Bret Ellis—Susan Reynolds

Bret Ellis—Susan Reynolds is a relationship shaped by years of intimacy and shared secrets, then strained by what each friend cannot safely disclose. Susan has long understood Bret’s closeness to her, but when her possible interest in Robert Mallory coincides with Bret’s effort to hide his past with Matt Kellner, their old trust becomes uncertain rather than assured.

A Longstanding Friendship and Unspoken Love

Susan and Bret met at Buckley in seventh grade. By the time they were seniors, Bret had been her closest male friend for five years and knew much of what she confided: her worries about her mother, perceived slights, and earlier crushes. He had allowed rumors that they were a couple to continue, though he did little to discourage them only until Thom Wright intervened. Susan seemed to recognize Bret’s feelings, sometimes teasing him when he paid her too much or too little attention, but neither made the love Bret felt an explicit subject between them.

Susan and Thom had been together since sophomore year and were widely regarded as Buckley’s most popular couple. Bret was infatuated with both of them, and he saw the pair as almost inseparable. Their relationship did not erase his attachment to Susan; instead, it placed his desire inside a friendship that had to coexist with her established romance. He later reflected that Susan had seemed unattainable, and that this distance may have helped him avoid the disappointment he imagined an actual relationship would bring.

The three friends’ social ease concealed different kinds of asymmetry. Susan and Thom could appear together openly, while Bret’s feelings for Susan went unspoken. His friendship with her gave him access to her private life, but that closeness did not mean she knew everything about him. The distinction between being trusted and being fully known becomes increasingly important as the senior-year story unfolds.

Shared Signals and Private Language

Music gives Susan and Bret a private vocabulary. They bought Icehouse’s debut cassette together at Tower Records on Sunset during the last week of junior year. Susan had wanted the single being played on KROQ, but the first track became the song that belonged to the two of them: a ballad they replayed while driving, until its reference to the icehouse and its lack of love served as a coded point of recognition. Thom, Debbie Schaffer, and Ryan Vaughn did not know the song in the same way. Its meaning lay not only in the lyrics but in the fact that Susan and Bret had made it theirs.

That private bond persists when Bret recalls the friendship’s earlier scenes: Susan’s arrival at a seventh-grade party, their growing closeness the following year, and a later moment at the Cinerama Dome when he tested the boundary of her relationship with Thom by touching her thigh. Susan did not push his hand away, but Bret withdrew it himself. Such memories do not establish that she returned his feelings; they show how he repeatedly looked for meaning in their closeness while leaving the question unresolved.

By fall 1981, Bret notices changes in Susan’s appearance and confidence and suspects that her new presentation may be directed toward Robert. This is an inference, not something she has confirmed to him. The uncertainty matters: Bret’s long familiarity with Susan does not grant him certainty about her desires, and his interpretation is already colored by what he has heard from Debbie and by his own suspicions about Robert.

Secrets and a Changed Confidence

The limits of the friendship surface when Susan asks Bret whether they have secrets. She recalls that they once seemed to have none, or only a few, and asks whether that has changed. Bret connects her question to Robert and to the possibility that she has feelings for him, but he recognizes that this account rests on hearsay and conjecture rather than proof. He worries that he may be constructing a story around Robert rather than responding to established facts.

Susan also points out that Bret had disappeared from view and asks why he had not wanted Debbie to visit while he was unwell. The exchange makes his withdrawal visible to her. Bret offers an explanation that minimizes what happened, while Susan’s questions indicate that she has noticed a gap between his account and his behavior. Their intimacy now includes scrutiny: she is attentive enough to see that something is being withheld, but Bret is not ready to tell her what it is.

When Susan asks what had been happening between Bret and Matt, she offers confidentiality and asks him to be honest. Bret initially says nothing. After she asks directly whether they had been involved, he realizes that he cannot trust her as he once did—not because she has betrayed his confidence, but because his suspicions about Robert have altered his sense of safety. He decides he cannot tell her the full truth. His answer acknowledges that he and Matt had sometimes been involved, while describing the relationship as an experiment and leaving out the depth of his feelings.

Susan responds that she will not tell Thom, Debbie, or Robert, and that what happened was between Bret and Matt. Her assurance confirms that she is willing to protect his privacy. Yet the reassurance cannot restore the earlier openness: Bret feels little relief after speaking, because even this partial admission marks how far he has moved from Susan and from their group. He understands that the secrecy is not simply a fact he has concealed; it has changed the relationship in which he might once have expected to confess it.

Distance, Memory, and What Remains

The later account preserves the relationship as a source of both attachment and loss. Bret describes the book he eventually writes as becoming more than a record of the attacks he and his friends survived: it also comes to encompass his desire for Susan and her emotional numbness, which he identifies as an influence on his own writing. Susan therefore remains central to his recollection not only as a friend from adolescence but as someone whose way of moving through the world shaped his understanding of intimacy and artistic attention.

The friendship’s history does not resolve into a romance or a clean break. Its defining pattern is closeness without complete disclosure: years of shared knowledge, a song recognized as theirs alone, Susan’s effort to protect Bret’s secret, and Bret’s inability to trust her with the whole of it. The relationship’s change is quiet but consequential. Susan is still offering care, while Bret has begun to experience their old confidence as something he can no longer inhabit.