No Easy Answers Read Free Page A

take time to change places with Ryan. He and Deanna jumped back in the car, and with me behind the wheel, we took off behind my dad.
    We headed back out to Pierce Street and floored it the rest of the way to our house, not caring that we were probably pushing sixty, sixty-five miles per hour on residential streets. I was still on the phone, so I explained the situation to the detective at Arapahoe County. He took my address and said that an officer would come out later that day to interview me further.
    My dad and I tore around the last few corners leading to our house. He pulled up on the sidewalk, and I parked right behind him—just as my brother Aaron came running out of the house to meet us.
    Thank God, I thought. I was so happy to see him safe.
    When my dad came to get me, he already knew Aaron was okay. After he'd talked to me, Aaron had called to let him know he had made it home. My dad knew I was the only kid he still had to bring to safety.
    Aaron told me that he and his friends had run like hell to get out of the school, made it to his car, and then come home. He didn't tell me how he'd been sitting in the cafeteria when it started, just a few tables away from a propane bomb that had somehow failed to detonate. Or how he'd run through the auditorium, being chased by the gunmen, bullets flying over his head, hearing the girl behind him get hit and scream, “I'm shot!” I would learn about that much later.
    All we knew was that we were safe at home. Far away from the horror that was still unfolding at Columbine High School.

    “Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.”
    Those wound up being Eric Harris's last words to me.
    Five minutes after I spoke to him, he was hurling pipe bombs at my friends, firing shotgun blasts at my brother, and murdering innocent students—students whose biggest worries before that moment had been midterm tests and college applications.
    Yet what I didn't know at the time was that Eric wasn't alone in his mission. His best friend Dylan Klebold was with him, firing off bullets right next to him, hunting and killing—and laughing about it.
    Dylan. One of my closest friends since first grade.
    Soon, Eric and Dylan would kill themselves in the library, denying any of us the chance to question them. I'd never be able to sit down across from the guy I used to throw snowballs at in elementary school and ask him why he had wanted to kill all those people who had done him no wrong whatsoever.
    The hell that Eric and Dylan would create at my high school that day would go on to haunt their families, the families of the victims, and parents and students throughout our community and the world. It would destroy my life, as comments from the sheriff would lead to accusations that I was somehow involved in the plot.
    Worst of all, it left me struggling with the knowledge that not only were my classmates dead, they had been murdered by one friend I'd known since childhood—and another who had let me walk away only a few minutes beforehand. And I would never be able to ask them why.
    So today I'm standing at that same spot where I watched as the end of my world came driving into Columbine's parking lot. I'm standingalone, smoking a cigarette, the same way I did then. Thinking. Reflecting. Trying to make sense of everything.
    Inside the school, our principal, Frank DeAngelis, is leading a collection of students and staff in a massive spirit assembly, reading aloud the words of President Clinton, telling everyone that we're all going to move forward, that the hate in our world “must turn to love.”
    At least, that's what I would read in the papers later. I didn't see it. I didn't hear it. I wasn't interested—nor did I have much of an interest in the “closure stories” being prepared by the pool of media nearby in Clement Park, ready to close the door on Columbine and declare the whole thing as the work of two sick, deranged kids who represent nothing more than the work of the devil, or