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Bret Easton Ellis' new novel, The Shatters, goes on sale May 18.

I remember that it was the Sunday afternoon before Labor Day 1981 and that our last course was to begin the following Tuesday, September 8 in the morning; and I remember the Windover stables being situated on a bluff above Malibu where Deborah Schaffer kept her new horse, Spirit, on one of the twenty individual blocks where the animals were housed, and I remember driving alone, following Susan Reynolds and Thom Wright in Thom's Corvette convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway. with the sea flashing faintly beside us in the humid air, until we reached the detour that led to the stables, and I remember listening to the Cars, the song was "Dangerous Type" -from a tape where I had also recorded songs by Blondie, the Babys, Duran Duran-, as I climbed behind Thom's car down the winding road to the entrance of the stables, where we parked next to Deborah's brand new BMW, the only car in the parking lot that Sunday, and after checking in at reception we continued along a tree-lined path until we located Debbie jogging in circles to Spirit caught by the reins in a fenced and empty arena (he had already ridden it, but he was still saddled and she was wearing the riding suit.) The image of the horse struck me, and I remember shuddering at its presence in the late afternoon heat. Spirit had replaced a horse that Debbie retired in June.

"Hey," Debbie said in that flat, monotone voice of hers.

I remember how hollow it sounded in the void around us: a dying echo. Beyond the manicured stables painted white and pine green was a forest of trees that prevented the view of the Pacific; You could glimpse small pieces of glassy blue, but everything seemed peaceful and calm, nothing moved, as if we were surrounded by a kind of plastic dome. I remember it had been a very hot day and I felt like I had somehow been forced to visit the stables because Debbie was my girlfriend that summer and it was something that was taken for granted, and not necessarily something I wanted to experience. But I had resigned myself: I would have preferred to stay at home and work on the novel I was writing, although at seventeen I also wanted to keep certain appearances.

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I remember Thom saying "Wow" as we approached the horse, and, like everything about Thom, it must have sounded sincere, but also, like Debbie's intonation, flat, as if she didn't really have an opinion: everything was great, everything was cool, everything was just a "wow." Susan muttered her approval as she took off the Wayfarers.

"Hey, handsome," Debbie said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.

I remember that I tried to contemplate the animal with admiration, but the truth is that I did not want to pay attention to the horse; And it was so big and so alive that it had me shocked. Seen up close it was imposing, and of course it impressed me, but it seemed huge and made only of muscle, a threat – "This could hurt you a lot," I thought – but in reality it was peaceful, and at that moment it did not mind letting us caress its flanks. I remember that I was aware that Spirit was another example of Debbie's wealth and her intertwined indifference: the cost of maintaining and lodging the animal must have been astronomical and yet to know how much she really cared about that with seventeen years and if that interest would continue. But that was another aspect I hadn't known about Debbie even though we'd been going to school together since fifth grade; I had not paid attention to him until then: I discovered that he had always been interested in horses, and the fact is that I had not found out until the summer before our last year of high school, when we became boyfriends and I saw the shelves of his bedroom full of medals, trophies and photographs in which he appeared in several equestrian competitions. I had always been more interested in her father, Terry Schaffer, than Debbie herself. In 1981 Terry Schaffer was thirty-nine years old and immensely rich, having amassed the bulk of his fortune thanks to several films that, in two unexpected cases, became blockbusters, and was also one of the most respected and sought-after producers in the city. He had good taste, or at least what Hollywood considered good taste – he had been nominated twice for an Oscar – and he was constantly offered to run studios, something that did not interest him at all. In addition, Terry was gay – not openly, but discreetly – and was married to Liz Schaffer, who was so lost in so much privilege and pain that I wondered if she was still aware of her husband's homosexuality. Deborah was his only child. Terry died in 1992.

Thom was asking Debbie general questions about the horse and Susan gave me a look and smiled at me; I rolled my eyes, not because of Thom, but because of the prevailing non-situation. Susan did the same: there was a connection between us that excluded our respective partners. After petting and admiring the horse there seemed to be no reason to stay there, and I remember thinking: Is this whyI have come by car to Malibu? To contemplate and pet Debbie's fucking new horse? And I remember standing there feeling a little ridiculous, although I'm sure neither Thom nor Susan felt that way: they almost never bothered, nothing upset Thom or Susan, they took everything well, and Susan's expression of impatience seemed aimed simply at appeasing me, but I appreciated it. Debbie gave me a soft kiss on the lips.

-See you later at my house? -he asked me.

I was distracted for a moment by the whispered conversation between

Thom and Susan before attending to Debbie again. I remembered that she had guests at her home in Bel Air that night and smiled naturally to reassure her.

-Yes, right.

And then, as if we had it all rehearsed, Thom, Susan and I went back to the cars while Debbie took Spirit to her block accompanied by someone from the Windover staff, uniformed in white jeans and a windbreaker. I followed Thom and Susan down the Pacific Coast Highway and when they took the left exit on Sunset Boulevard that would take us from the beach to East Gate Bel Air, there was a song from my tape that I liked but would never have admitted, "Time for Me to Fly" by REO Speedwagon. a cheesy ballad about a loser who musters the courage to tell his girlfriend he's leaving her, and yet for me, at seventeen, it was a theme about metamorphosis, and the line "I know it hurts to say goodbye, but it's time for me to f ly..." It meant something more that spring-summer of 1981 when I connected with the song. It was about leaving your own territory for another, as I had been doing. And I remember myself in the stables not because anything happened there—it was just Thom, Susan, and I driving to Malibu to see the horse—but because it was the evening that preceded the night we first heard the name of a new student who would come to our class that fall in Buckley: Robert Mallory.

Thom Wright and Susan Reynolds had been dating since sophomore year, and were now the most popular alumni not only in our class but in the entire Buckley student body after Katie Choi and Brad Foreman graduated in June, and it was evident why: Thom and Susan had a casual beauty. American, dark blond hair, green eyes, everlasting tanned complexion, and there was a certain logic in the way they had inexorably gravitated toward each other and moved everywhere as an individual unit: they were almost always together. Both came from wealthy L.A. families, but Thom's parents were divorced and his father had moved to New York, and only when Thom traveled to Manhattan to visit him did he cease to be closely close to Susan. For about two years they were in love, until that autumn of 1981, when one of them ceased to be, which triggered a series of frightening events. They both fascinated me, but I never acknowledged to either of them that what I really felt was love.

He had been Susan's closest male friend since we met at Buckley in seventh, and five years later he knew seemingly all about her: when she had her period, the problems with her mother, any and all imaginary privations and hardships she thought she endured, her crushes on companions before Thom. She knew in a way that I loved her secretly, but despite being so intimate she never said anything, only at certain moments she joked that I paid too much attention to her or not enough. I had once been flattered to be taken as a couple and had not made the slightest effort to deny the rumors about us until Thom came on the scene. Susan Reynolds was the prototype of a cool Southern Californian even at thirteen, before she started driving a BMW convertible always a little on marijuana or Valium or with half a Quaalude (but without stopping working: it did not cost her any effort to be an outstanding student) and with the Wayfarers shamelessly put on while crossing the arched stucco thresholds to enter class unless a teacher asked her to take them off (apparently all of Buckley's students had designer sunglasses, but were not allowed to wear them on campus except in the parking lot and on Gilley's sports courts). Susan seemed to confide everything to me during the last years of high school – in the seventies it was called "intermediate" – and although I did not reciprocate with the same frankness, I had revealed enough to her to know things about me that no one else knew, but only up to a point. Some I never thought I would tell him.

Susan Reynolds became the de facto queen of our class as we progressed through the course: she was beautiful, sophisticated, enigmatically discreet and exuded an air of carefree sexuality even before she teamed up with Thom – and not because she was easy; she had indeed lost her virginity to Thom and had no sex with anyone else—but Susan's beauty always intensified in us the idea of her sexuality. Thom ended up going a step further and Susan's sexual aura became more pronounced once they started dating, when we all knew they fucked, but it was something that had always been there; And although in fact they did not fuck at first, during the first weeks of that autumn of 1979 in which they became a couple, the question was: how could two such attractive teenagers not be fucking each other? By September 1981 Susan and I were still intimate, and in a way I think she felt closer to me than to Thom - we had, of course, a different relationship - but now there seemed to be a certain suspicion, not necessarily towards something concrete but a general malaise. Susan had been with Thom for two years and a vague but perceptible tedium had taken hold of her. At that time the jealousy that inspired me and that had almost destroyed me began, I thought, to dissolve.

Thom Wright, like Susan Reynolds, had begun attending Buckley in seventh from the Horace Mann School. His parents divorced when he was a freshman and he was living with his mother in Beverly Hills when his father moved to Manhattan. Although he had always been a monkey – clearly the cutest boy in our class, adorable even – it wasn't until something happened to him during the summer of 1979, after returning from New York after spending July and August with his father, that somehow, inexplicably, Thom became a man; A kind of metamorphosis had taken place, the cuteness and adorability had vanished, and we began to see it differently: suddenly, when we saw him go back to school that September of our sophomore year, we officially sexualized him. Although I had always sexualized Thom Wright, now everyone else was aware that he had formed, the contour of the jaw seemed more pronounced, the hair shorter – something widespread among the boys of Buckley (mainly by norms of the center), but his hairstyle had something stylish, transcendent, a foot in manhood. and when I caught a glimpse of him in the locker room that first week back from summer changing for PE (throughout our stay at Buckley our lockers were glued to each other), I held back an exhale when I realized that he had obviously been exercising and that his chest, arms and torso were defined as they had not been at the end of June, the last time I had seen him in a swimsuit at a pool party at Anthony Matthews' house. The area around the newly muscled thighs and ass – the place where the swimsuit had prevented the passage of the sun during the weekends in the Hamptons – was also pale, a whiteness that contrasted with the rest of his tanned body, which shocked me. Thom had become an ideal of adolescent male beauty and what was so seductive was that he didn't seem to care, he didn't seem to be aware, as if it were a natural gift bestowed upon him: he had no ego. I had dismissed countless times any idea that my feelings for him were reciprocated, because Thom was decidedly heterosexual in ways that I was not.

This early crush on Thom might have been renewed during those first weeks after his return from New York that September 1979, but suddenly he was with Susan and we almost naturally became a kind of trio as soon as we had cars the following spring, going out together on weekends. going to the movies in Westwood, lying on the sand at the Jonathan Beach Club in Santa Monica and touring the Century City Mall, so my crush on Thom and Susan stopped making any sense. Not that Thom had noticed, although I am convinced that Susan had sensed my feelings and knew that I wanted her: it must be said that Thom was not a very insightful guy - about many things - and yet he displayed an intriguing unconsciousness that was attractive and comforting, there was never any tension. He was the height of carefree without being a stoner. By the time we finished the third year of high school the only drug he liked was coca, and only one or two stripes, with a few snorts he had the party done, and he did not drink except for the occasional Corona. He was so easy to be with and was so open to any proposal that when I fantasized about entering him I often dreamed that he would let me do it, at least a little, before gently rejecting my advances but not without giving me a kiss and a suggestive squeeze on the thigh to try to reassure me in vain. In some of my more elaborate fantasies Thom wouldn't reject me sexually and we would both end up drenched in sweat, and in my dreams the sex was exaggeratedly intense and then, I imagined, he would kiss me long, panting, laughing quietly, amazed at the pleasure I had given him in ways that Susan Reynolds could never provide.

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