Buckley’s indifference to violence and death

Buckley’s indifference to violence and death is the school’s recurring ability to let disturbing events recede without sustained attention or collective mourning. The pattern reaches its clearest expression after Matt Kellner, missing for a week, is reported dead: an official account calls his death an accident, the news gives it little space, and students turn it into a joke. Against the narrator’s fixation on the Trawler and the murders, Buckley’s practiced return to ordinary concerns makes neglect itself part of the story.

A Campus Ordered by Normality

Buckley’s small classes, uniforms, and quiet campus are described as discouraging visible distinctions and limiting opportunities for students to fixate on one another. Each grade had about sixty students, and no class exceeded fourteen. The arrangement was meant to soften inequalities of appearance, charisma, athletic ability, wealth, and family fame; it could not erase the social hierarchy through which certain students nevertheless captured the school’s imagination. The school’s orderly surface thus offers protection from overt competition without ensuring that attention or care is distributed evenly.

That imbalance is visible in the way students are noticed. Thom Wright’s return from a summer in New York in 1979 prompts classmates to see him differently: the boy they had regarded as cute is suddenly treated as a young man and sexualized. Ryan Vaughn, by contrast, is described as aloof and private despite his looks and potential popularity. These observations do not themselves establish the school’s response to violence, but they show the social system that shapes it: Buckley attends selectively, and the narrator measures later indifference against the attention given to more prominent students.

Violence Competes with Everyday Concerns

When Julie Selwyn is found and connected to the murders of Katherine Latchford and Sarah Johnson, the narrator expects the discovery to become a major subject at school. Instead, Susan Reynolds and Debbie Schaffer are preoccupied with Susan’s party, homework, music, and Robert Mallory. Their limited engagement is not presented as proof that they know nothing: they recognize Julie’s photograph and acknowledge that her body was found at Shadow Ranch Park, but they do not pursue the connection to the other victims or the Trawler as the narrator does.

The contrast continues after reports and press conferences bring further details into public view. Susan’s party at the North Canon Drive house occupies the group, while the narrator follows Debbie through the week, finding reassurance in her attention. The murders do not become the shared story the narrator wants them to be. The passage suggests that the threat remains easier to set aside while it is perceived as distant, insufficiently dramatic, or unrelated to the immediate rituals of school and friendship.

Matt Kellner’s Death and Its Official Story

The response to Matt’s death gives this pattern institutional force. After the Los Angeles Police Department contacts the school, Dr. Croft addresses students at the Monday mid-morning assembly, following the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer. He calls Matt’s death an unfortunate event and asks the students to remember his family in their prayers. The account presented is accidental drowning: Matt supposedly slipped, hit his head on the pool ledge, and drowned, with drugs hinted at as part of the explanation.

That concise version leaves out the context that would make the death harder to contain. Matt had been missing for a week, and his bloodstained backpack had been found in a parking lot an hour outside Los Angeles. The school’s public account does not revisit those circumstances. Instead, the accident explanation makes the event seem simple and closed, replacing unresolved questions with a story that can be absorbed into the school day.

The news coverage reinforces that reduction. Matt’s death is reported in a small item in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner under the headline “Encino Boy, 17, drowns in pool,” and receives only a brief obituary in the Los Angeles Times. His junior-year yearbook photograph appears among hundreds of obituaries, its individual presence diminished by the surrounding page. No funeral or memorial service follows. A death that should have marked a first for the students—no Buckley student had died while they were there—passes without becoming a campus-wide occasion.

Unequal Grief and the Cost of Dismissal

The narrator understands the muted response partly through Matt’s social invisibility. Matt had withdrawn into himself and was regarded as a stoner and a weirdo; the narrator imagines that a death involving Thom Wright, or even Jeff Taylor, would have produced a more substantial campus response. Matt’s death therefore exposes a difference between the abstract expectation that a student death should matter and the school’s actual allocation of attention. The narrator is more shocked by the apparent lack of concern than saddened in the way expected, and admits that the easy acceptance of the official account surprised him as well.

In the first days of October, the response becomes openly callous. Students in the hallways imitate Cheech and Chong and Mr. Bill, making jokes that associate Matt with the pool and his death. The narrator identifies Debbie as the person most visibly affected and says that he wished she had not been, because she did not believe his assurances that he was all right. Her concern is a pointed counterexample: feeling persists, but it does not become a shared school response capable of challenging the prevailing dismissal.

The same habit of simplification shapes discussion of Robert Mallory. Susan describes his previous treatment at a developmental center; the narrator recasts that description as an asylum and uses the label to question the prospect of holding a party for him. Later, Dr. Croft challenges claims about Robert by asking whether two boys have active imaginations and whether Robert has done something to them. These scenes show how labels and questions of credibility can narrow discussion rather than resolve it. They do not establish that the school’s account of every threat is false; they reveal how institutional calm and social skepticism can make troubling claims easier to set aside.

Aftermath: Attention Turns Toward the Accuser

Near the end of the account, Abigail Mallory publicly disputes the narrator’s version of what happened between Robert and Bret Ellis on November 7. The narrator’s forceful account nevertheless becomes the core truth carried by the remaining narrative: Robert is presented as dangerous and suicidal, though not necessarily the Trawler. The passage preserves uncertainty about the competing accounts while showing how a persuasive story can temporarily organize what others believe.

That narrative does not protect the narrator. Buckley’s mood toward him shifts through small acts of withdrawal: people stop greeting him, teachers look away, students avoid him, and friends no longer include him in lunches at Teru Sushi, Du-par’s, McDonald’s, or Hamburger Hamlet. He finds himself alone in the courtyard and eating at a far table beneath the Pavilion. The contrast with Matt’s treatment is not that the school suddenly becomes attentive to harm, but that attention changes direction: the narrator becomes socially isolated as his account is contested. Across both episodes, Buckley’s apparent calm depends on which person is believed, remembered, or left outside the circle of concern.