No Easy Answers (4 page)

We met at Normandy Elementary School. It was the first day of first grade, a time when school is something new and unexplored. We were young, wide-eyed kids, nervous and excited to be facing this grand new adventure. School, after all, is one of the first steps you take without your parents right there next to you.

Dylan was a shy kid. The first day of school, he pretty much kept to himself. Yet my parents had always taught me to give new people a chance. So it just seemed natural to go up to Dylan and say hello.

Once I'd coaxed him out of his shell, I found out that Dylan and I were pretty similar. For one thing, we were both diehard fans of video games. Both of us owned the Nintendo Entertainment System, the cutting edge of video games in 1987. We became friends right away.

Our circle of friends included a good handful of the boys in first grade. That year, no one thought about “jocks” and “geeks” and the other social cliques that would become dividers later on. Dylan and I were friends with Kevin Hofstra, who would grow up to be captain of the soccer team at Columbine. In first grade, friends are friends.

Like most people, my memories of first grade aren't exactly crystal clear. But I do remember it as a time where I felt like I belonged at school.

Brooks's parents, Randy and Judy Brown, cared a great deal about raising their children in a good environment. Randy worked in real estate, and purchased a house in the Jefferson County School District, which he had been told was “a great place to raise a family.”

The Browns had two sons, Brooks and his younger brother, Aaron. At first, both seemed very happy at Normandy Elementary School; in fact, Brooks raved to his parents about Mrs. White, his first-grade teacher
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“Mrs. White was wonderful,” said Judy Brown. “She really took care of the kids as if they were her own. Brooks loved her.”

Judy also recalled the positive environment that White created for her son and his classmates. “What I remember most about Brooks from that time,” she continued, “is that in the mornings, I would drop him off and the other kids would yell, ‘Brooks! Over here! Over here!’ Everyone liked him; he was the big kid that everybody wanted to play with, and he was nice to the other kids. He loved his teacher, and he loved school
.

“The next grade,” she said, “was where things started to change.”

People will ask me what I remember the most about grade school with Dylan Klebold. Sadly, my strongest memory is of both of us kneeling on the floor of the Normandy Elementary School bathroom, bawling our eyes out as we took turns scrubbing a little girl's muddy jacket with a toothbrush.

It all started during recess. We were outside, playing in the leftover snow from a few days before. As we ran around, I found a big patch of ice that was starting to melt but was still plenty solid enough to play with.

“Hey, Dylan!” I said. “Come here!” By the time Dylan arrived, I was already bouncing and sliding on the slushy patch. Dylan gamely joined in, our feet smashing little spiderwebs into the ice as it buckled under our weight.

Dylan's boot crashed down on a corner of the ice and made the whole patch shift. It tipped into a puddle underneath, which splashed a good amount of muddy water into the air. A girl in our class was standing nearby, wearing a brand-new coat her parents had just given her; the mud left a jagged brown stripe right down the front of it.

It was an accident. We hadn't thought the ice was going to do that. But our classmate took one look at her ruined coat and started screaming.

The second grade teacher immediately ran over to assess what was happening.

“It was an accident,” I tried to say. “We were just playing with some ice, and—”

“Don't you have any respect for other people's property?” I remember the teacher yelling at us. “Don't you? You two are coming with me right now.”

Dylan and I knew we were in trouble, but at the same time, we didn't understand why the teacher was so angry. It wasn't as if we had thrown the mud at the girl, or stolen her coat and rolled it around on the ground. Maybe we'd been a little careless, but that's all. It was still an accident.

We tried to get the teacher to listen to us, but she ordered us to be quiet as she carried the girl's coat into the bathroom.

Both of us were bawling by the time she had us at the sink, wetting a toothbrush. She put the coat in Dylan's hands. “I want this cleaned!” she ordered. “You two will stay in here and scrub that mud off, and you're not leaving until I say you're finished!”

Choking back our tears, we took up the brush and started working. We quickly discovered that using a toothbrush on mud wasn't very efficient—but we didn't have any choice. Both of us continued to cry, our ears burning red from the embarrassment of being yelled at, of our teacher's spiteful glare, of people looking at us as we worked.

“It's not coming out!” Dylan kept saying, rubbing the same spot for what seemed like the 500th time.

“We have to get it,” I remember saying in response. I just kept repeating that. “We have to get it.”

Judy Brown happened to visit the school that day to drop off something for her son during lunch hour
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“I was in the hall, and I ran into the teacher and she was red-faced mad,” Judy recalls. “And I said, ‘What's going on?’ She said, ‘Your son and Dylan ruined this girl's coat. He is in the bathroom right now, trying to clean it.’ I asked when this had happened, and she said it had been over an hour before. She went and got Brooks to have him talk to me, and when he came out, he was in tears
.

“So I took her aside, and I said, ‘You know what, you're going a little too far with this,’” Judy continued. “I talked to Brooks and he said that he wanted to stay in school, that everything was okay. Well, I went to pick him up after school, and guess what? She had made them stay in there for the whole day, and now she was keeping them after school as well. She wasn't going to let it drop. This teacher was out of control, and it was over mud.”

To this day, Judy is angry about the treatment of her son and his classmates in second grade, and not just because of the bathroom incident. “She expected these kids to be perfect,” she says today. “And kids aren't perfect. But she would have none of it. She absolutely terrorized my child.”

Scrubbing a coat in the bathroom may not have been such a bad thing by itself, but it was kind of the icing on the cake. Second grade had, from the beginning, been completely different from first grade. For Dylan and me, it was the first time in our young lives that we felt like an adult hated us.

The teacher would single out the kids who she caught picking their noses in class, and openly mock them in front of everyone. She would yell at us, especially the boys, for almost any infraction. Some teachers are nicer to boy students or to girl students. It was clear where this teacher's preferences lay.

The teacher also frightened many kids with an ill-timed story about bees. Our second grade class met in a temporary structure outside of the main Normandy Elementary building. A bees' nest was in the trees nearby, so it wasn't unusual to see the insects buzzing around as we walked by each day.

One day, our teacher chose to read to us a book called A Taste of Blackberries. It was a Newberry Award winner, which is probably why she picked it. Still, it scared us, because it involved a kid who dies from a bee sting.

For months afterward, Dylan and I were afraid of that bees' nest, and we weren't the only ones. One of the girls was terrified, because she was allergic to bees. Kids had everything from apprehension to outright terror on their faces as they walked to class each day, watching those insects out of the corner of their eye.

A few times, I told my parents about what was happening in school. It was the first time I ever remember hearing my father use the word “bitch.” My parents tried to complain to the principal about the teacher; however, nothing was done.

So when the chance came to leave Normandy Elementary and join the accelerated program at another school, Dylan and I didn't voice any objections.

By the end of second grade, Dylan and I had joined the Cub Scouts, building Pinewood Derby cars and having “den meetings” every month. It was at one of these meetings that my parents first met the Klebold family.

Tom and Sue Klebold were the type of parents who made their children a top priority. In addition to Dylan, they had an older son named Byron, and the Klebolds made it a habit to attend every activity their kids were involved in. If Dylan and Byron were involved in different activities on the same night, then one parent would go to Dylan's activity and the other would go to Byron's. They were always involved in their sons' lives. To this day, when I hear people ask questions like “Where were the parents?” when it comes to Columbine, I cringe. The Klebolds were excellent parents to Dylan and Byron.

It was Tom Klebold who fought to make sure Dylan got into the accelerated learning program in the first place. He had technically tested high enough, but organizers were worried that there weren't enough female students who'd made the cut. So when Mr. Klebold heard that Dylan was going to lose his spot, he stepped in. His son wasn't going to be denied what he'd earned because of politics, Mr. Klebold said, and he made sure administrators corrected the problem.

The Klebolds originally hailed from Ohio. Mr. Klebold worked in the oil and gas industry; his job moved him first to Oklahoma, and then to Lakewood, Colorado. Shortly after Dylan was born, the Klebolds came to Littleton. Soon Mr. Klebold began working in the mortgage management
business, while Sue worked with disabled students at Arapahoe Community College.

The Klebolds and my parents got along well, and my mother and Mrs. Klebold became close friends. I often saw them together, either when Dylan stayed over at my place or when I went to his.

The Klebolds discouraged violence in any form. Dylan told me once that he wasn't allowed to have any toy guns in the house. As we got older, his mom worried about the level of violence in the video games we were playing.

Our parents' friendship was a bonus for Dylan and me; it made it easier for us to spend time together. On weekends at each other's houses we played board games, built castles out of Lego blocks, and battled each other on Nintendo. Dylan was a master at the game Ninja Gaiden; I could never keep up with him.

We also discovered the joys of chasing crawdads at the creek near my house. Dylan would come over, and we'd grab a couple of jars and head down to the creek. When we'd caught a few crawdads, we'd put them in our terrarium and keep them for a few weeks. Sometimes our moms would take us to the park together; the adults would sit on benches and talk while Dylan and I chased frogs.

My mom has a picture of Dylan and me at the state Capitol in downtown Denver. I'm pointing to the building, and Dylan is standing next to me, grinning. We were mighty third-graders in the big city, and we were ready to conquer the world.

I couldn't have asked for a better pal in grade school than Dylan Klebold. In fact, my mom still has a drawing of the two of us that I made in class; underneath it, I wrote in crayon, “What scares me most is if Dylan does boast that he isn't my friend.”

“Dylan was the sweetest, cutest kid you'd ever meet,” said Brooks's father, Randy. “He was really shy, though, and it would take him fifteen or twenty minutes to warm up to us every time he came over, even though we knew him and we were close to him. After he'd warmed up, he was okay.”

Judy Brown remembers Dylan Klebold as “a sensitive, caring child” who worried a lot about what other people thought—perhaps too much for his own good. She recognized the way that Dylan seemed to internalize what was bothering him, rather than being open about it. It was a familiar problem
.

“I raised my kids to be extroverts, because I was an introvert when I was younger and I never wanted them to go through what I went through,” she said. “When they were little, I would take them to parks and they would go over and talk to the adults they saw. I would always say to them—and maybe I shouldn't have said this to Brooks so much—‘Loud and proud.’ I wanted to teach them to speak up
.

“That was just something Dylan could never do,” she said. “I used to be the same way, never telling anyone what was bothering me. Ever… As Dylan got older, he never told his parents he was teased. Never. He kept it all inside.”

The accelerated learning program for students in the Jefferson County Public Schools is called CHIPS, or “Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students.” Its intent is to push advanced kids to the next level. Classes took place not at Normandy Elementary, but at Governor's Ranch Elementary a few miles away. We were promised advanced learning classes, regular field trips to educational spots all over the state, and an education that would put us well ahead of the rest of the pack by the time we got to junior high.

Dylan and I both got in. So did a few of our friends from Normandy. Our parents congratulated us. They were proud to see their boys test high enough to move to the next level—and we felt pretty good about it, too.

What we didn't know at the time was that admission into CHIPS was based on politics as much as ability. Some kids got in because they tested high enough on the entrance exam; other kids got in because of who their parents were. Naturally, parents in Jefferson County wanted to be able to say that their child was in “the accelerated program,” and some parents had friends in the school district, or were otherwise in a position to pull a few strings.

As a result, the CHIPS program wasn't a big group of accelerated kids who were there to better themselves. Instead, what you had was one group of kids who had earned their spots, another group of kids who hadn't—and all of them trying to one-up the others, each trying to prove that he or she wasn't one of the “free ride” kids.

If you did a class project, you had to safeguard it from kids who might smash it when your back was turned. When kids smacked each other in the back of the head during class, the teacher would look the other way. Once kids realized that discipline in CHIPS was nonexistent, they went wild.