Columbine HS Shooting – 10th anniversary "Remember the Two"

An essay for today:


Remember the Two
Written by Brandy Stoner



I will always remember the two.


Perhaps it is because my brothers were so tormented at their own high school, which was where most of my middle-school and elementary-..school tormenters ended up attending high school. Perhaps it is because I have a friend who was living in Littleton but attending another Denver school, and might have been scarred by the memories herself if not for fate.


Maybe it is because so many of my friends wore dark trench coats and were fascinated with weapons and music and books that gave words to the pain that they only knew how to express through aggression.


I have always had my words. I was accepted to a magnet school and left behind my bullies, with an unspoken pact with the other kids who were leaving the same school, that we would quietly “reinvent” ourselves, and not tell anyone at the new school what incredible outcasts we "really" were.


But.


I told my mother, before receiving the acceptance letter for the school for the gifted, that I would rather kill myself than attend my home school another year. Months later, when she saw the shock on my face as I read the letter, Mom looked at me with wet lashes and comforted, “Oh. Brandy. I’m so sorry.” Bewildered, I looked up at her and said, “Why? I got in.” We were both relieved.


I watched the newscasts, seven years later, with tears running down my neck, not just for the 13 victims, but for the victims who became aggressors. I just kept thinking "There but for the grace of God go I." Even now, when talk of the deaths arises anew each spring, I and fellow former outcasts -- who are otherwise strangers -- momentarily share what Eudora Welty called "age group looks."


Besides grace, though, I had advantages that the bullied boys of Columbine High did not.


Taunts ranged from “K-Mart, K-Mart is our store! We shop there ‘cause we are
poor!” to “Brainy’s got a gun, and she’s come undone.”


We didn’t shop at K-Mart. Frankly, in a one-income working class home with three young kids (and that wasn't all the children), K-Mart was a little upscale for us. Financial advantage was not one of mine. I certainly couldn’t afford therapy. We were happy to have occasional dental care. But I had a mother who was surprisingly sympathetic to my adolescent isolation, and who grasped the concept of a “teachable moment” before that became a catchphrase.


I began by explaining the plight of another eight-grade classmate to my mother. “Ryan is pretty weird, Mom. He tells people sometimes that I am going to be his girlfriend. Just because I am nice to him. Do you know why I am nice to him, Mom? Because I keep thinking that one day he is going to get sick of how mean everyone is to him, and he will snap, and come back to kill us all, and I am hoping he will remember I was nice to him, and spare me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend, but I don’t want him to kill me someday either.” It was a bizarre statement, and Mom and I had a good, awkward laugh before I made my own confession.


“Um, Mom. You know why I worry that Ryan is going to flip out someday? Because when they say ‘Brainy’s got a gun,’ and laugh…sometimes... I think about it. How good it would feel, just to shut them up. I don’t really want to hurt anyone. I just want them to stop.”


Mom sat in silence while I cried into my folded arms and onto the kitchen table and my Algebra textbook. Then she said, “I can see why you would feel that way.” She went on to tell me that she knows I am frustrated, and that she would like to tell me that there was a magic bullet, made of lead or otherwise, that would make them stop. But there wasn’t. And there would not be one anytime soon.


The scant hope she offered was that I had potential they didn’t, despite every material advantage, and that while one day I would be secure and happy and still smarter than they were, my tormentors would struggle with insecurity and entitlement the whole of their lives.


That being said, for the duration of our wait for the ultra-competitive magnet school’s response, she and my father began looking to purchase a home in another school district. I was privileged with parents who recognized the difference between genuine despair and average adolescent angst. I had parents who would move all of their children to save one. We were taught to cast aside our usual differences in desperate times -- an "All for one and one for all" mentality.

Thankfully, I was born with enough intelligence and talent that my education did not hinge on my parents' following the proverbial Jones's into what for me would have been a suburban hell of conformity and mediocrity.


I do not claim to know whether “the two” had parents who were emotionally removed from their children. It is not fair to surmise, yet hundreds of assumptions are made about their boys. As a parent myself, though, it is fair to say that if our children are stockpiling weapons, and we do
not take notice, we have become too far removed from their lives.


I do know that I count myself blessed that I have a mother who I could beg the question "How do I make them stop?” and who would offer the response, “How do you make you stronger than your misery and better than their barbs?”


And so, I remember them today. Not by name, not by the infamy that they felt would make them legendary, but as two scared and scarred adolescents.


I remembered them eight years ago, when one of my brothers opted for home
tutoring rather than enduring anymore socially-based shame.


I remembered them nearly three years ago, when my kindergartner cried because a girl she thought was her friend tied the shoelaces on her brand new pink Chucks to the jungle gym, and the laces had to be cut at the end of recess.


I remembered them last year, when my daughter quickly became part of the A-group at her new elementary school, but remained kind and helpful, and the teacher said she seemed to reach out to socially and academically struggling classmates.


I remembered them a few months ago, when, now in second grade, amidst an ill-founded custody battle, she told me of shoving and taunts – “Nobody cares about Tia.”


I remembered them when I asked her how that made her feel. Do you know what she said?


“I’m sorry for whatever happened that gave him such low self-esteem. We should pray for him. But I’m not going to let him make me feel bad about myself.”


I have remembered them this decade, in my parenting.


We remember the two by providing our children with an “emotional vocabulary.”


We remember the two by talking about bullies and forgiveness and self-esteem.


That way, we remember the two. We forgive the two. And we honor the lost thirteen.



"Remember the Two" Copyright 2009 Brandy Stoner