Newsworld

Chapter 1 Columbine: The Musical

 On Wednesday morning, between math and PE, I learned that Robbie Fenstermaker, who was set to play Dylan Klebold in our school’s production of Columbine: The Musical, had wrecked a driver’s training car and fractured his collarbone. “Collarbone?” repeated Mr. Baxter, my PE teacher. He combed his fingers through his sparse, aluminum-toned hair. “We’re talking a good two months’ recovery. More if it was a nasty break. When’s this play set to open anyhow?” “In a week and a half,” I told him. “Better scratch him off the program. He’s not doing any acting for some time.” Here was my problem: I was Robbie’s understudy. I knew some of his lines. I’d even practiced them with my girlfriend, Susan, who got a little turned on when I imitated Robbie’s stage voice, but I never thought I’d need to play this role in the actual production. I was a quiet kid. I’d only tried out because Susan was in the play. I stood there dumbColumbine : The Musical  founded, dressed in our school’s PE uniform: blue shorts, gold jersey, my name, Greg Gorman, thickly inked across my chest. After the activity bell rang, Mr. Baxter sent us out for six laps while he settled into a beach chair and asked one of his female assistants to bring him a diet Coke. With the other boys, I ran my laps around our school’s new “safety” track—a quarter-mile circuit enclosed by a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire. I generally did what I was told and believed this would be the key to my future success. I was good with directions, liked organization , never challenged the teachers or security officers at my school. For example, I was happy in my role as “Library Victim Number Four.” I was good at feigning panic, good at singing the soft, low chorus of death we all sang lying on the floor while other students who played our parents walked through the library holding poster-sized reproductions of our dental records above their heads. I had no real ambition to be the star of anything, let alone our school play. All morning long I told no one about Robbie’s accident, not even Susan, who stood beside me in the lunch line. She was a tall girl with dark blond hair that fell in a straight line to her shoulders. On that day, she wore the Abercrombie leather necklace I’d bought for her as a threemonth anniversary gift and a tank top that showed off her tan shoulders . Occasionally I wondered why she was going out with me at all— clearly football players were interested—but like me, her father had left her family when she was in junior high. I believed we shared something because of this, a certain hopefulness perhaps, though I can’t say for sure what that was. When we got near the front of the line, she pushed through and ordered for us both. I had the same thing every day—a cheeseburger and Coke. After Susan’s father left, her mother had become an executive secretary for a law firm specializing in lucrative class-action suits filed by ex-smokers. My mother, on the other hand, experienced repeated ep-  isodes of road rage until she finally gave in to the beauty of a quasiEastern inner peace and enrolled at the community college to become a certified workplace counselor specializing in conflict management. Because of her, I’d found my own inner peace as well: I looked for the best in other people and had learned that the meaning of life was found in universal goodness. That is, I believed we were all basically good people just trying to get along, though sometimes because of our own flawed understanding of the world, we had trouble seeing how other people were trying their best to get along with us. I spent the afternoon in history class, then in study hall, where I worked on my algebra homework, graphing parabolas that stretched toward infinity. After school, I stayed in the library long enough to miss the beginning of our daily rehearsal. As a rule I hated to be late for anything , but I hoped Mr. Sweeney would select someone else to take the role of Dylan Klebold if I wasn’t there on time. Only when...