Word: prom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gaze and a sullen streak, he moved faster when he was in Harris' wake, drawing energy and confidence from him. Yet he seemed to be looking forward to a future that didn't involve guns and bombs. He told people that Harris' pseudo-Nazisms bothered him. At the school prom he giggled and slow-danced with his date, and even held hands--a big move for a too-tall kid who had not yet had his first girlfriend. He and his father Tom, a geophysicist who had moved into the mortgage-services business, had just spent five days visiting...
When Harris was turned down by the Marines on April 15, it was because of his antidepressants. A day before, Brandi Tinklenberg had turned down his invitation to the prom. Did these failures set him off? It's impossible to say. But five days later, he and Klebold started shooting. Fittingly, they had already computer-modeled their crime. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks Internet hate groups, discovered last week in its archives a copy of Harris' website with a version of the bloody shoot-'em-up video game Doom he had customized. In Harris' version there are two shooters...
...meantime, the Columbine survivors are left with their fear and grief. The grocery stores are out of cellophane cones of flowers. Prom pictures have become obituary shots. A bunch of kids went out to dinner at Applebee's Thursday night. Everyone stared. "They knew we were kids from Columbine," says junior Scott Schulte. "No one said anything. Then a waitress dropped a booster chair. We all jumped...
...open, all the needles and threats, but in a school of nearly 2,000 busy, ambitious kids, that quiet hissing sound was just background noise, drowned out by the gossip about who went to the prom with whom on Saturday night; the humming of the seniors' theme song, The Way You Look Tonight; and finally the normal sounds of a Tuesday morning, when the biology class was worrying about its test on the digestive system, the choir was rehearsing for its afternoon concert and it was warm enough outside to wear shorts, at last...
Poetry gets no respect. Readers of poetry are somehow "different" and "strange" creatures. Maybe those elusive poetry readers were high-school rejects. Maybe poetry readers don't want to belong. Maybe they are never prom queens. Maybe poetry really belongs hidden in dark coffeehouses, where poets live and breed and strum acoustic guitars, safe from the light of clean, clear narrative life...