She Said Yes Analysis

“Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:4). Growing up, many kids face difficult times that arise, and struggle to cope with increasing pressures, demands, and emotional burdens. Cassie Bernall was a regular teenager, who grew through her recalcitrant adolescent behavior, by persevering and finding guidance through her faith. However, on the morning of April 20th, 1999, she was a victim of a senseless tragedy that struck in the form of two troubled students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. On a mission to shoot up their classmates, faculty, and school, Harris and Klebold seized the lives of thirteen students, including Cassie, and injured countless others physically and emotionally,
Raised with her younger brother, Chris, and by parents, Misty and Brad Bernall, Cassie had a normal childhood. In contrast, three years before Cassie’s death, her mother came across a stack of letters from Cassie’s best friend, Mona, which included inappropriate language and thoughts, “There was endless talk about the ‘sexiness’ of black clothes and makeup, the ‘fun’ of contraband alcohol, marijuana, and self-mutilation...’” (Bernall 35). With this, the letters also included vulgar and suggestive drawings, in one, Cassie’s parents were strung from their intestines, with daggers hanging out of their hearts. Misty and Brad later found out through Mona’s mother and Cassie’s own admission, that the letters were not unsimilarly, reciprocated. This was just the beginning of it though, as Misty would go on to divulge. Cassie fell in with the “wrong” group of kids, so it seemed. Her decided close friends would influence behavior from Cassie, that her parents would find less than stellar. Misty goes on later to write, “Brad remembers: ‘When Cassie got upset with us… She would cry and scream and yell, ‘I’m going to kill myself! Do you want to watch me? I’ll do it, just watch. I’ll kill myself. I’ll put a knife right here, right through my chest’” (42). There seems to a line differentiating normal and abnormal teenage behavior, for example, parents often hear their children saying phrases such as,