A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(67)
The unsettled feeling with which we’d begun the fall continued as the days grew cooler. One of my favorite teachers at the Art Students League died suddenly of a heart attack. My brother’s wife was hospitalized, and my sister, who had struggled for years with health problems, was unwell again. Tom’s health continued to deteriorate. In November he had surgery to fix the broken tendon in his arm, and he scheduled a shoulder surgery for January. He still couldn’t work much, and our financial concerns intensified.
A friend consoled me with the Winston Churchill chestnut: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” But the bad news kept coming. We got a call from Byron in the emergency room; he needed stitches in three places after standing up to a racist ex-skinhead. That night, I finally allowed myself to acknowledge my despair over Byron’s situation. Of course, I was proud of him for standing up for his beliefs, but his decisions kept getting him into trouble, and nothing we did—therapy, support, tough love—seemed to help.
Thanksgiving was a rare bright spot in that dark season. Eight of my extended family members came to stay, a hectic change from the quiet life we usually led. My brother and my sister and I have always been close. We all talk too fast and laugh loudly; getting a word in is like merging onto the autobahn. Dylan found the chaos a little overwhelming, but I loved having my family around.
My dad owned neighborhood movie theaters—my first job was selling popcorn at a concession stand—and we’re passionate about old movies. We all love books and music, too. Not surprisingly, we like to play charades. Dylan usually preferred to play poker with the adults, but that year he gave in to the begging and joined us for a round or two of charades. I was so proud of how funny and clever he was, and delighted that his innate shyness hadn’t prevented him from joining in.
There was no way to know that, within a few short months, everything would fall apart, and Dylan would once again rise to the top of our family’s worries.
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In early January of 1998, Dylan told Tom about his frustration with a couple of kids at school who were “really asking for it.” The kids were freshmen, and Tom resisted the temptation to laugh: Dylan was six feet four inches tall, and a junior. Dylan told us he wanted to get some guys together to confront the boys. Tom and I told him not to give them the satisfaction of a response. I was worried someone would be hurt, and Tom was worried Dylan would embarrass himself by engaging with freshmen.
Dylan could not let it go. Without our knowledge, he and Eric rounded up some friends. They confronted the kids and told them to meet them at a spot away from school, but the younger boys never appeared. Tom and I found out about the planned rumble after the fact. Dylan believed he had handled the situation effectively, but we were upset and told him so. At least, I thought, no one had been hurt.
Later that month, I got a phone call from Judy Brown, the mother of Dylan’s friend Brooks. Brooks and Eric had gotten into a fight at school, and Eric had thrown a snowball at Brooks’s car, damaging the windshield. Judy was furious and launched into a tirade against Eric, which perplexed me. It seemed to me that the boys shared responsibility for the incident, and I didn’t understand her impulse to get involved when they’d resolved it themselves. The ferocity of her hatred for Eric seemed like an overreaction to me.
Not long after the call from Judy, Tom got another call from the school. Four months after his suspension for hacking the locker combinations, Dylan had deliberately scratched the face of someone’s locker with a key. He was given an in-school suspension for a day and owed the school seventy dollars to pay for a new door. Tom went over to write the check. He asked the dean about the freshmen, certain that Dylan would not have lashed out without being provoked. The dean acknowledged they had a particularly “rowdy” group of freshmen, acting as if they “owned the place,” but assured Tom that the administration was dealing with it.
We talked with Dylan that night. Tom was irritated with him for destroying property and irritated with the school for charging so much money to repaint a locker door. Dylan gave Tom the cash he had on hand and promised to work off the rest of the debt by doing extra chores. I told Dylan he couldn’t allow the obnoxious behavior of others to upset him.
I don’t know whose locker Dylan scratched, or if it was simply the one in front of him when the destructive urge hit. I have read in the years since that the scratch read “Fags”—a slur I have also read was frequently leveled against Dylan and Eric in the hallways at Columbine—but we did not hear that from the school.
It is, of course, not ridiculous that a younger boy could bully an older one. I simply never imagined anyone would bully Dylan. My idea of the type of kid targeted by bullies was as unrealistic a stereotype as my idea of the kind of person who dies by suicide. The way he dressed and wore his hair was intended to set him apart from the preppy, affluent, suburban mainstream, but it was not outrageous. We also believed Dylan’s height would be intimidating, because he told us it was. Once, during sophomore year, Dylan said something to Tom about “hating the jocks.” Tom asked him if they were giving him a hard time, and Dylan answered with confidence: “They don’t bother me. I’m six four. But they sure give Eric hell.”
Since the tragedy, much has been written about the school culture at Columbine High School, and Dylan’s place in it. Regina Huerter, director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver district attorney’s office, compiled a report in 2000, and Ralph W. Larkin independently confirmed many of her findings in his exhaustively researched 2007 book, Comprehending Columbine. Both researchers found Columbine High School was academically excellent and deeply conservative; that much we knew. But they also describe a school with a pervasive culture of bullying—in particular, a group of athletes who harassed, humiliated, and physically assaulted kids at the bottom of the social ladder. Larkin also points to proselytizing and intimidation by evangelical Christian students, a self-appointed moral elite who perceived the kids who dressed differently as evil and targeted them.