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Chapter One

Noon, Monday,
August 2, 1999

More than three months had passed since the bullets ricocheted off the walls of the library at Columbine High School, striking terror into the nation, and since Littleton, Colorado entered the pantheon of public horrors -- alongside the World Trade Center, the Challenger disaster, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Americans staggered in confusion at the latest assault on their innocence.

Scores of journalists had descended on the once complacent suburb, holding out the tantalizing prospect of healing insight. They emerged with details about...trenchcoats. Pundits had transmogrified old-fashioned schoolyard bullies into well-scrubbed parodies of the Crips and the Bloods and converted Goth, the latest teen fashion statement, into a satanic cult. When they decamped for a fresher story, they left us hanging with shards of half-truths about music and style and adolescent angst.

You didn't have to be a seventeen-year-old to know that that cruel parody of high school life was an empty promise. But perhaps you had to be a seventeen-year-old to make sense out of those jumbled images.

I wasn't seventeen years old, and I was under no illusions that I could unravel the unfathomable, that I could divine a single crisp explanation to a seemingly inexplicable reality. Obsession, however, is the occupational hazard of journalists, so that afternoon I flew to Minneapolis to go back to high school, to linger for a year in the halls and malls where America's Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises spend their days.

A member of the national chorus that was speaking in a single, almost desperate voice, I was driven by a single question: "What's going on in our suburban high schools?"

Inside the walls of Prior Lake High School -- a typical suburban high school remarkably like Columbine -- I hoped to glean at least the beginnings of an answer.

Excerpted from ANOTHER PLANET © Copyright 2001 by Elinor Burkett. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.