“Do You Believe in God?” “Yes.”;

The second thing one notices is the makeshift memorials. With all the construction paper and flowers and balloons and stuffed bears, it looks as if several dozen Hallmark shops had been overturned in a twister. But the cards are homemade, and their prayers and verses and valentines to the dead run from adolescent bathos to shell-shocked understatement (“Sorry for what happened,” one fifth-grader wrote).

The third thing one notices is the presence of God, who has surely pitched camp in Littleton. Even the agnostics approach this hallowed ground with the reverential awe of a high priest entering the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. You see it too with the often ill-mannered reporters, who don’t know whether to roll tape or to remove their shoes and walk in backwards.

The place feels like a Pentecostal tent meeting with the sound turned down. But instead of ululating or pew-hurdling, attendees form impromptu prayer circles on top of Mt. Columbine, a steep hill overlooking the campus where usually the track team tax their quadriceps. Several dozen mourners stand near a cross singing Scripture songs and Christian karaoke in worshipful, unrehearsed rounds. Everywhere, it seems, acts of mercy are committed. In one instance, a woman attempts to scrawl “evil bastard” on a cross bearing the name of one of the Trenchcoat Mafiosi, only to have her pen taken away, while strangers sing “Amazing Grace.”

The Columbine massacre, even by massacre standards, is a stubborn story, one that won’t quite recede. It is not sticking around just because it makes good copy, but because it demands an explanation: “Why?” as both Newsweek and U.S. News simultaneously asked in their cover lines. There is no dearth of opinions on that subject, as evidenced by the MSNBC windsocks who inflate on cue, apportioning blame to everything from lax gun laws to Marilyn Manson to high cholesterol to problem skin.

But here in Littleton, and increasingly throughout the rest of the country, another explanation is gaining currency — and that explanation resides largely in the person of one of the victims, Cassie Bernall.

On April 20, the 17-year-old junior was a typical teenager having a typical day. A devout Christian, Cassie drew solace from her faith — except when it came to that bane of many a girl’s existence, her looks. Not that there was anything wrong with her looks. She had crystalmint eyes, McIntosh cheeks, and a smile that should’ve netted her an Ultra Brite contract. She was convinced, however, that she needed to lose weight.

She dressed for school in a turquoise shirt with a white undershirt, her favorite jeans (a little snug on top, a little flared on the bottom), and her beat-up Doc Martens. Around second period, she had a friendly tiff with her best friend at Columbine, 16-year-old Amanda Meyer. “You tried to tell her how pretty she was and she got mad at you,” says Meyer. “One of the things she said was how bad she looked and look at what she was wearing. That’s why I happened to notice it. Later that night, I had to describe it to investigators.”

That Tuesday morning, Cassie asked Amanda if she wanted to meet in the library for lunch. Though several friends had invited Cassie to eat off campus, she wanted to study. “If I’m there, I’m there,” said Amanda. But just before lunch — and just after she spoke to Cassie for the last time, telling her, “Never forget that you’re beautiful” — Amanda spilled a drink on her shirt and went home to change.

A little past 11 A.M., Cassie walked to the library, toting a backpack with a “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelet pinned on it. She sat down at one of the blond, faux-wood tables where she often read her Bible. Today, she studied Macbeth, for an English class two periods away. Around 11:30 A.M., a teacher barreled through the library doors, frantically screaming that someone was shooting students. Eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold had started their killing spree in the cafeteria, and by the time they blasted their way into the library, removing their black dusters to reveal their ammo belts and TEC 9 semiautomatics, all library patrons had ducked under the tables. Of the 13 murders, 10 took place in this room.

After declaring their intent to kill their jock rivals, Harris and Klebold expanded the roster to blacks and anyone else who drew breath. One of the gunmen spotted a cowering schoolmate under a table, cried, “Peekaboo,” then killed her. One identified football player Isaiah Shoels as “a nigger,” then shot him in the head as he begged to go home. Crystal Woodman, a 16-year-old junior from the same church youth group as Cassie, huddled with two of their friends whispering prayers for protection, as the killers “whooped and hollered like it was a game,” says Woodman. “They’d be like, “Who’s next?'” Woodman thought she was, as one shooter came so close he pushed a chair into her arm. Somehow, she was spared.

The gunmen worked their way around to Cassie, who, like the rest of her classmates, was hunched under a table, visibly praying. One of the gunmen asked her, “Do you believe in God?” “It was really cruel the way he said it,” says Joshua Lapp, a 16-year-old sophomore who was hiding some 25 feet away. “It was almost like Satan was trying to talk through him.” Cassie paused before answering. Then, while presumably staring down a gun barrel, she replied, “Yes.”

“She was scared, but she sounded strong,” says Lapp, “like she knew what she was going to answer.” Unsatisfied with her answer, the gunman asked, “Why?” Before Cassie could respond, he shot and killed her.

It is natural enough that after such a bold stand, Cassie Bernall has been portrayed as a martyr for her faith, not just by friends and family, but by everyone from Al Gore to Franklin Graham (son of Billy). Perhaps it is our frailty that causes us to devour stories like hers. Death summons us all, and our best hope is to see our invitation delayed in the mail until the glorious hereafter beckons us as octogenarians. But when the young, like Cassie, are brutally cut down, the living who were cheated try to cheat back. We do this by ascribing meaning to the loss, by planing the senselessness off a “senseless tragedy.” And in so doing, we harbor faith, our hedge against randomness. In fact, this faith, Cassie’s faith, rejects randomness entirely. It affirms instead that seemingly arbitrary events are orchestrated, for reasons that may remain unknown. As Thomas Lynch, mortician by trade and poet by calling, has written, “Events unfold in ways that make us think of God. They achieve in their happening a symmetry and order that would be frightening if assigned to chance.”

Some skeptics might assert that Cassie’s death, though tragic, does not rise to martyrdom. Getting shot by a couple of crazed Goth geeks who were murdering all comers may not reach the dramatic demises of our first-century martyrs: Stephen stoned outside the city gates while praying for his executioners, Peter crucified upside down, John the Baptist handed his head. Some suggest that Cassie might not even have been targeted, that she’d have been shot regardless of her answer, as were so many others who weren’t athletes, blacks, or Christians. To this, her youth pastor Dave McPherson answers, “I turn that around and say, Why did they ask her? Because they knew what she was.”

What she was has emerged over the last week in obituary roundups. Cassie was a born-again Christian who loved writing and photography. She carried a Bible to school, and her favorite film was Braveheart (the story of the Scottish patriot William Wallace, who battled Edward I and who, for his trouble, was drawn and quartered, his head turned into an adornment for London Bridge).

But to really know Cassie, one needn’t bother watching Mel Gibson films. Nor is it absolutely necessary to spend time with her bereaved parents. I tried, and they declined, not because they’re averse to talking to the media, but because, as her selfless mother Misty told me only a week after her daughter’s death, “There are just too many of her friends who are coming over here every day. They need us right now.”

Everything one needs to know about Cassie can be found by driving out to the western cusp of Littleton, past the condos and the dollar movie theaters and the faceless chainstores, where the West Bowles Community Church abuts the low-slung, snowcapped foothills of the Rockies.

It is here that Cassie Bernall’s funeral was held, with overflow crowds flooding the aisles and anterooms. Some were strangers who came from as far away as Florida, clicking pictures of the closed casket of the brave girl who died proclaiming her faith. Others were beefy ex-Crips, drug addicts and felons from the Victory Outreach program in the roughneck Five Points section of Denver. There, Cassie used to go to minister in one-on-one chats with street converts who had rap sheets longer than her hair.

This is the church where her parents brought her two years ago, and not of her own volition. When she was in middle school, an adolescent rebellious phase took an ugly turn, and Cassie started fancying a crowd not unlike the one Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold favored. She was trying drugs and contemplating suicide and dabbling in witchcraft. Her friends did more, sometimes spending their Saturdays sacrificing cats. Her worried parents forced her into a sit-down with youth pastor Dave McPherson, whose prognosis was bleak. “We have a lot of rough kids come through here,” he says. “Those trenchcoat kids could come into our youth group and fit in perfectly if they tried.” But after attempting to talk to Cassie, he simply thought, “She’s gone. There’s some kids you meet that you think there’s a chance, and there’s other kids that you say ‘She’s gone.’ I never gave Cassie a hope. She was disconnected, she wasn’t going to listen to anything, she was into black magic, the dark stuff.”

McPherson recommended that her parents administer a shock-treatment regimen: Withdraw Cassie from school to get her away from her old friends, shut off her phone, and sequester her in the house. Her parents agreed and enrolled her in a Christian school. Once she was there, a new friend invited Cassie to attend a Christian camp, where Cassie ended up accepting Christ. Her 22-year-old youth leader, Jeremiah Quinonez, recalls her transformation: “Before, she was extremely shut down. She wouldn’t talk, you could hardly get her to smile. When she came back from that trip, she was glowing. She said, ‘You know what, I went to this church camp, and a bunch of people prayed around me. I don’t know what happened, but I was just changed. I felt this huge burden lifted off of my heart.'”

While Cassie often belittled her looks, her new smile was generally regarded as her best feature. That, or the waist-length blonde hair that almost ceased to be. “She wanted to cut off her hair and give it to this place that makes hair for kids who go through chemo,” says Sara Romes, a 15-year-old member of Cassie’s youth group. “She wanted to cut it off pretty short, so that there would be enough to supply three or four kids.”

Sitting in her church, canvassing her friends, I hear story upon story similarly celebrating Cassie’s graciousness. Even after her funeral, many call her a “living example.” In fact, this desire to serve is at least partly responsible for her being in the building where she lost her life. After her conversion, Cassie insisted on leaving her Christian school and enrolling in Columbine. The reason, she told her friend Amanda Meyer, was: “How can I witness to kids at a Christian school? I have to go to public school to be a witness to those kids.”

Transferring to Columbine as a sophomore, Cassie never fully assimilated. She attended Bible Club and was universally loved by the sizable youth group contingent that went to Columbine (47 kids from West Bowles Community Church were in the school building on April 20, though only Cassie was killed). But her friends say her unassuming manner and quiet spirit earned her neither scorn nor notice.

Like most teenagers, she suffered from self-image deficiencies and unrequited crushes. Though plenty of guys found her attractive, “she only wanted a godly man,” says Sara Romes. That narrowed the eligible pool.

As her friends generously share Cassie’s correspondence and conversations, it is apparent that Cassie was not merely some silly teenybopper, dashing off over-wrought notes full of exclamation points and smiley faces. Instead, one is prepared to believe that the last days of her life may have been preparation for her death, that the greatest testament of her “living example” is that she has ceased to live among us.

In a letter last June to her friend Cassandra Chance, she noodled over her life’s purpose, a perpetual concern: “Some people become missionaries and things, but what about me? What does God have in store for me? . . . Isn’t it amazing this plan we’re a part of? I mean, it’s a pretty big thing to be a part of God’s plan!”

About a month ago, the day after a long discussion with trigonometry classmate Craig Nason about what it means to fully surrender to God, she greeted Nason with four notecards filled with exhortations pulled from sources as varied as C. S. Lewis and Johnny Cash. Before signing off “In His name, Cassie B.,” as was her custom, she copied a translation of Luke 6:38: “If you give, you will get! Your gift will return to you in full and overflowing measure, pressed down, shaken together to make room for more, and running over.”

In another letter written about two weeks ago to Amanda Meyer, Cassie fretted over whether she’d ever marry: “It’s so frustrating to be patient and wait for God’s perfect timing. It’s so hard to remember that his timing is not our timing. That he knows best. I need to learn to trust, be faithful and trusting . . . and choose his will.” The night before she died, she wrote a letter that she gave to Amanda the next day. Her P.S. read, “Honestly, I want to live completely for God, it’s hard and scary, but totally worth it.”

That same Tuesday morning, she saw Craig Nason. As she told him how excited she was about their Bible study that evening, he noticed she had underlined a paragraph in their devotions book, Seeking Peace. In part, it read: “We can only win our lives when we remain faithful to the truth that every little part of us, yes, every hair, is completely safe in the divine embrace of our Lord. To say it differently; when we keep living a spiritual life, we have nothing to be afraid of.”

What some call eerie prescience, others label divine appointment. The day after Cassie died, her brother found a poem on her dresser. He gave it to Dave McPherson, who included it in her funeral program. Following Christ’s admonition to the disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” Cassie wrote:

Now I have given up on everything else. — I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought him back to life again, and to find out what it really means to suffer and to die with him.

Just days after she wrote the poem, that’s precisely what she did. And as police officer Wayne Depew walked through the library carnage, himself having almost lost a son in the massacre, he saw Cassie lying on her back under a table. Depew didn’t even notice the bullet hole in her temple. Instead, he says, her hands were clutched to her chest, as if in prayer. “She had a real soft look on her face with a slight smile,” he says. “This is just my opinion, but she looked as if she had accepted God’s will, that she was going to die for what she believed in.”

Back at West Bowles Community Church, there are very few surprises. Nearly every characterization of Cassie calls her an angel. Nearly every conversation shows her youth-group mates to be so sweetly and earnestly endearing that it almost hurts your teeth. But what is surprising, just one week after Cassie died, is that I don’t find any of her friends still crying. In the youth chapel, where the lovely ladies of the Jefferson Center for Mental Health have set up grief-counseling camp, with artesian water jugs and cookie tins, they sit alone, talking to each other, itching to dispense invaluable tips like “Structure your time — keep busy,” and “Give yourself permission to feel rotten.”

“There are more of them than there are us,” says Sara Romes. Like most of the youth, she steers clear unless she wants a cookie. Dave McPherson, who stayed up three days straight while grieving the loss of Cassie and the other Columbine victims, now says that her death should be celebrated as well as mourned. “We can sit in this building and grieve, or we can get out and spread the Gospel,” says McPherson. “A week ago, I couldn’t have mentioned God in school, and now everybody wants to talk about God. So we’re ready to go, and Cassie gave us the opportunity.”

As for whether Cassie will enter the pantheon of the faith’s great martyrs, McPherson is unconcerned: “She was just like every other teenage kid. She wanted popularity, thought maybe she weighed a little too much, when she would dance, she wasn’t in tune. . . . Cassie wasn’t perfect. But you don’t have to be perfect to be a martyr. You just have to be prepared, and Cassie was. She was prepared to give up her life.”