No Easy Answers Read Free

you?”
    I looked down the street, trying to place my own location.
    “I'll meet you by Steve's house on Upham Street. I'm right by there.” Steve was my drum teacher, so my dad knew where he lived.
    “Okay. Ten minutes, Brooks. Thanks.”
    My dad hung up and I handed the phone back to Mrs. Taylor. I thanked her, and apologized if I had panicked her. I knew her daughter was in choir right now.
    That was when I realized. My brother's still in there .
    My little brother Aaron, two grades below me, was also a student at Columbine. He and Eric didn't get along. If Eric was still in the school, and he came across my brother … I felt terror overwhelming me all over again.
    I started walking toward Steve's house. A lot of cars were already driving by; the first thing I did was look among them for people I knew.
    First I saw Mr. Johnson and Mr. Bath, two of my teachers from Columbine, and waved them down. They pulled over and asked me why I wasn't in class. They were laughing.
    I just blurted out what I thought: Eric Harris was involved in a shooting of some kind. They both became very quiet.
    “You know, he's in my psychology class,” Mr. Johnson said after a beat.
    Mr. Bath asked if I was okay. I told them yeah, and they said they would see me later. Then they drove off. I kept walking, until my friend Ryan Schwayder drove up in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.
    “Hey, Brooks,” he said. “What's going on? We tried to go back to school and they've got the road blocked off.”
    I didn't answer him. I just opened the door, threw my book bag into the back of the Jeep and jumped in. Inside were two other Columbine students, Matt Houck and Deanna Shaffer.
    Ryan took one look at me and instantly became concerned. “What's wrong?”
    I tried to explain, but I was talking too fast for them to understand. Ryan kept asking me to slow down. I took a couple of deep breaths, and asked Ryan to drive closer to Columbine, so I could get a better look.
    “Why? What's wrong?”
    I took a moment. “There's a shooting at the school.”
    For two seconds, dead silence filled the Jeep.
    Then Deanna's hands went to her face, and she started crying. Ryan's entire body just sank in his seat; I could literally see the energy escape him.
    “Oh, God,” Matt said quietly.
    I tried to explain about seeing Eric, and what he had said to me. “Oh, man, I think he had a duffel bag with him,” I said.
    I asked Ryan if I could use his phone to call 911. Almost like a zombie, he handed it to me. I called the police and told them I had information about what was happening.
    They seemed to have trouble transferring my call at first. I wound up getting forwarded to the Arapahoe County office. As this was happening, all of us looked up to see multiple helicopters descending on our school.
    The battery started dying on Ryan's phone. He let me climb over into the driver's seat and plug the phone into the lighter adapter to get power, while he stood outside with Deanna, quietly holding her.
    Arapahoe County put me through to Detective Kirby Hodgkin, and I started rattling off information. I told them about Eric skipping class that day, what he'd said to me in the parking lot, what kind of car he drove, and what he was wearing.
    “He looked like an Army cadet,” I said.
    I said Eric had just turned eighteen a few weeks ago, and that he'd talked in class about buying guns, saying he “couldn't wait to turn eighteen”so he could legally purchase one. I mentioned that we'd had a falling-out several years before. I didn't think to mention the Web pages.
    While I was still on the phone with them, my dad pulled up next to us. “We're getting the hell out of here right now!” he yelled.
    I didn't know what had my dad so spooked. He later told me that he'd heard a report on the radio saying the shooters had already left the school on foot. My dad was afraid that Eric was walking around in the same neighborhood as us. With guns.
    I said, “Fine! Fine!” I didn't even