Debbie Schaffer

Debbie Schaffer is Bret Ellis’s girlfriend through much of his senior year at Buckley, and the relationship becomes both a recognizable social role and a refuge from the truth he does not want to face. Bret can offer her affection, reassurance, and the appearance of commitment, but his concealed desires and repeated evasions prevent that performance from becoming an honest partnership. When Debbie learns that he has had a relationship with her father, Terry Schaffer, the secret shatters the role she had tried to inhabit; after the violence of November 7, her brief disappearance and return leave her poised between family loyalty, grief, and suspicion of Bret’s story.

Identity and Relationship with Bret

Debbie is the daughter of Terry and Liz Schaffer and Bret’s girlfriend during the events of his senior year. The available scenes show her moving within Buckley’s affluent social world: she drives a BMW, wears Wayfarers, and arrives with Romeo Void playing from the sunroof. Those details place her in the polished teenage milieu the novel repeatedly presents, but her relationship with Bret is more unstable than its public shape suggests.

Bret is already aware of the divide between what he feels and what he performs. His unreturned feelings for Thom Wright, whose heterosexuality seems settled to him, sharpen the contrast between his private desire and his visible relationship with Debbie. The relationship is not simply a disguise: Bret says he genuinely likes her. But he also relies on the structure of being her boyfriend because it provides a manageable role and, as he thinks of it, a kind of pretend safety. His affection and his concealment coexist, making the relationship neither wholly false nor fully candid.

Care, Pursuit, and Evasion

When Susan Reynolds arranges a party to welcome Robert Mallory, Debbie is part of the circle surrounding Bret and the news of Robert’s return. Susan describes Robert’s treatment at a developmental center the previous spring; Bret pointedly recasts that phrase as meaning an asylum. The exchange establishes the group’s awareness of Robert’s troubled recent past, but does not make Debbie responsible for Susan’s decision to welcome him.

The relationship’s imbalance becomes clearer when Debbie tries to reach Bret. She asks whether he is happy to see her and whether something is wrong, pressing him to explain the distance she senses. Bret considers admitting his real feelings, then decides that speaking honestly would complicate the year and disrupt the story already in motion. He chooses the easier course: to act as the attentive boyfriend. He tells her he really likes her, a statement the narration identifies as true, while leaving the more consequential truth unspoken.

After Matt Kellner dies, Debbie interprets Bret’s grief as evidence of a close friendship that she had not understood. Having briefly spoken with Matt by phone, she becomes worried about Bret and cancels a session at Windover Stables so she can follow him to the house on Mulholland and comfort him. Bret recognizes that she has mistaken Matt for someone who was only his dealer, but does not correct her. Instead, he allows Debbie’s concern to bring them together and uses thoughts of Ryan Vaughn to get through sex with her; he soon finds he cannot sustain that arrangement and begins using Matt’s death as a reason to avoid sex.

Debbie’s repeated calls make the avoidance visible. During a weekend with Ryan, she leaves a long message after Bret does not answer the bedroom phone. Ryan reacts with tension and turns up the television to drown out the message; when Debbie calls again, Bret still does not respond. Later, Bret calls Susan and, when she does not answer, tries another number at the Canon Drive house. These episodes show how one concealed relationship presses upon the others: Debbie’s search for contact becomes something Bret and Ryan try to silence, while Bret turns elsewhere when he needs to speak.

The Performance of Commitment

By a Friday lunch beneath the Buckley Pavilion, Bret has deliberately changed his presentation. He tells Debbie that he spent Thursday at home thinking about their relationship and wants to be more committed. He promises that he has overcome the withdrawn state that had overtaken him earlier in the semester, then makes a conspicuous show of affection, touching, caressing, and kissing her between classes. His renewed attentiveness is a social performance with a specific purpose: to reassure Debbie without resolving the dishonesty beneath it.

The performance does not require Bret to feel nothing. He can tell Debbie that he likes her and can comfort her, while also making choices that keep her from understanding his life. The distinction matters because the narrative depicts the role as pragmatically useful rather than as a simple, wholly fabricated romance. Bret wants its stability; he does not offer the openness that would make that stability mutual.

The relationship also reaches a limit in private. On one afternoon, Bret cannot become aroused, while Debbie’s participation is described as desultory. He is nevertheless able to bring her to orgasm, after which she cries and he holds her. They move together to the kitchen, where Debbie opens a bottle of Chardonnay; back in Bret’s room, they lie on the bed in silence with the television on. The scene’s emotional aftermath contrasts with Bret’s public display of renewed commitment: care remains possible, but it does not remove the distance between them.

Betrayal and Disappearance

That distance becomes a rupture when Debbie discovers explicit photographs of Bret and Terry. Liz has left a manila envelope bearing Debbie’s name on the table beside the front door at the Stone Canyon house. Debbie is dressed and carrying an overnight bag when she notices it. The photographs establish that Bret and her father had been together in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in October. Debbie calls Bret at 10:15 p.m., with two police officers and a Bel Air Security patrolman present, and screams at him about his relationship with Terry, his earlier involvement with Matt, and what she had understood about his experimentation. She also invokes Susan, who had told her about Matt, and Liz, who has been incapacitated nearby. What had been concealed as separate episodes is now exposed to Debbie as a pattern of betrayals that includes her own family.

In the aftermath, Debbie goes missing for several days. Bret asks Robert where he is keeping her and specifically raises the possibility that she is at Benedict Canyon, but the question records Bret’s suspicion rather than establishing her location. The evidence does not resolve where Debbie spends the interval or what she does during it. That gap is significant in itself: her absence is not narrated as a confirmed abduction, and it cannot be treated as proof of Bret’s suspicions.

Debbie returns to Stone Canyon on Monday morning, November 9. She has spent time away and takes about half an hour to locate her car on the street before remembering that it had been hidden in the garage because she did not want anyone to find her. Maria cries and falls to her knees when she sees Debbie again; Steven Reinhardt contacts Terry at Cedars-Sinai, where Terry is recovering from a second operation. Debbie refuses to speak to either parent and instead listens silently as Steven tells her about the attack on Susan and Thom, the later attack on Bret, and Robert’s death, which Bret alone says he witnessed.

Her first question challenges the account she has just heard: she asks whether Robert’s death was really a suicide, as Bret has said. The question does not supply an alternative explanation, but makes clear that Debbie does not accept the official version merely because it is delivered to her. Her return therefore does not restore the relationship or the household to normal. She is back at Stone Canyon, but estranged from both parents and newly doubtful of Bret’s narrative.

Narrative Significance

Debbie’s storyline gives concrete form to the novel’s concern with social roles and concealment. Bret chooses the boyfriend role partly because its familiar structure lets him postpone a harder reckoning with his desires. His reassuring words are not entirely false, but they are insufficient to overcome the facts he withholds: his feelings for men, the nature of his connection to Matt, and his relationship with Terry. Debbie’s attempts to reach and comfort him repeatedly encounter that boundary.

Her discovery of the photographs turns a private performance into an event with consequences beyond the couple. What had been hidden from Debbie implicates her father and mother as well as Bret, and her days away from Stone Canyon are followed by a return marked by refusal to speak and distrust. Her question about Robert also intersects with the book’s uncertainty over Bret’s account of November 7. Later, Bret’s dramatic version becomes the core public account even as Abigail Mallory disputes what she believes happened; Debbie’s doubt does not settle the facts, but it places the credibility of Bret’s story under pressure. Her arc thus links intimate betrayal to the novel’s broader pattern of secrecy, unreliable narration, and social life sustained by stories that can no longer contain what they conceal.