In season 5, in "The Death of the Queen Bee", when asked if she'd had a pet rat, Brennan discloses that she, in fact, had a pet mouse, snake, and some spiders. During her time at Burtonsville high school, her only friend was the school custodian, Ray Buxley, with whom she would enjoy long, in-depth conversations on life and death, and who would also provide her with dead animals to dissect (Brennan has set out to become a forensic anthropologist,) and who would later be one of her books' biggest fans (she had named the killer in her first book, "Bred in the Bone", after him). According to the Burtonsville high school on-line yearbook entry on Brennan, in her senior year, she was a member of the Chemistry club and Math club, her interests were chemistry and mathematics, and she was a National Merit Scholar and an Academic All-Star.