Columbine (5 page)

He was trying a new bedtime drink, too: Diet Coke and rum.

The Sunday before the prom, the family threw a birthday party for Angela's four-year-old, Austin. Dave liked making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the grandkids. He sliced off the edges, because they liked it fluffy all the way through. Dave would hide a gummi worm in the jelly, which surprised them every time.

Austin called to talk to Grandpa on prom weekend but missed him. Dave called back and left a message on the machine. Angela erased it. She would try again during the week.

____

Prom was scheduled for April 17, but for most kids, it was the culmination of a long, painful dance stretching back to midwinter. Night after night, Patrick Ireland had lain on his bed, phone in one hand, a ball in the other, tossing it up and snatching it out of the air, wishing his best friend, Laura, would take the hint. He kept prodding her about her prospects.
Any ideas? Anybody ask yet?
She tossed the questions back:
Who you going to ask? When? What are you waiting for?

Indecision was unfamiliar ground for Patrick. He competed in basketball and baseball for Columbine and earned first place medals in waterskiing while earning a 4.0 average. He kept his eye on the ball. When his team was down five points in the final minutes of a basketball game, and he'd just miss an easy layup or dribbled off his foot and felt like a loser, the answer was simple:
Brush it off!
If you wanted to win, you focused on the next play. With Laura, he couldn't focus on anything.

Patrick was modest but self-assured with regard to most things. This mattered too much. He couldn't risk fourth grade again. Laura had been his first love, his first girlfriend, in third grade. It was a torrid romance, but it ended badly and she wouldn't speak to him the next year. It took them until high school to become friends again. For a while, it was friendship, but then his pulse started racing. Had he been right about her the first time? Surely she felt it, too. Unless he was imagining it. No, she was flirting, totally. Flirting enough?

Laura grew impatient. It wasn't just prom night at stake, it was weeks of planning, dress shopping, accessorizing, endless conversations to risk being excluded. The sad looks, the pity--a full season of awkwardness.

She got another offer. She stalled for time, then, finally, accepted. The guy was way into her.

So Patrick asked Cora, just as friends. His whole group was going as friends. No pressure, just a good time.

Prom night arrived. Most groups turned it into a twelve-hour affair: photos, fine dining, the dance, the afterprom. Patrick's gang started at Gabriel's, an old Victorian home in the country that had been converted into an elegant steak and seafood house. They pulled up in a limo and ate like kings. Then it was a long ride into Denver for the big event. The prom committee chose the Denver Design Center, a local landmark known as "that building with the weird yellow thing." The "thing" was a monumental steel sculpture called
The Articulated Wall,
which looked like an eighty-five-foot DNA strand and towered over the shops and restaurants converted from old warehouses.

The trade-off with a famous city location was space. You could barely move on the dance floor. Patrick Ireland's second-most-memorable moment was dancing to "Ice Ice Baby." He had lip-synced to it in a third-grade talent show, so whenever they'd heard it for the next decade, he'd grabbed his buddies and performed the same goofy dance. That was nothing compared to holding Laura. He got one dance. A slow song. Heaven.

____

Cassie Bernall was not asked to prom. She was pretty but, in her estimation, a loser. The church boys from the youth group barely noticed her. At school she got attention, but strictly sexual. Friends were hard to come by. So she and her friend Amanda dressed up anyway, did their hair, and got all glamorous for a work banquet Amanda's mom had going at the Marriott. Then they cruised to afterprom, where dates were optional, and partied till dawn.

6. His Future

D
ylan's prom group arranged for a limo, too. Robyn Anderson drove out to pick him up on Saturday afternoon. They shot pictures with his parents before meeting up with the five other couples to head into the city. Robyn wore midnight-blue satin with cap sleeves and matching opera-length gloves. She'd curled her hair in long blond ringlets, swept forward to bounce across her low-cut square neckline--a suburban variation on the classic Pre-Raphaelite style.

Dylan was giddy and beaming getting ready, all cleaned up for once, working to make everything look just right. He tugged his shirt cuffs down, straightened his tuxedo jacket. He'd gone with a traditional black tuxedo, bow tie slightly askew. A small splash of color lightened up his lapel: a pink-tipped rosebud with a tiny ribbon the color of Robyn's dress. His hair was slicked back into a short ponytail that kept giving him grief. He had shaved. His dad followed him around with a camcorder, capturing every move. Dylan looked at him through the lens: Dad, we're going to laugh about this in twenty years.

They rode downtown in a big honking stretch with tinted windows and a mirrored ceiling. Whoa! Dylan held Robyn's hand and complimented her on her dress. The first stop was dinner at Bella Ristorante, a trendy spot in Lower Downtown. It was a fun time: jokes and horseplay with table knives and matches, pretending to light themselves on fire. Dylan devoured an oversized salad, a big seafood entree, and dessert. He gushed about the upcoming reunion for kids from the gifted program in elementary school. It would be fun hooking up again with the childhood smarties. Dylan had volunteered to use his Blackjack connection to get some pizzas.

They finished dinner early. Dylan stepped out for a cigarette. He asked his buddy Nate Dykeman to join him. It was cold out, but nice anyway--a little quiet time, away from all the commotion. Great food, great company, first time in a limo for both of them. "Everything is going perfect, as planned," Nate said later.

Nate was even taller than Dylan, six-four, and considerably more attractive. He had classic features and dark, heavy eyebrows that accentuated his piercing eyes. They talked more about reunions. Everyone was scattering for college. They talked about Dylan heading down to Arizona and Nate across the country to Florida. Nate wanted to work for Microsoft. What would they accomplish before reunion time rolled around? They tossed around the possibilities. "No hints whatsoever that anything could possibly be wrong," Nate recalled later. "We were just having a great time. It's our senior prom. We're enjoying it like we should."

The short ride to the Design Center was a blast: hard rock jamming from the speakers, an adrenaline rush while they riffed on one another. They made fun of pedestrians, flipped them off at random. Nobody could see in; they could see out. What a riot.

Dylan was in a great mood. We've got to stay in touch, he insisted. This group was too fun to let go.

____

Eric pressed his luck. He was crazy for a prom-night date, but he waited till early evening to call Susan. He was confident. Girls liked him. He asked her to come over for a movie. She swung by around seven. His parents had just left, out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Eric wanted to show Susan
Event Horizon,
a low-budget gorefest about a spaceship transported back from hell. It was his all-time favorite. They watched it straight through, then sat around his basement bedroom talking.

Eric's parents came home and went down to meet her. It was lots of aimless chitchat, like Eric's dad telling her he got his hair cut at Great Clips. They seemed friendly, Susan thought. They all got along well. After Eric's parents left, he played her some of his favorite tunes. It was mostly banging and screaming to her ear, but then he would mix in some New Age stuff like Enya. He put his arm around her once but didn't go for a kiss. He did lots of thoughtful things, like offering to warm up her car when she had to get home. She stayed until eleven--half an hour after she should have. Eric kissed her on the cheek and said good night.

____

Prom was the standard affair. They crowned a queen, they crowned a king, Mr. D breathed a sigh of relief that they had come through it alive. Dylan and Robyn had fun, but joy wasn't really the objective. Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like
a couple
even if you've never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets, and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.

For enjoyment, someone invented afterprom. Peel off the cummerbund, step out of the two-inch pumps, forget the stupid posing, and indulge in actual fun. Like gambling. The Columbine gym was outfitted with row after row of blackjack, poker, and craps tables. Parents in Vegas costumes served as dealers. They had ball-toss contests, a jump castle, and a bungee cord plunge. It stayed active till dawn. Afterprom had its own theme: New York, New York. Some parents had built a life-sized maze you had to follow to get into the school, and the entranceway was festooned with cardboard mock-ups of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Some of the boys barely saw their dates at afterprom. Some didn't have one. Eric joined Dylan and his limo group. They spent hours in the casino losing fake money. Patrick Ireland hung out nearby. They never met. Dylan kept talking about college, about his future. He kept saying he could hardly wait.

7. Church on Fire

T
his is a church on fire. This is the heart of Evangelical country. This is Trinity Christian Center, an ecstatic congregation crying out for Jesus in a converted Kmart half a mile from Columbine. As the casino shut down in the school gym, the faithful rose across the Front Range. They spilled out into the aisles of Trinity Christian, heaving and rumbling like an old-time tent revival. The frenzied throng thrust two hundred arms toward the heavens, belting out the spirit their souls just couldn't contain. The choir drove them higher. It ripped through the chorus of Hillsong's burning anthem and the crowd surged.

This is a church on fire...

We have a burning desire...

No one had the fever like a sunburned high school girl, radiating from the choir like the orchids splashed across her sundress. She threw her head back, squeezed her eyes shut, and kept singing, her lips charging straight through the instrumental jam.

Since pioneer days and the Second Great Awakening, Colorado had been a hotbed on the itinerant ministry circuit. By the 1990s, Colorado Springs was christened the Evangelical Vatican. The city of Denver seemed immune to the fervor, but its western suburbs were roiling. Nowhere did the spirit move more strongly than at Trinity Christian Center. They had a savior to reach out to and The Enemy to repel.

Satan was at work in Jefferson County, any Bible-church pastor would tell you so. Long before Eric and Dylan struck, tens of thousands of Columbine Evangelicals prepared for the dark prince. The Enemy, they called him. He was always on the prowl.

Columbine sits three miles east of the foothills. Closer to the peaks, property values rise steadily, in tandem with decorum. In comparison to Trinity Christian, upscale congregations like Foothills Bible Church mount Broadway productions. Foothills Pastor Bill Oudemolen took stage like the quintessential televangelist: blow-dried, swept-back helmet hair, crisp tie, and tailored Armani suit in muted earth tones. But the stereotype dissolved when he opened his mouth. He was sincere, sharp-witted, and intellectual. He rebuked ministry-for-money preachers and their get-saved-quick schemes.

West Bowles Community Church lay between other megachurches geographically, socioeconomically, and intellectually. Like Oudemolen, Pastor George Kirsten was a biblical literalist. He was contemptuous of peers obsessed with a loving Savior. His Christ had a vengeful side. Love was an easy sell--that missed half the story. "That's offensive to me," Kirsten said. He preached a strict, black-and-white moral code. "People want to paint the world in a lot of gray," he said. "I don't see that in the Scripture."