Summer 1982

Summer 1982 is a hinge between the narrator’s school years in Los Angeles and an anticipated life elsewhere. After graduating from Buckley, the narrator spends the final weeks of August at Lake Tahoe preparing to leave for Vermont and, eventually, New York City. The prospect of escape offers a clear future, but memories of 1981 prevent that future from feeling wholly free: the narrator senses Robert Mallory’s presence even in the solitude of the lake and its surrounding trails.

Leaving Los Angeles

In late August, the narrator stays in a house rented by an aunt on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Daily walks through the forests become part of a deliberate mental preparation to leave Los Angeles behind. The plan is to begin again in Vermont, at a small liberal-arts college in Bennington, and then move on to Manhattan. The narrator recalls this time as clearheaded, with departure seeming not merely possible but close enough to organize the weeks around it.

The promise of leaving carries a familiar resonance: it recalls the earlier idea of flying away from one life into another. Yet the outward plan for a fresh start does not erase the past. The narrator’s preparations for the East Coast unfold under the pressure of memories formed in Los Angeles, making departure both an aspiration and an attempt to gain distance from what happened there.

Fear Within the Retreat

The Lake Tahoe setting appears to offer solitude, but the narrator cannot experience it as uncomplicated refuge. While walking alone with a Walkman, swimming in the lake, or tanning on the deck leading to the pier, the narrator feels watched and imagines that Robert Mallory has somehow returned. The unease intrudes on activities that might otherwise mark freedom and private time.

The memory of a bloodstreaked wall in a high-rise condominium and the adjoining balcony, also associated with blood, breaks into the narrator’s recollection of the summer. The contrast between the open landscape and that remembered scene turns the promised escape into something less secure: the narrator is physically away from Los Angeles but remains mentally attached to its violence and uncertainty.

A Summer Seen Through Longer Time

The account of 1982 is shaped by retrospective narration. The narrator describes the Lake Tahoe weeks as clearheaded and oriented toward a future, while also acknowledging that the fear of being watched followed into places far beyond Los Angeles. This combination makes the summer a point of transition rather than a clean break: leaving is a real plan, but not a resolution of the past.

The period also sits beside the narrator’s recollection of the preceding year and the relationships that defined life at Buckley. Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds had been a couple since sophomore year and were among the school’s most popular students; their nearly two-year relationship ended when, in the fall of 1981, one of them ceased to be in love. Against this earlier social and emotional world, the narrator’s post-graduation plans mark an attempt to move into a different life, even as the memories of that year continue to accompany the narrator.