I was tortured /every day/ for *years*.

When Eric and Dylan finally snapped, most people said "How horrible, that those two boys did that!"

I wondered "How horribly must they have been treated, to have felt that that was their only way out?"

I was a child prodigy, sent to very small schools in rural Kentucky, where I was much smaller and smarter than any of my "classmates" (or "fellow inmates", or "torturers", whatever).

If there had been a Dylan to my Eric, or an Eric to my Dylan, I very well could have chosen their path. There was no one with whom to share the torture, so I just sucked up and took it for as long as I had to. When I was sixteen I left high school and enrolled in college, and I can't begin to describe the relief I felt when I was no longer forced to submit to constant violence.