The following is an excerpt from Suspect, which blends memoir with investigative journalism to tell the story of when the author was suspected of wanting to shoot up her Vermont high school. It is now available to pre-order from Whisk(e)y Tit.

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Here's something I've been embarrassed about for most of my life: in senior year, I joined an online message board for people obsessed with the Columbine killers. I felt aligned with them and wanted an outlet. To the best of my recollection, my thought process went: if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been classmates of mine, they'd have understood the pain I was going through, and would never have ostracized me like my actual peer group did.

One hot topic on the message board was the buzz of anticipation surrounding the basement tapes. These were videotapes that the killers had made in hopes that they'd be widely available to the public. They wanted people like me, like us, to be inspired—not unlike other sorts of terrorists bent on recruitment. I began posting regularly on the message board and struck up a friendship with a goth girl from Ireland. She felt connected to Dylan Klebold, whom she saw as deprived of love, a feeling she could definitely relate to. We exchanged physical addresses and she sent me a handwritten letter addressed to "Elka." In it, she included all sorts of details about how cute she thought her favorite shooter was. I agreed; at the time, I found him cute and alluring. I felt bonded to him and his friend because I saw them as victims—a notion I later vehemently discarded. Back then, I thought the people they shot were victims as well, but a different kind of victim, not the kind I identified with.

The letter from my pen pal included some photos of her. She sat in a verdant field wearing a loose-fitting black velvet dress, a scowl on her face, black circles setting off her baby blue eyes. She looked so cool, I wished she lived nearby. I hid the envelope and its contents at the bottom of a shoebox, under letters from my old friends on Long Island.

A few months later, I became paranoid and tore up the Irish girl's letter. I was scared that someone would find it and conclude that the rumors had been true, that I really had wanted to massacre my classmates. The fact was that despite my empathy for the kind of people I thought the Columbine killers were, I'd never believed their actions were right. I did wonder, though, if being pushed hard enough could make me capable of murdering my tormenters. On the other hand, if that were the case, shouldn't I have erupted by now?

I checked myself for homicidal urges but didn't discover any. I did have dreams in which I played the role of shooter, but always in the aftermath of slaughter. It was never me with a sawed off shotgun pumping rounds into people; instead, I was being interrogated about the murders I'd allegedly committed. I'd always be confused, because I couldn't remember them.

Eventually, by the end of senior year, I did start to have some fleeting fantasies of shooting up Spaulding, but I'd suppress them pretty fast. I thought that I was maybe capable of it, that possibly all humans have murderous violence in us, but I also knew that path just wasn't for me. This might have had something to do with the fact that all my pessimism about my future social life couldn't extinguish a spark of hope. I thought there had to be a world where I could find career success—even if, for the moment, I had no idea how to get there.

I had other fantasies too that were much more naive, of being popular but doing it right, moving up the social ladder while being kind. I’d often watch the ending of Heathers and smile. I loved when Veronica ripped the scrunchie (a symbol of power) out of her popular friendemy’s hair and sternly said“there’s a new sheriff in town,” before befriending a badly bullied classmate.

Beyond the phenomenon of online fan sites like the message board I joined, there's a great deal of evidence suggesting that the fantasy of connecting with school shooters is widespread, among adolescent girls in particular. If anything, it has increased in the years since Columbine. For example, Nikolas Cruz, perpetrator of the infamous 2018 massacre that left 17 people dead at his Parkland, Florida high school, received stacks of fan mail and even love letters, many penned by teenage girls. One wrote, "I'm 18-years-old. I'm a senior in high school. When I saw you on television, something attracted me to you."

Broward County Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, whose office represented Cruz, told a reporter for a local paper that the letters chilled him. Why? Because they were written by people he considered to be normal. "The letters shake me up because they are written by regular, everyday teenage girls from across the nation," he said. "That scares me. It's perverted."

Online groups that sprouted after the Parkland shooting included one called "Nikolas Cruz--The First Victim." This was a private group with hundreds of members, many of whom used hashtags like #StopBullying. Though in all likelihood some of these people do condone murder, I very much doubt that all of them do. I speculate that an important subset may entertain the same type of misguided empathy that I felt for the Columbine shooters.

Despite evidence from studies that have found an absence of any obvious correlation between bullying and mass murder, the legend of such a connection remains powerful. Those who have been bullied have an extra incentive to invest in stories of shooters as heroic underdogs and girls in particular feel empathy for them. James Hawdon, a sociologist and director of the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech, told me in 2021 that while males look to school shooters to identify and “learn” from them, females lean towards “understanding” and “empathizing” and “loving” them.

Despite the role that social media has played in offering a forum to fans of murders, the fandom itself is hardly a new phenomenon. Between the time that serial killer Ted Bundy was apprehended in 1978 and his execution in 1989, he received piles of fan mail and marriage proposals. Susan Klebold's memoir reveals that she was flooded with love letters for her son Dylan.

Decades after Columbine, its legend lives on. "I care more about Eric and Dylan than I do about 90% of the people around me," a 17-year-old girl who goes by "reb420angel" posted on Tumblr. She was born in 1999, the year of the shootings. She's just one of many female admirers who continue to gather on social media, bonding over their fantasies of how cool, cute, and tormented the teenage killers were.