Susan Reynolds—Thom Wright

Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright’s relationship is the apparent center of Buckley’s social world: a two-year romance between its most popular couple that looks stable from the outside, yet gradually reveals Susan’s discontent and an uncertain future. Its deterioration becomes one of the story’s quiet but consequential shifts, registering first through small changes in mood and shared references, then in the open rupture of their final breakup.

A Couple at the Center of Buckley

Susan and Thom had been dating since their sophomore year, after becoming a couple in the fall of 1979. By the summer before senior year, they were widely regarded as the most popular students in their class and among the most prominent at Buckley. Their wealth, looks, and easy familiarity seemed to make their pairing inevitable; they were almost always together, moving through school and social life as a unit.

Their public ease belonged to a tightly ranked school culture. Buckley’s uniforms, small classes, and orderly campus were meant to soften distinctions, but popularity still gathered around certain students. Susan’s beauty and social poise made her a central figure, while Thom’s looks, athletic standing, and amiability made him the school’s informal king. At lunch, the most visible table beneath the Pavilion could seem almost like a throne. The narrator’s own place beside them gave him social standing by association, even as he understood that their status was taken for granted in a way his was not.

The narrator’s view of the couple is intimate but not neutral. He had been Susan’s closest male friend since seventh grade and was privately in love with her; he was also attracted to Thom. He describes Thom’s transformation after a summer with his father in New York: Thom returned in 1979 looking more mature and physically self-assured, while remaining apparently unaware of his effect on others. The narrator’s concealed feelings give the couple’s closeness a second meaning: he is both their friend and an observer whose own desire makes their seemingly effortless bond difficult to watch.

The First Signs of Distance

By September 1981, the narrator sensed a slight wariness in Susan. After two years with Thom, she seemed touched by a vague ennui, and their relationship no longer appeared wholly secure to him. Her conversation about Thom’s college visits sharpened that impression. She was confident she would attend UCLA, but Thom was considering schools on the East Coast, partly because his father, Lionel, hoped he would study nearer to him. The narrator understood the trip as a way to please Lionel, not evidence that Thom had abandoned UCLA; Susan’s subdued response nevertheless suggested that she was already imagining the relationship’s possible end.

The narrator later frames their separation as a process that began before either of them named it. Susan had admitted doubts about Thom in Westwood, and their conversation about his college plans occurred roughly two weeks before the song that would become their private reference. Thom, by contrast, did not seem to share Susan’s emerging account of the relationship. The mismatch between her growing dissatisfaction and his apparent ease made the possibility of a breakup feel present to the narrator before it became explicit.

A Song as a Private Language

Susan and the narrator bought Icehouse’s debut cassette together at Tower Records on Sunset during the last week of junior year. They had meant to hear the single, “We Can Get Together,” but became attached instead to “There’s No Love Inside the Icehouse,” replaying it as they drove around. It became a shared code: Debbie, Thom, and Ryan did not know the song in the same way, and Susan and the narrator could refer to it as though it carried a meaning reserved for the two of them.

The narrator reads the song’s waiting figure and uncertain promise of new love through Susan’s situation. In his interpretation, Susan is the girl outside the icehouse, still hoping for something else; Thom is the love already beside her, yet no longer sufficient to settle her future. For a time, the narrator wonders whether he himself is the disruptive force in the song’s emotional triangle. He later identifies Robert Mallory as the figure who comes to occupy that place. The song therefore serves not as proof of what Susan will do, but as a structure through which the narrator makes her changing feelings legible—and projects his own fears and hopes onto them.

That private reading turns more somber as the summer advances. The narrator understands Susan’s attachment to the song as connected to her mild dissatisfaction and her sense that Thom’s college trip might mark a separation, perhaps before senior year had even ended. He also recognizes that Thom does not appear to be living through the same story. In Susan’s car, as the song finishes, the narrator notices her cigarettes and Tic Tacs on the dashboard, the cassettes collected there, Thom’s Corvette, and Robert’s black Porsche nearby. The ordinary objects and parked cars make the emotional uncertainty concrete: several possible futures occupy the same school-day scene, while the narrator privately anticipates that their shared world will not last.

Breakup and Aftermath

The relationship’s final break becomes public at the center table in the Pavilion courtyard. After Susan leaves Thom there, the narrator remains with him, embarrassed and unsure what to say. Thom tries to put away his uneaten lunch with shaking hands, then gets up and goes to the men’s restroom; he does not return for the rest of lunch. None of the other senior tables approaches. The social prominence that had seemed to protect the couple offers no public comfort once their private conflict is exposed.

Later that day, Thom is in his Corvette in the senior parking lot, crying. He composes himself enough to lower the window and tells the narrator that he has practice soon and does not know if he can manage it. The narrator wants to comfort him physically and emotionally, but instead says that they have to do something about Robert. His response reveals how the breakup has become entangled with the larger crisis around them: care for Thom, the narrator’s unspoken desire, and fear of Robert all converge, but none can restore the relationship.

The narrator’s later recollection makes clear that Susan and Thom’s ending is more than a private disappointment. Their apparent unity had helped define the narrator’s place among their classmates, and his attachments to both of them made the breakup feel like the collapse of a shared world. The couple’s story also contrasts with the narrator’s concealed connection with Ryan Vaughn: Susan and Thom could be recognized as a couple, while the narrator’s same-sex desire and Ryan’s closeted identity had to remain private, with the prospect of leaving Buckley and starting elsewhere standing in for an openly lived future. The relationship’s arc thus moves from social certainty to emotional divergence, exposing how little the appearance of an effortless couple can reveal about what either partner expects from the future.