Nothing ever happened at my high school. There were parties and proms, fistfights and car accidents, but there was nothing that made it special, nothing that made it remarkably different than any other suburban high school in southwest Denver -- or really any suburban high school anywhere. There were some state champion soccer teams, and half the kids went onto college in 1990, the year I graduated, but not one student ever left and changed the world or won an election or even starred in a Hollywood movie.

Then on Tuesday, with 16 dead bodies scattered around the cafeteria and the library, my school, Columbine High, became famous. Something finally happened. Two kids in black trench coats -- armed with semi-automatic weapons and explosive devices that may have included hand grenades and pipe bombs -- swept through the hallways for an hour or so and casually, mercilessly, opened fire on their fellow students. Columbine High School, home of the Rebels, became the home of the largest high school killing spree in American history.

I heard about the massacre minutes after it happened and, like the rest of the country, watched the news reports as the numbers jumped from five injured to 11, and then to 16 teachers and students dead, 20 others injured and both of the murderers killed by their own guns. I thought the reports were wrong. And they still might be -- about either the body count, or the murky facts and so-called motivations connected to the spree and its instigators.

When I see the school on the television I hardly recognize it. Yes, there have been some major physical changes ever since the resoundingly Republican local voters finally reversed a four- or five-year trend and passed a school improvement bond in the early '90s. But other facts didn't add up. Associated Press and CNN even Salon News called Columbine and Littleton, Colo., "affluent" -- which makes them sound like something they're really not. One of the gunmen drove a BMW, but I'd gamble it was parked next to three beat-up Datsuns and a rusting VW Bug. Columbine wasn't "Dangerous Minds," but it wasn't "Beverly Hills 90210" either.

When I go back to visit my parents and my grandmother -- never my friends; they've all left -- I barely recognize Littleton. The stores are all shiny and different, like they were dropped out of some sort of alien chain-store mothership. There's always an entirely new city of tract homes in some field where I used to ride my dirt bike.

Although there is a tiny Main Street miles away, the part of Littleton where Columbine sits, still bloody and wet with tears, isn't really a town. It's more like a huge amalgamation of unincorporated subdivisions with 10-plus large high schools. (The strategy keeps the property taxes low and the schools wanting for money.) It's the kind of place that parents think is the perfect location to raise a family.

At the same time, Littleton, and most suburbs for that matter -- as everyone from David Lynch to Edward Scissorhands to John Cheever has pointed out -- are inherently alienating. The center cannot hold. There isn't one.

For me, the strangest thing about the entire experience has been watching the news media struggle to nail down the facts. I sat and wondered what was real. Right now, there are far more questions than answers. Were the two boys part of an organized gang, dubbed "the Trench Coat Mafia," or just a small clique of outsiders gathered together under a stupid name? Were they white supremacists who targeted jocks and minorities in their lunch-hour rampage, or are they as misunderstood in death as they were in life? This isn't sympathy for a couple of brutal killers, but when one reporter said that the Trench Coats had targeted minorities, I wondered how hard the gunmen must have had to look: There were two blacks and a handful of Asians and Hispanics in my 400-person graduating class.

One student told "Nightline" that the killers burst into the library looking for "that nigger," and when they found the lone African-American there, they shot him. Ted Koppel asked his panel of three Columbine students whether the fact that the killings happened on April 20, Hitler's birthday, mattered, and they shook their heads, bleary-eyed. The students took more seriously the fact that the date -- 4/20 -- was a supposed code word for marijuana. The suspects were also, we've learned, computer savvy, and at least one reportedly had his own Web site.

All of which means what? If racism turns out to be part of the motive, that may be reassuring. Because racism is something we can identify, and combat. The problem is that everyone is looking for a magic answer, pasting together vague clues and innuendo to create some sort of context to frame what looks like, as all the worst crimes do, an awful, unspeakable act of fairly random violence, this time executed by two very, very fucked-up kids.

I tried to resist a lot of the sinister hype. Most press accounts say the two gunmen were "outsiders." So were all of my close friends at Columbine. They listened to German industrial music. So did I. Maybe the gunmen wrote bad poetry, too, did drugs on the weekends and spent as much time as they could in downtown Denver, which is culturally light years away from Littleton. My friends and I did all those things; we called the suburb "Littlefun," and still do.

The obvious difference is that we never armed ourselves to the teeth and slaughtered the people we privately resented and abhorred.

I'll probably never understand what happened at Columbine High, and neither will you. We will all, however, hear no end to the guesswork, the misunderstanding and the political posturing that Tuesday had President Clinton saying that the nation needs to "do more to reach out to our children" and "recognize early warning signs."

The early warning signs of what? Deranged mass killers? High school students with automatic weapons? Alienated kids? Jock-hating, computer-savvy racists? We will never understand what happened here; we will just stop wondering, when we're distracted by the next unfathomable outbreak of chaos.