No Easy Answers (18 page)

She talked about her own beliefs as well, but not in an attempt to convert me. She was just explaining, and I listened carefully, just as she had done for me. Then we started casually debating the subject.

“Where does your faith in God come from?” I asked. “After all, you don't see God, right? So how can you be sure that he really exists?”

“I can see him,” she replied. “I know that God is real. I know it in my heart. You can only believe in what you know to be true. You know your own truth. I know mine. Everyone should be able to find that within themselves.”

“But with most Christians I know, it's not like that,” I said. “They think their way is the only way to live, and when you tell them you don't agree
then they'll just tell you that you're going to hell. I mean, seriously—do you believe that it's your role as a Christian to try and save everyone else?”

Rachel shook her head. “It's not about that for me,” she said. “I'm not trying to go out there and convert people. I just want to be an example. I want to live my life for God, and let other people take from that whatever they want.”

I took a drag of my cigarette, mulling that over.

“You ever read the
Tao te Ching?”
I asked.

Rachel shook her head no.

“Well, basically it argues that the greatest teacher teaches without teaching,” I continued. “I don't know. You kind of sound like you're not so much Christian as Taoist.”

Rachel didn't say anything. She just smiled.

It amazed me. The fact that we could sit there, two people on such opposite sides of the spectrum of faith, and talk openly about our differences the way that we did—it wasn't something I'd seen before at Columbine. I couldn't get over how open and honest Rachel Scott was. In my mind, Rachel was an example of what the ideal Christian should be.

Rachel's beliefs were strong, yet she accepted people who felt differently. She felt that the path to spiritual enlightenment didn't mean scaring people, lecturing or judging them. She just lived her life the best way she knew how, and hoped other people would follow her example.

Imagine what a better place this world could have been throughout history if more people had shared Rachel Scott's viewpoint.

Rachel and I never talked about faith again after that; we each knew where the other stood, and stayed friends regardless. It was a refreshing change of pace as far as Christians were concerned; I discovered that I really enjoyed her company.

The last time I saw her was on April 20. She'd just appeared in the last play of the season,
Smoke in the Room
, in a role that had required her to cut her hair short and dye it. She was defying people's expectations to the end.

Rachel was eating lunch with another student, Richard Castaldo, when Eric and Dylan began their attack.

Rachel and Richard were the first two people hit. Rachel was struck twice in the legs and once in the torso; more bullets tore through Richard's spine, leaving him paralyzed.

What happened to Rachel next is a mystery. Richard's mother told NBC's
Dateline
that when Richard first came out of surgery, he described the scene in detail. He said Rachel was approached by the shooters a second time and asked if she believed in God. She said yes, and they killed her.

Later, Richard told police that he remembers Rachel lying on the ground, crying, and that the shooters approached a second time but left him for dead. However, he no longer remembered whether Rachel was asked about her faith in her final moments. To this day, he cannot recall what happened after he was shot.

“After he got the breathing tube out, he was crying and upset, telling me through sobs how they taunted and teased her about God,” Castaldo's mother, Connie Michalik, told the Denver
Rocky Mountain News
on April 21, 2000. “Then he heard a shot and he didn't know what happened to her. He asked me again this morning: ‘What did I say? Why didn't anybody write it down?’ He's asked me so many times. Richard has cried a thousand tears for Rachel. He has so much guilt inside.”

My parents went to Dylan's funeral. It was a small affair; only a handful of people bothered to come out, and the ones who did were mainly there in support of the Klebold family. I heard that there were some nice tributes made there.

Rachel's funeral, the only one I attended in the wake of Columbine, couldn't have been any more different. It took place in a packed church only a few blocks south of Columbine, and was televised by CNN. The ratings during that funeral were higher than anything else CNN had previously broadcast.

At first, I went to sit with the rest of the debate team. With dirty looks and whispered comments, they made it clear that they didn't want me there. These people, who had known me for years, had been with me to debate competitions, had been Rachel's and my teammates, were now turning their backs on me because I had been friends with Eric and Dylan.

“You're going to burn in hell,” one of them told me.

I suppose that under different circumstances, I would have made some retort. Here we were, at a funeral for someone who had advocated kindness and acceptance; the kids who called themselves her friends weren't exactly following her example. But I didn't have the heart. I was too shocked. I just moved away from them and sat with Steve and Doug.

Just a few days ago, Steve and I had driven around looking for Rachel, hoping to find her alive. Now she was here, in a closed casket at the front of the church. It still didn't seem real.

There were several moments during that funeral that truly were beautiful. Rachel's sister did an exact recreation of the Christian dance Rachel had performed at the talent show the year before, accompanied by the song “Watch the Lamb and Who Nailed Him There.”

When it came time for Rachel's friends to speak, Nick Baumgart gave a genuine, from-the-heart speech that focused on the positive memories we had of her.

“Her trueness to herself was amazing,” Nick said. “She didn't let anybody affect who she was. She didn't let anybody tell her that what she believed and who she was wasn't okay. She was true to herself, and because of that, she was true to everybody else. In a sense, she is still here. She always will be, and that smile will still be here . . . I'm lucky to have known her. I'm fortunate to have been her friend, and I'm fortunate to have called her my Prom date. But I'm truly blessed to have had her in my life.”

I was really moved by the beauty of the service . . . until Bruce Porter, the officiating minister, stepped up to give his speech.

Porter has since written a book called
The Martyr's Torch: The Message of the Columbine Massacre.
On the back cover of the book, Porter's bio describes him as “a ‘man with a mission’ to call Christians back to their ancient roots of fervent dedication and radical passion for Christ no matter what the cost.”

That much was obvious at Rachel's funeral. With the CNN cameras rolling, Porter had come to turn the service into a recruiting rally.

“We've removed the Ten Commandments from our schools,” he told us. “In exchange, we've reaped selfish indifference and glorified hedonism. We've told our children that they were nothing more than highly evolved amoebae, accidentally brought forth from a mud pool somewhere in time. And we wonder why so many of them see no intrinsic value to life.

“We removed prayer from our schools and we've reaped violence and hatred and murder,” Porter continued. “And we have the fruit of those activities before us now. I want to say to you here today that prayer was established again in our public schools last Tuesday!” Applause rang out as Porter's volume increased. Porter went on to call Rachel a “martyr” who had now “dropped her torch and gone on to her eternal reward.” He
started asking who would pick it up for her, encouraging young people to “take your schools back.”

“I want to know right now who will take up that torch,” he said. “Let me see you. Who will pick up Rachel's torch? Who will do it? Hold it high!”

People in the church began to stand up. Kids and parents were cheering. At the podium, Porter was growing more feverish, more evangelical, as he started to address the TV cameras.

“Hold up that torch right now!” he went on, his voice rising. “If you are watching from some other place, stand up where you are. Stand up and say ‘I won't be a victim! I will lift that torch high! The love of Jesus!’ I want you to know that by doing that, you've declared a revolution!”

I sat there in stunned silence. This was wrong. To me, a funeral should be about loved ones remembering the person they've lost, and saying goodbye. Yet Porter had another goal in mind. In one of his own e-mails before the funeral—which he reprinted in his book—the minister wrote, “CNN will be broadcasting from the funeral as a part of a press pool, and there is every possibility that millions will be joining with us as we mourn Rachel and the other students who were slain. Pray that we will be able to speak into the hearts of multiplied millions of young people the reality of Christ's love for them . . .”

Porter was using the incident of Rachel's death to convert as many young people to his faith as possible. This was a slap in the face to the scores of non-Christian kids who Rachel had befriended, including me.

Rachel was a Christian, yes. But she was all about acceptance, whether people looked different, acted different, or had different beliefs. She was about reaching out to the less fortunate in school and making them feel welcome. She was about living true to herself, and helping other people live true to themselves. She was about leading by example rather
than by sermons. These were ideals that could be appreciated by many of her peers, regardless of their faith.

Porter noted in his speech that Rachel had reached out to people from all walks of life, and accepted them. If he knew this, then he had to expect that people from all walks of life would be at her funeral. Jewish. Agnostic. Atheist. People who were still discovering their beliefs. This funeral was for all of us to mourn together. It should not have been for harvesting new followers and making political statements.

If Porter had truly wanted to recognize Rachel's legacy, he could have pointed out how so many people had come to the service that day, or how so many kids wanted to speak in her memory. Perhaps he could have allowed more of them to do so.

Steve and I sat there for a moment, staring at the hundreds of people around us who were now standing and applauding. We didn't know what to say.

Then slowly, Steve stood up too, silent amidst the circus of cheering and clapping. He turned back and looked at me.

“Rachel's torch,” he said quietly. “Not his.”

When he said that, I stood up too. In honor of Rachel.

At the end of the funeral, as people were getting ready to file out, they asked the family to leave. No one was expecting what happened next.

They opened Rachel's casket.

There was Rachel. Dead. Her body, right there, in the casket for all to see. I don't know what they were trying to show people by doing this, but in order to exit, you had no choice but to walk right by it.

As we filed out, Doug was the first of our group to see her. He started crying. It was hard to watch.

Steve was next. He saw Rachel's body and collapsed on the floor in tears. Here was his former girlfriend, who still meant the world to him, and his body just failed him. Doug and I had to pick him back up and help him out of there. Of course, when I saw Steve lose it, I was right behind him. All the tears I hadn't cried up to that point came gushing out, just like everybody else, as I saw Rachel lying there in that coffin.

As we walked out, holding Steve, there was a literal wall of cameras and reporters waiting for us. Taking pictures of us, looking at us, videotaping us.

We just wanted it to be over.

THE DAYS AFTER THE MURDERS WERE A BLUR. I WANDERED AROUND in a daze most of the time, trying to comprehend the nightmare that had hit all of us.

There were no answers to be found.

Imagine your own best friend. Someone you've known for almost your whole life. Someone who used to laugh and tell you jokes, and showed you his new Wolf badge from Cub Scouts, and chased frogs with you around the creek behind your grade school on Friday afternoons. Someone who, just yesterday, you ditched school with. Someone you always thought you knew.

Now imagine that, from out of nowhere, that friend turns around and guns down over a dozen people. Classmates. Friends. People who are close to you.

It's something you could never have seen in your wildest nightmare, yet there it is. On the TV, the media are talking about your friends the same way they talk about Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. Investigative specials are tossing out details about your friend's childhood like some kind of Twilight-Zone-tinged episode of
This Is Your Life.
When your mind tries to take it in and make sense of it all, you realize that you can't. Hell, you can't even ask your friend for an explanation. Because he put a bullet in his brain right after he did it.

They'd gunned down Rachel. They'd gunned down Danny. Then they'd blown their own brains out right in the fucking library.

No one could have explained it. No one could have known.

Or could they? Could I? I
knew
Eric was dangerous. I knew from those Web pages. Those rants Eric had posted, the “Rebel Missions” he'd documented, the bombs, the threats. His desire to kill me a year ago, before we finally made peace. Had I not gone far enough? Had I missed a chance to intervene?

There was no way to collect my thoughts, either. No matter where I went, the scene was the same: reporters everywhere, police asking questions, classmates crying. Every TV channel showed Columbine exclu-sives, or Eric and Dylan's smiling faces, or analysts debating what the tragedy represented to society. Psychiatrists were showing up at gatherings, wanting us to come up and hug them, to tell them what we were thinking, what we were feeling, to pour our hearts out. We got stares from the people who didn't know what to say, tears from the people who did.