expected to remember as merely entitled, and acknowledged his unresolved regret that he had not contacted her after hearing of Terry Schaffer’s suicide.

The adult narrator’s account holds memory and uncertainty together rather than claiming a clean recovery of the past. He recalls trying to forget the fall, and later recognizes that he sometimes pretended it had been a dream. Yet the season continues to return through remembered relationships, the beige van, music, and the act of writing itself. Its significance lies not only in the threats that occupied the teenagers’ lives, but in the long afterlife of what remained unresolved: the future they imagined, the attachments they could not openly pursue, and the memories that kept demanding a new telling.