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I've had a hard time trying deal with what happened. At times, I've felt like I was lost. I've been sad, numb, depressed, angry. But we've had support from a lot of people, and that has really helped. Now I want to make something good come out of this. That's the best thing I can do for Rachel.

It helped to talk with a counselor and a pyschologist. At first, I thought that idea was kind of lame. I thought just talking about it wasn't going to do anything. But it did. It helped in a different way when they gave me a plastic bat and said I could beat on a chair. That got the anger out.

I was angry at Eric and Dylan because my sister was not the sort of person who was an enemy to anybody. They felt no one accepted them, and they watched their Hitler tapes and played Doom to build up all that hate inside them. But Rachel accepted everybody for who they were. She never made fun of anybody. She was just the kind of person they needed, and they shot her.

I can't change what Eric and Dylan did. But maybe I can do something about the way we treat guys like them. The kids who taunted them, who slammed them against lockers, need to change. They need to see that's it not cool to put other people down for a cheap laugh. Nobody really respects that, even though people may not speak up because they're afraid to seem uncool. We need to reach out to kids who seem like they're having problems. We need to find some common ground with them. That's my main goal.

The greatest comfort I have is seeing that some people are trying to be more sensitive to other kids. There's this one big football player at school -his name is Joe- and he wrote me a letter that was totally not what I would have expected from him. He told me he was praying for me, and he said some real nice things. That meant a lot to me. I looked at it and I thought, "Wow, he really wrote that with his heart."

I know what happened at Columbine has brought up a lot of issues about schools, families, laws, video games, and music. All of the violence that comes at us all the time has to have an effect. You can't pretend that it doesn't, especially on people who aren't real stable. But I honestly don't think that new laws about guns or more metal detectors at school are the answer. They're not going to stop the sort of people who decide to do something like what happened at our school. What we need is a better way of thinking about each other. We need to be more careful about how we treat people who seem torn up inside.

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