September 1981

September 1981 is the unsettled beginning of Bret Ellis’s senior year at Buckley: Robert Mallory arrives, Bret’s secret relationship with Ryan Vaughn briefly becomes possible, and the routines of school persist as Bret grows numb and detached. In later recollection, the month stands at the threshold between the imagined freedom of life after graduation and the danger that will overtake the friends’ world.

A Senior Year Begins

Buckley’s first days of school preserve the appearance of order. Students wear uniforms, attend classes, and settle into a carefully ranked social world. At lunch, the small senior class occupies the tables beneath the Pavilion; the central table, where Bret sits with Thom Wright, Susan Reynolds, and Debbie Schaffer, is especially visible. Thom and Susan remain the school’s celebrated couple, while Bret’s standing depends largely on his closeness to them. The hierarchy is softened by uniforms and the school’s small classes, but it is never erased.

Robert’s arrival unsettles this familiar arrangement. During a brief lunch encounter, he seems charming, handsome, intelligent, and well-mannered, yet Bret senses that his casual manner is rehearsed. Robert’s story about a former girlfriend and his previous school proves false: he had not attended Roycemore for the term he describes. Bret’s later narration calls this an early glimpse of a hidden story, turning an ordinary introduction into retrospective foreshadowing.

The first week passes in a haze. Bret later recalls that he remembers little of the classes after meeting Robert, and describes himself as constructing a reassuring account of events around him. He wants to believe that the Griffin statue’s desecration was merely a prank that went wrong, that the person seen with a flashlight regretted it, and that Robert was as stable as anyone else. The effort to preserve the idea that the students are innocent and protected by privilege is already at odds with Bret’s growing sense of disconnection.

Relationships and Unspoken Futures

Thom and Susan have been together since their sophomore year and are among the most popular students at Buckley. Bret, who has been Susan’s close friend since seventh grade, knows the details of her life and recognizes that she has understood his concealed feelings for her. He is also in love with Thom, whose easygoing manner and athletic reputation make him seem both socially secure and emotionally difficult to read. Bret’s attachment to both friends remains largely unspoken, even as their closeness gives him a place in the school’s social order.

Ryan and Bret, acquainted since seventh grade, grew close the previous spring. Their connection is shaped by shared secrecy: both imagine leaving Buckley and beginning again somewhere far from home. Ryan comes from a more conservative, middle-class household in Northridge, and Bret understands his guardedness as a way of staying unnoticed until he can leave. Ryan has already admitted that he wants Bret, but also that their relationship requires concealment. The prospect of a future together therefore remains tied to delay, discretion, and escape from their present surroundings.

That September, Ryan spends a weekend at Bret’s empty house on Mulholland. The arrangement is made simply, after Ryan tells Bret at school that he will come over. Bret remembers the weekend as the last one not yet tainted by the past, and as an interval organized around desire and hope. Its quietness and apparent ease contrast with the instability gathering around their senior year.

Secrecy, Estrangement, and Threat

The friends’ relationships do not offer a shared or reliable refuge. Ryan calls Thom a friend but also describes him as sheltered and oblivious to anything outside his privileged world. Thom, meanwhile, later wonders whether Robert is gay and suggests that this might be the secret behind Robert’s time in an institution. The exchange shows how readily the group turns hidden identity into an explanation, even while Bret and Ryan’s own relationship depends on keeping their desires unspoken.

Bret’s detachment becomes more pronounced as the week unfolds. He describes himself as no longer a tangible participant in Buckley or the outside world: events reach him as facts without attaching themselves to feeling or meaning. Even political news and public violence register only as empty excitement. The phrase captures more than a passing mood; it defines the distance separating Bret from the school life he continues to perform.

Thom and Susan’s relationship, meanwhile, is approaching a break. They have been together for about two years, but Bret senses a vague weariness in Susan by September. Later, when their conflict becomes visible at school, Thom is left in tears and Bret feels the urge to comfort him, but instead says that they have to do something about Robert. The moment exposes the tension between Bret’s private attachment to Thom and the danger he believes is gathering around the group.

Retrospective Meaning

The month is narrated through a later Bret, who returns to the events of 1981 with knowledge the seventeen-year-old did not possess. At the first meeting with Robert, the older narrator says that he now knows the secret narrative; in the original moment, he has only a suspicion that Robert’s manner is false. This gap between youthful impressions and adult understanding makes ordinary school scenes carry the weight of warnings whose significance becomes clear only afterward.

In retrospect, September’s relationships are also structured by competing ideas of the future. Thom and Susan’s long-standing couplehood appears to belong to a familiar social timetable, while Bret and Ryan can imagine a life together only after leaving school and starting elsewhere. At graduation in June 1982, their brief encounter in the Pavilion bathroom ends with Ryan’s abrupt farewell and the pair’s old shared expression. Decades later, Bret learns that Ryan is reportedly an architect living with a partner in San Francisco, but the news does not resolve what their relationship might have become. September’s promise of possibility remains inseparable from the secrecy and separation that followed.