Trenchcoats.

My friends and I were the social outcasts of the school, but we had a lot of fun being nerds. We'd create fake clubs like the "flat earth society" just so we could take up an extra page in the yearbook. One year our group was given a vaguely Italian name and we all bought cheap trench-coats and wore suits and mismatched felt fedoras on picture day. Pretended to be in the mafia or something. It was the 90s and we were stupid, ok?

The teachers honestly loved us. We all had excellent grades and were sociable enough to get along well with them and most students. We ran most of the clubs in the school, from yearbook to band to drama to VICA to whatever. We were just weird. Really weird. And we gave the more severely outcast members of the school a way to feel like they really belonged and had friends. In all it was a really really good group, if oddly dressed.

Well there were also a couple members of our group that were a little further out in the "socially acceptable behavior" spectrum, of course, and they would do things that might have made others uncomfortable. You know. For some of them the trench-coat and fedora was an everyday thing.

For example, one of my best friends would often bring a katana to school under his trench-coat. He was harmless, and nobody knew, but looking back... yeah.

Well he went off to a summer camp in Colorado. While there he re-created our little "mafia" with a few other students there. They became great friends and even though I never went to the camp some of us have become close friends with each other.

Then each of these kids went off to their own schools. One of them returned to his school, Columbine, and started a little "mafia" group there. They all bought trench-coats and called it the "trench-coat mafia." Social outcasts at his school, just like at mine, became recognized by their seasonally inappropriate clothing.

I don't know that he was friends with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. But he certainly went to school there, and certainly shared in their clothing style, and I can't help but wonder.

The next year I had graduated but my little clique of nerds continued at the school after me, perhaps a little weirder, a little more out-there; absorbing more and more of the odd and outcast.

Then Columbine happened. Trench-coats were banned.