Brown and Lance Kirklin drifted apart. Brown became closer to Richard Castaldo, who was shot outside the school and paralyzed. He's the kid in "Bowling for Columbine" who accompanies Michael Moore to the Kmart headquarters and persuades them to stop selling ammunition. Castaldo has Kmart bullets inside him to this day, courtesy of Dylan Klebold.

"About a month ago I gave up on the whole Columbine thing," Brown says. "I'm done with what happened that day. I've come to terms with what Eric and Dylan did. People are dead, although I don't quite fully understand why yet." His basement is the center of his life now, and his computers.

Brown says he empathizes with Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard wrongly fingered by the FBI for the Olympic bombing. "There are people who will believe anything that is told them and won't research it themselves. And to them I say, 'Enjoy church.'"

We go outside, to Brown's gray Mercedes Benz 300e, and head east, past an interminable stretch of gas stations and convenience stores lit by neon. He talks about his choice to finally go on with his life and leave Columbine questions behind. "I've slept pretty well since making that decision. I have energy again." He makes a turn into a wooded area. "Rachel's grave," he says, "is just up the road a bit."

At Chapel Hill Cemetery, about 25 minutes from Columbine High School, Brown stops the Benz. Although only two of the victims, Rachel Scott and Corey DePooter, are buried here, side by side, 13 crosses have been constructed in a shallow semicircle, one for each of the dead. Flowers have been left, and photographs and cards: a smaller version of the massive makeshift memorial that grew up outside the school in the days immediately following the shootings, as well as around Rachel's red Acura Legend, parked in the Columbine lot near Clement Park. To many, Rachel's car became the most enduring Columbine shrine. Mourners left flowers and balloons.

A beautiful young woman with a wide smile and perfectly white teeth, a junior who dreamed of a career in the theater, Rachel Scott was going places. She and Brown took regular smoking breaks together outside school. It was during one of those breaks that Scott, 17, lost her life.

"Rachel was in a miscellaneous group," Brown recalls, in the dark. He visits Chapel Hill a couple of times a month, at night usually, or around sunrise, when the place is officially closed. Rachel Scott was Brooks Brown's kind of person, the kind of socially agile, multidimensional teenager Dylan and Eric might also have liked if they hadn't been so blinded by their hate. "Rachel was Christian, but she wouldn't hang out with the Bible thumpers," Brown explains, a fresh Camel between his fingers. "She was good-looking, but she wouldn't hang out with the hot girls. She worked two jobs in order to be able to buy herself nice clothes, but she wouldn't hang out with the rich kids. She just hung out with people who were smart. That's all she cared about."

Klebold killed her anyway. "Two shotgun blasts, boom, right to the back at about five feet. She was gone pretty quick," Brown says, as he drops some smokes on the ground. "I leave them here because the last time I saw Rachel she had a cigarette."

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A few months ago, around the time Brooks Brown cut back on his drinking and began to try to put Columbine behind him, Richie Castaldo's life finally took a big positive turn, too. Castaldo moved out of his mother's house, where she'd been seeing to his every need, into a small place of his own in a working-class neighborhood in Englewood, Colo., with a cat, Maceo, named after a Jane's Addiction song. He began taking some business courses at Metropolitan State College of Denver two days a week and playing bass in a band, Danger Girl.

For most of the past five years, Castaldo lived at home while he adjusted to life in a wheelchair. Castaldo has no feeling from the middle of his chest down, thanks to a Dylan Klebold bullet that hit his T4 vertebra and shattered his spinal cord. His friend, Rachel Scott, lay dead beside him. Three shots hit Castaldo's left arm, and caused nerve damage in his left hand; he took eight bullets altogether. A pipe bomb thrown in his vicinity failed to detonate. "I didn't know Eric or Dylan at all. I saw them in the hall a couple of times," says Castaldo, who'd played saxophone in the Columbine High marching band. "I didn't even know their names. I don't think they ever said two words to me."

Castaldo backed his oversize brown van down his driveway one afternoon last February and slid into Englewood traffic. "This took me a long time to learn," he says, as he operates two hand controls, one for the steering wheel, one for the accelerator and brake. "My balance gets screwed up. Sometimes, when I turn, I have to lean into it, a little bit like you do on a motorcycle."

Castaldo takes a left turn, past Swedish Hospital, where he spent two months recovering from his injuries. Another two months in a rehabilitation facility followed, and prescriptions to stop the seizures he was having. After a year, some but not all of the movement in his left hand returned, and Castaldo took up the bass. "There are some notes that are kind of hard to play. That hand is still numb in a few areas." He's got a cool idea for the demo he's working on. He wants to sample a sound few people will have heard before -- the throaty mechanical whirr made by the lift that carries him and his wheelchair into his Chevy van.

Castaldo has been thinking, lately, as the fifth anniversary comes around, about exactly why Harris and Klebold did what they did. Even now, he realizes, it's hard to come up with solid reasons. Maybe it's impossible and there will only be individual theories. "Most kids get picked on in high school. I think they kind of fed off of each other, too. It probably started off as a joke, like 'Oh, yeah, let's just go and kill everybody.' Then, 'Let's go get the guns' and they're like, 'OK, I guess we have to do this now because we got the guns. No one's stopping us. It's too easy now.' That's what I imagine it being like."

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