Susan Reynolds

Susan Reynolds is a central figure in the Buckley social world and in the chain of concealed relationships that shapes the novel’s events in 1981. For roughly two years she and Thom Wright have appeared inseparable; she is also Bret Ellis’s closest female friend, while his private love for her complicates his loyalty. Her growing involvement with Robert Mallory turns those attachments into competing claims, and the later attack at her home makes secrecy a matter of immediate danger as well as social consequence.

Identity and Place at Buckley

Susan and Thom have dated since their sophomore year. After Katie Choi and Brad Foreman graduate, they become the most popular students in their class and across Buckley: both are wealthy, casually beautiful, and so routinely together that they seem to move as a unit. Their public ease makes the eventual change in their relationship difficult to separate from the wider social disruption that follows. The narrator describes their two-year romance as ending when one of them no longer loves the other, a turn that sets further events in motion.

Susan’s prominence exists within a school that formally discourages visible distinctions. Buckley’s uniforms and small classes—about sixty students per grade, with no classroom larger than fourteen—are meant to curb popularity contests and conspicuous displays of difference. Yet the narrator observes that some students still capture the student body’s imagination, and Susan is unmistakably among them. Her standing is both informal and official: she is student-body president, and at the welcome-back assembly she addresses the school without notes, mentions Homecoming and float-design approvals, and directs students toward the newspaper and yearbook. The applause and wolf whistles around her make the gap between the school’s leveling rules and its actual social hierarchies visible.

Friendship, Desire, and the Public Couple

Bret has been Susan’s closest male friend since they met in seventh grade. Over the following five years, he becomes privy to her confidences about her period, troubles with her mother, perceived slights, and earlier crushes. Susan seems to recognize that he is secretly in love with her. Rather than directly naming that knowledge, she sometimes teases him when he pays her too much or too little attention. Bret, meanwhile, is flattered when others mistake them for a couple and does little to correct the rumor until Thom intervenes.

The asymmetry between them matters: intimacy and trust do not amount to reciprocal romantic feeling. When Susan later asks Bret whether he loves her, her appeal comes amid her distress and uncertainty, not as a simple continuation of the old friendship. Bret’s desire for her is real, but it exists alongside his attraction to Thom and his increasingly difficult role as the person who knows more than he can safely say. Susan’s friendship gives Bret unusual access to her inner life, while also making his silence consequential.

Robert Mallory and the Fracture with Thom

When Susan announces that there is a new student, she names Robert Mallory. Robert and Thom quickly bond, while Susan appears less comfortable with the attention that their connection draws. Bret notices Robert seeming to restrain himself from staring at Susan, although the group does not later discuss this observation. Susan’s changing manner becomes more noticeable in the fall: as she passes through seventeen, the narrator sees her as newly radiant and self-possessed, moving calmly through the school’s social world.

Susan tells the group that Robert spent the previous spring being treated at a developmental center. Later, she says that she intends to hold a party to welcome him and asks Bret to keep the matter between the four of them. That confidence establishes an important pattern: information about Robert is carefully controlled, and Bret is brought inside the circle without being told everything at once. Thom, by contrast, is initially welcoming toward Robert and appears to trust him easily. The trio’s social ease therefore masks a growing imbalance in what each person knows.

The relationship between Susan and Robert eventually becomes visible to Bret in Palm Springs. He sees them together at a table overlooking Palm Canyon Drive: Susan has ordered a margarita, Robert has a Coke, and she is speaking while he listens. The quiet scene resolves Bret’s uncertainty about their connection, but it does not settle what should happen next. Susan asks Bret not to tell Thom, and then tells him that she loves him and asks whether he loves her too. Her confession places Bret between her request for secrecy and his friendship with Thom; it also reveals how much emotional dependence has accumulated inside what had looked like an effortless popular couple.

Secrecy, Breakup, and the Attack

After the Palm Springs encounter, Bret tells Susan that he will not disclose her secret and apologizes for the distress surrounding the situation. He stops her beneath the eaves at school, takes her hand, and tells her that he loves her regardless of what she decides. Susan’s eyes fill with tears and she hugs him. The moment gives their friendship a renewed intimacy, but it also confirms that Bret’s promise to protect her secret now shapes his relationships with both Susan and Thom.

Thom eventually begins to grasp what others at the table already know. Susan’s response to his questioning appears to Bret both teasing and rehearsed, leaving Thom exposed to a truth that has not been clearly explained to him. Later, Bret finds Thom crying in his Corvette in the senior parking lot before practice. Thom says he does not know whether he can go; Bret wants to comfort him, but his own affection for Thom and his knowledge of Susan’s relationship pull in opposite directions. When Robert’s Porsche arrives, Susan tells Bret that she is with Robert now. The declaration makes the change explicit, though it does not resolve the pain or secrecy left behind.

On Robert’s eighteenth birthday, Susan arranges for him to come to her family’s North Canon Drive home at eight. Her parents, Donald and Gayle Reynolds, are expected to be out until about eleven, and the plan is to spend the evening together in her bedroom watching television. Susan has suggested that Robert celebrate his birthday with her; whether he will stay overnight remains undecided. The ordinary details of the arrangement make the impending intrusion all the more disruptive: a private evening is planned within a narrow window when the house is empty.

Susan realizes something is wrong when she believes Thom has hung up and then discovers that the phone lines have been cut. Moving through the house, she sees an intruder dressed in black, wearing a ski mask and holding a knife. During the attack she resists, and the intruder wounds and strikes her before she falls. The encounter makes her earlier insistence on privacy newly precarious: the secret gathering has left her alone at home when a masked attacker enters. Six days later, Bret visits her in her bedroom, where she is recovering.

What Susan Knows, and What She Sees

During Bret’s visit, Susan notices a deep, bruised wound on his forearm beneath the sleeve of his blue shirt. The sight changes the mood between them; she begins shaking, but says nothing at first. Bret asks whether his secret is safe with her. The exchange reverses their familiar confidant roles: Susan has often relied on Bret to protect what she has concealed, but now she has seen something about him that he is trying to keep hidden. The novel does not make her response a straightforward resolution; the question leaves their friendship suspended between care and suspicion.

Susan’s story is consequently marked less by a single stable role than by the collision of roles she performs and inhabits: popular student, student-body president, Thom’s girlfriend, Bret’s confidante, and Robert’s secret partner. The controlled calm the narrator associates with her in the fall contrasts with her private requests, the emotional appeal in Palm Springs, and the danger at her home. Her prominence cannot protect her from the consequences of concealment, while her friendship with Bret repeatedly makes him both a refuge and a witness. Through Susan, the novel links adolescent romance to the broader problem of who knows the truth, who is asked to keep it, and what loyalty costs when relationships change.