Dave Cullen: Columbine

He was trying a new bedtime drink, too: Diet Coke and rum.

The Sunday before the prom, the family threw a birthday party for Angela’s four-year-old, Austin. Dave liked making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the grandkids. He sliced off the edges, because they liked it fluffy all the way through. Dave would hide a gummi worm in the jelly, which surprised them every time.

Austin called to talk to Grandpa on prom weekend but missed him. Dave called back and left a message on the machine. Angela erased it. She would try again during the week.

Prom was scheduled for April 17, but for most kids, it was the culmination of a long, painful dance stretching back to midwinter. Night after night, Patrick Ireland had lain on his bed, phone in one hand, a ball in the other, tossing it up and snatching it out of the air, wishing his best friend, Laura, would take the hint. He kept prodding her about her prospects. Any ideas? Anybody ask yet? She tossed the questions back: Who you going to ask? When? What are you waiting for?

Indecision was unfamiliar ground for Patrick. He competed in basketball and baseball for Columbine and earned first place medals in waterskiing while earning a 4.0 average. He kept his eye on the ball. When his team was down five points in the final minutes of a basketball game, and he’d just miss an easy layup or dribbled off his foot and felt like a loser, the answer was simple: Brush it off! If you wanted to win, you focused on the next play. With Laura, he couldn’t focus on anything.

Patrick was modest but self-assured with regard to most things. This mattered too much. He couldn’t risk fourth grade again. Laura had been his first love, his first girlfriend, in third grade. It was a torrid romance, but it ended badly and she wouldn’t speak to him the next year. It took them until high school to become friends again. For a while, it was friendship, but then his pulse started racing. Had he been right about her the first time? Surely she felt it, too. Unless he was imagining it. No, she was flirting, totally. Flirting enough?

Laura grew impatient. It wasn’t just prom night at stake, it was weeks of planning, dress shopping, accessorizing, endless conversations to risk being excluded. The sad looks, the pity—a full season of awkwardness.

She got another offer. She stalled for time, then, finally, accepted. The guy was way into her.

So Patrick asked Cora, just as friends. His whole group was going as friends. No pressure, just a good time.

Prom night arrived. Most groups turned it into a twelve-hour affair: photos, fine dining, the dance, the afterprom. Patrick’s gang started at Gabriel’s, an old Victorian home in the country that had been converted into an elegant steak and seafood house. They pulled up in a limo and ate like kings. Then it was a long ride into Denver for the big event. The prom committee chose the Denver Design Center, a local landmark known as “that building with the weird yellow thing.” The “thing” was a monumental steel sculpture called The Articulated Wall, which looked like an eighty-five-foot DNA strand and towered over the shops and restaurants converted from old warehouses.

The trade-off with a famous city location was space. You could barely move on the dance floor. Patrick Ireland’s second-most-memorable moment was dancing to “Ice Ice Baby.” He had lip-synced to it in a third-grade talent show, so whenever they’d heard it for the next decade, he’d grabbed his buddies and performed the same goofy dance. That was nothing compared to holding Laura. He got one dance. A slow song. Heaven.

Cassie Bernall was not asked to prom. She was pretty but, in her estimation, a loser. The church boys from the youth group barely noticed her. At school she got attention, but strictly sexual. Friends were hard to come by. So she and her friend Amanda dressed up anyway, did their hair, and got all glamorous for a work banquet Amanda’s mom had going at the Marriott. Then they cruised to afterprom, where dates were optional, and partied till dawn.

Dylan’s prom group arranged for a limo, too. Robyn Anderson drove out to pick him up on Saturday afternoon. They shot pictures with his parents before meeting up with the five other couples to head into the city. Robyn wore midnight-blue satin with cap sleeves and matching opera-length gloves. She’d curled her hair in long blond ringlets, swept forward to bounce across her low-cut square neckline—a suburban variation on the classic Pre-Raphaelite style.

Dylan was giddy and beaming getting ready, all cleaned up for once, working to make everything look just right. He tugged his shirt cuffs down, straightened his tuxedo jacket. He’d gone with a traditional black tuxedo, bow tie slightly askew. A small splash of color lightened up his lapel: a pink-tipped rosebud with a tiny ribbon the color of Robyn’s dress. His hair was slicked back into a short ponytail that kept giving him grief. He had shaved. His dad followed him around with a camcorder, capturing every move. Dylan looked at him through the lens: Dad, we’re going to laugh about this in twenty years.

They rode downtown in a big honking stretch with tinted windows and a mirrored ceiling. Whoa! Dylan held Robyn’s hand and complimented her on her dress. The first stop was dinner at Bella Ristorante, a trendy spot in Lower Downtown. It was a fun time: jokes and horseplay with table knives and matches, pretending to light themselves on fire. Dylan devoured an oversized salad, a big seafood entree, and dessert. He gushed about the upcoming reunion for kids from the gifted program in elementary school. It would be fun hooking up again with the childhood smarties. Dylan had volunteered to use his Blackjack connection to get some pizzas.

They finished dinner early. Dylan stepped out for a cigarette. He asked his buddy Nate Dykeman to join him. It was cold out, but nice anyway—a little quiet time, away from all the commotion. Great food, great company, first time in a limo for both of them. “Everything is going perfect, as planned,” Nate said later.

Nate was even taller than Dylan, six-four, and considerably more attractive. He had classic features and dark, heavy eyebrows that accentuated his piercing eyes. They talked more about reunions. Everyone was scattering for college. They talked about Dylan heading down to Arizona and Nate across the country to Florida. Nate wanted to work for Microsoft. What would they accomplish before reunion time rolled around? They tossed around the possibilities. “No hints whatsoever that anything could possibly be wrong,” Nate recalled later. “We were just having a great time. It’s our senior prom. We’re enjoying it like we should.”

The short ride to the Design Center was a blast: hard rock jamming from the speakers, an adrenaline rush while they riffed on one another. They made fun of pedestrians, flipped them off at random. Nobody could see in; they could see out. What a riot.

Dylan was in a great mood. We’ve got to stay in touch, he insisted. This group was too fun to let go.

Eric pressed his luck. He was crazy for a prom-night date, but he waited till early evening to call Susan. He was confident. Girls liked him. He asked her to come over for a movie. She swung by around seven. His parents had just left, out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Eric wanted to show Susan Event Horizon, a low-budget gorefest about a spaceship transported back from hell. It was his all-time favorite. They watched it straight through, then sat around his basement bedroom talking.