Senior Year at Buckley

Senior Year at Buckley is the period when the narrator’s friendships and private desires become entangled with the upheaval around him. The school year begins with a close social circle and a familiar hierarchy, but Susan Reynolds’s growing attachment to Robert Mallory strains her long relationship with Thom Wright. At the same time, the narrator and Ryan Vaughn pursue a secret intimacy that neither can readily imagine carrying into life after school. Graduation offers the prospect of escape, but it does not resolve what the group has lost or left unsaid.

The Circle Before It Breaks

Thom and Susan have been dating since their sophomore year and are among the most popular students at Buckley. They are often treated as a unit, their prominence reinforced by their good looks, wealth, and ease with one another. The narrator is close to both: he has been Susan’s trusted male friend since seventh grade and has privately loved them both, while his attraction to Thom persists alongside his friendship with Susan. The apparent stability of their trio conceals those unequal, unspoken attachments.

Buckley’s campus gives popularity a visible geography. Seniors claim the tables in the shadow of the Pavilion, and the central table, separated from the others and facing the assembly plaza, is the most conspicuous seat. The small school and its uniforms are supposed to dampen distinctions, but they do not erase the informal order: Thom is treated as the class’s king, Susan and Debbie Schaffer command attention, and the narrator’s own standing comes largely from his closeness to Thom and Susan. As the school year begins, he describes himself as moving numbly toward that familiar table, already feeling detached from the social role that has made him recognizable.

Secret Desire and the Future Beyond School

The narrator’s connection with Ryan deepens in the months before senior year. They have known each other since seventh grade, but begin spending time together privately after finding common ground in their attraction to men. Ryan’s reserve and his reputation as a cool, solitary athlete help conceal that shared vulnerability. He expects to leave Los Angeles for college and reinvent himself; the narrator recognizes that this is also his own imagined escape. Ryan describes the discretion their relationship requires as subterfuge, making secrecy part of their intimacy rather than a passing precaution.

In September 1981, the two spend a weekend together at the narrator’s empty house on Mulholland. Ryan announces at school that he will stay there, and the narrator’s anticipation marks the encounter as a turning point: their relationship moves beyond earlier, limited intimacies into a weekend organized around being together. The narrator later remembers it as the last weekend untouched by what followed. Its ease and apparent privacy stand in sharp contrast to the suspicion and rupture that soon overtake the wider group.

A Relationship Under Pressure

Susan’s relationship with Thom has begun to feel worn down by the time senior year is underway. The narrator notices a vague malaise between them, even while their established popularity and closeness make their partnership seem secure to others. During the year, Susan falls in love with Robert. The narrator understands that keeping this relationship secret can only postpone its consequences: once it becomes known, loyalties will shift and the group’s familiar arrangements will be altered. He fears especially for Thom, whose sunny public manner makes him seem unprepared for the break.

The strain becomes public at school. At lunch, Susan tells Thom to leave her alone for a while and not to call. After she walks away, Thom struggles to contain his distress and leaves the table; later, the narrator finds him crying in his Corvette in the senior parking lot. Thom says he has practice soon and does not know whether he can manage it. The narrator wants to comfort him but instead says they have to do something about Robert. The exchange turns a private romantic rupture into an immediate conflict within the circle, while exposing the distance between the narrator’s unspoken feelings for Thom and the support he is able to offer.

Graduation and the Unfinished Future

The school year’s competing futures are clearest in the narrator’s recollection of Ryan. Although their relationship has briefly offered the possibility of being together, Ryan barely speaks to him for the rest of senior year. At graduation in June 1982, they meet by chance in the boys’ bathroom at the Pavilion, still wearing their red robes and mortarboard caps. The narrator starts to address him; Ryan cuts the moment short with a casual farewell and the expression they once shared. The encounter gives their separation no explanation or closure.

Decades later, the narrator learns through a former classmate that Ryan may be living with a partner and working as an architect in San Francisco. The news wounds him despite the years that have passed and the brevity of their relationship. Looking back, he considers how youth and the conditions of 1981 constrained what they could openly be, and wonders whether they might have made a life together elsewhere. Senior Year at Buckley thus holds several timelines in tension: the school’s expected passage toward graduation, the secret relationship deferred to a distant future, and the older narrator’s attempt to recover what the students could neither say nor settle at the time.