Recalling the Slain and Their Slayers

She had beautiful hair, down past her shoulders, but she cut it off--butchered it, really--for her role in the school play.

That was Rachel.

She never did anything halfway. Didn’t know how. She was fearless, no stage fright even, and funny and dramatic and ambitious. An all-out, go-for-the-gusto kind of girl.

And Isaiah. How to describe Isaiah?

He was short, very short, and always making fun of his height. Always joking about how he feared he might get stepped on. Isaiah seemed to know absolutely everyone. Smiled in the halls, waved at folks, even made a point of saying hi to geeky freshmen. The nicest guy. Everyone said so.

Matt, well, he was a joker. He hated country music, so buddies at the pizza joint where he worked used to turn on the most whiny, twangy station around just to get his goat. He’d retaliate by belting out his best--or maybe it was his worst--Shania Twain imitation. And he’d slap them with wet towels after work. He had a vicious towel snap.

Rachel. Isaiah. Matt.

All three were killed at Columbine High.

Friends remembered them, and the 12 others killed, as they placed flowers, signs and balloons at a makeshift memorial near the school Wednesday under a grim, sorry sky.

Authorities weren’t releasing the names of the dead, so as students milled about, they asked one another: Have you heard? Do you know? Have they said? Some refused to talk about their friends as victims, as though putting that label on them might jinx them. “She’s unaccounted for,” was all they would say. That, or “he’s still missing.”

But as the day wore on, as the rumors took on suffocating heft, they knew. Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoals, Matt Hector. Danny and Kathy. The basketball coach Dave Sanders. It began to seem so horribly real. “She had everything going for her,” they said. “It shouldn’t have happened to him.”

They began to talk, then, about their friends. The victims.

The memories they thought of first--the ones that flooded raw eyes with tears and prompted desperate, shuddering hugs--were silly things, really.

How she loved to shop.

How he woke up early every morning for conditioning runs.

How he hoped to make the junior varsity football team.

Thinking of her friend Megan, 16-year-old Jill White remembered pickup soccer games in the park and trips to try on clothes in the mall. “I don’t know what else to say. She just did the normal things teenage girls do.”

It was just those normal things, however, that stung the worst when friends remembered them. They made the pain seem fresh again.

How could Brittany Barry not choke up, remembering those purple shoes her classmate Cassie used to wear, remembering how she liked ska music and art and dressed with such flamboyance, oblivious to the latest fashions?

How could Heather Hansen not cry, remembering how Matt--”the most all-American boy you ever could meet”--saved up money to buy his own car, how he started food fights in the pizza parlor, chucking sausages at her as they cleaned up after hours?

Some of the dead were honors students. Others devoted their free time to church. Danny was “real quiet and shy . . . a really good guy,” a friend who had known him since elementary school said. Kathy, a classmate reported, was always fun to be around. Some of the victims were athletes. Others liked to study chemistry. They wore braces. They dated. They were typical high school kids.

“I can’t even find the words,” Lauren Beachem, a sophomore, said about her best friend, Rachel. “She was the most driven, the most enthusiastic, the most spur-of-the-moment kid I had ever met in my life.”

Rachel worked at Subway and, although her boss forbade it, used to sneak her buddies free sandwiches. Spicy Italian was her favorite. She wanted to be an actress, but she loved to write too. She was working on a play, hoping to have it produced at Columbine next spring. But she wouldn’t tell her friends what it was about. It was supposed to be a surprise.

The many kids who had loved her clustered Wednesday around Rachel’s car, still parked in the student lot, a Subway cup and a pair of ski gloves inside. They covered the car with flowers. They couldn’t seem to leave it.

“She was quite a character,” 16-year-old Sarah Slater said, smiling through her tears. “She wasn’t afraid of anything. I used to write poetry with her and philosophize. She was someone I spilled my guts to. Someone who would always be there.”

It was hard, Sarah said, to come to grips with the fact that Rachel now would not always be there. Without an official list of victims, friends of other missing kids felt much the same way, their grieving suspended as they waited for confirmation they both wanted and dreaded. They all wore ribbons in silver and blue, colors of the Columbine Rebels. Most carried flowers. Many walked hand in hand with their parents.

Many, too, talked of the basketball coach they called a hero: He had seen the gunmen early on, students said, and immediately yelled at kids to get down. Witnesses said he had taken two shots in the back and lay for a long time bleeding on the floor, as students pressed T-shirts to his wounds.

Authorities did not confirm that the coach was among the dead. Students and parents, however, eulogized him Wednesday, calling him a good economics teacher and outstanding coach who led the girls varsity basketball team to their first winning record in 13 seasons after taking over this year.

They remembered how he made a point of reserving the weight room for girls twice a week, even in the off-season, so they wouldn’t be intimidated by the jocks. They remembered how he organized a summer basketball league to keep his players in shape. And how he refused to recruit, even when other coaches did. Columbine was a neighborhood school, he always said, not some Big 10 athletic powerhouse.

“The seniors worked their butts off for him,” said Julie Lebsack, whose daughter, Stephanie, played on the freshman basketball team.

As the aching afternoon lingered, a cold wind kicked up and a few raindrops fell. But many students seemed unable to leave the high school grounds. The memorial grew and grew: There were teddy bears, helium butterfly balloons, even a small potted pine tree. Cards and posters signed by kids from high schools all over Denver expressed sympathy and support. “We love you, Columbine,” many of them read.

The pile of flowers on Rachel’s car grew too. And by late afternoon, someone had placed the 1998 Columbine yearbook by the tire of her red Acura. The title of the yearbook: “More To Come.”