Douglas Coupland: Hey Nostradamus!

And I did - nab him. We were an item within the group itself, and to the rest of the school an attractive but dull couple. And not a day went by where Jason didn't ask for something more than a kiss, but I held out. I knew he was into religion just deep enough to think losing his virginity meant crossing a line.

The thing was, I did discover religion during my campaign to catch Jason, and that's not something I'd expected, as there was nothing in my upbringing that predisposed me to conversion. My family paid lip service to religious convictions. They were fickle - no God being feared there. My family wasn't so much anti-God as it was pro the world. God got misplaced along the way. Are they lost? Are they damned? I don't know. I'd be mistrustful of anybody who said they were, and yet here I am, in the calm dark waiting to go off into the Next Place, and I think it's a different place from where my family's headed.

My family didn't know what to make of my conversion. It's not as if I was a problem teen who rebounded into faith -the most criminal I ever got was generic teenage girl things like prank phone calls and shoplifting.

My parents seemed happy for me in a well-at-least-she's-not-dating-the-entire-basketball-team kind of way, but when I discussed going to heaven or righteousness, they became constrained and a bit sad. My younger brother, Chris, came to a few Alive! meetings but chose team sports instead. Truth be told, I was glad to have religion all to myself.

Dear God,

I'm going to stop believing in you unless you can tell me what possible good could have come from the bloodshed. I can't see any meaning or evidence of divine logic.

I can discuss the killings with the detachment I have from being in this new place. The world is pulling away from me, losing its capacity to hurt.

For starters, nobody screamed. That's maybe the oddest component of the killings. All of us thought the first shots were firecrackers - part of a Halloween prank, as firecracker season starts in early October. When the popping got louder, people in the cafeteria looked to its six wide doors with the expectation of being slightly amused by some young kids doing a stunt. And then this kid from the tenth grade, Mark Something, came tottering in, his chest red and purple from what looked like really bad makeup, and there were some nervous laughs in the room. Then he fell and his head landed the wrong way on the corner of a bench, like a bag of gym equipment. We heard some guys yelling, and three grade eleven students walked into the caf wearing duck-hunting outfits - military green fatigues with camouflage patterns, covered with bulging pockets and strips of ammunition -and right away one of them shot out a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. One of the suspension cables broke and a light bank fell down onto a table of food - the not-very-popular photo club and chess club table. The second guy, in sunglasses and a beret, plucked out two grade nine boys and one girl who were standing at the vending machines. These -were messy shots that left a mist of blood on the ivory-colored cinder-block walls. A group of maybe ten students tried bolting for the doors, but the gunmen - gunboys, really - turned and showered them with buckshot or bullets, whatever it is that guns and rifles use.

Two of them got away cleanly and I could hear their footsteps echoing down the corridor. As for the rest of us, there was no escape route, so we clambered underneath the tables, as if in some ancient nuclear drill from the 1960s.

In the summer between grades eleven and twelve, after my conversion and after landing Jason, I had a summer job at a concession stand at Ambleside Beach. It was a dry hot summer and the two other girls I worked with were fun -kind of skinny and nutty and they mimicked the customers quite wickedly. They also didn't go to Delbrook, so they didn't have any history with me, which was a relief, and I felt guilty feeling this relief. Youth Alive! was concerned that my constant exposure to semiclad skin, sun and non-Youth Alive! members would make me revert to the World - as if listening to screaming babies and groping for the last purple Popsicle at the bottom of the freezer bin could be a test of faith or tempt me into secular drift. Lauren and Dee and some of the others visited me a bit too often, and I don't think a night ever went by without returning to my car at shift's end and finding an Alive!er eager to invite me to a barbecue or a hike or a Spirit Cruise around the harbor.

By the end of that August, Jason was going mental for me. He came into the city on weekends from his job up the coast, surveying for a mining company. A sample conversation from this period might go:

"Cheryl, God would never have made it feel so right or so good unless it was right and good."

"Jason, could you honestly hold up your head and say to Pastor Fields or your mother or the Lord that you'd been fornicating with Cheryl Anway? Could you?"

Well, of course he couldn't. There was only one way he could land what he wanted, and that was marriage. One weekend in my bedroom, he said we could get married after graduation. I removed his hand from near my right breast and said, "God doesn't issue moral credit cards, Jason. He's not like a bank. You can't borrow now and pay later."

"My strength - Cheryl, I'm losing it."

"Then pray for more. God never sends you a temptation that you aren't strong enough to overcome."

I did want Jason but, as I've said, only on my own terms, which also happened to be God's terms. I'm not sure if I used God or He used me, but the result was the same. In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We're the sum of our decisions.

During none of my lunch-hour confessions, whether at the White Spot drive-in eating fries with the Bunch, or at an Alive! weekend seminar on kingdom building, did I ever once confess how much I needed Jason, in every sort of way. Even thinking of him made me drunk, and all the teenage girl stuff that came with it: bees needing flowers; wanting to dissolve like sugar into tea.

Of course, everybody else in the school was going at it like minks. Nothing was forbidden to them, so why not? It's indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels. And while the ever-present aura of casual sex saturated the school like locker aroma, I didn't surrender to my own instincts, though I really did have to wonder why God makes teenagers so desperate. Why could we see Archie and Betty and Veronica on dates at the malt shop, but never screwing around in Archie's dad's basement covered in oil stains, spit and semen? Double standard. You can't do one without implying the other. Preachy me.

Dear Lord,

Protect our children, while they . . . Lord keep them as . . . Sorry. I can't pray right now.

Dear God,

What's hardest here is that I simply can't believe this is happening. Why do You make certain kinds of events feel real, but not others? Do You have a name for this? And could You please make all of this feel real?

As I was saying, silence.

In the first few moments of the attack, I remember briefly seeing a patch of sky out the window and I remembered how crisp and clean the day was.

Then one of the boys shot his gun in that direction and stemmed the exodus. I know nothing about guns. Whatever they were, they were powerful, and when they cocked them, it sounded industrial, like a machine stamping something flat.

Under the tables we all dove - thumpa-thumpa-thump.

Don't shoot at me - I'm not making any noise! Look! Look at How! Quiet! I'm! Being!

Shoot someone else over there! Shoot me? No! Way!

I could have stood up, shouted and caused a diversion and saved a hundred people, or organized the lifting of our table to create a shield to ram into the gunmen. But I sat there like a meek little sheep and it's the only thing I've ever done that disgusts me. Silence was my sin. I sinned as I cowered and watched three pairs of ocher-colored work boots tromp about the room, toying with us as though we were bacteria under a magnifying lens.