A Mourning Campus Shows Its True Colors

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Rhonda Holmstrom's first instinct was that of a mother. When word of Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech reached her in New Jersey, she and her husband, Harold, drove six hours to campus, where she and her son Dustin Flannery hugged and cried "hysterical" tears of relief.

Then, yesterday, a different instinct, almost as profound, took hold. The parents headed to Campus Emporium -- that North Main Street repository of all things Hokie -- where they spent about $800 on assorted garments in regal maroon and garish orange. Flannery, meanwhile, a pre-med senior, still shaken from having had a class scheduled in one of the bloody classrooms an hour after the slaughter, was clad accordingly in that mile-long river of orange and maroon snaking into the memorial convocation to hear President Bush.

"I have twin 17-year-olds and one 9-year-old, all boys, and I pray to God they get accepted here," said Rhonda Holmstrom, wearing her new Tech sweat shirt. "All that the world is seeing is that drill field" between the crime scenes, she says. "The news footage is all of kids running, and cops and guns. On a normal day, it's kids playing Frisbee, lying on blankets, studying. They're all just Hokies. It's a beautiful school."

All day it was like that in the peppy, well-stocked refuge of Campus Emporium, while breaking news of the tragedy played on two televisions. In their grief and shock, the people were shopping for slippers and coffee mugs and snarky T-shirt taunts against the rivals in Charlottesville.

This seemed both an act of defiance against being defined by one fellow Hokie's madness -- and a growing acceptance that they are.

They are a changed tribe, the students, faculty and alumni of Virginia Tech. Their be-true-to-your-school chauvinism and clubby rituals, always strong, are now underscored by that stark black banner with oversize white numbers hanging from the student center: "4*16*07." Smaller versions added the line: "Together we mourn."

To each customer, the two Teched-out women behind the counter chirped "How about you, how are you doing?" and "Did you call your mother?"

"All right" and "Yes, ma'am," came the subdued replies.

Across campus and throughout the town, the defiance banged up against the acceptance seeping relentlessly into soul of the community. "Can you do me a favor and not use the word 'massacre' in your story?" said Brad Newkirk, a chemistry graduate student, watching that very word appear as the logo on a cable news show airing at closing time in a bar early yesterday morning. "It's not fair to this town."

And yet everywhere, in dorms and off-campus apartments, students debated the boundaries of this new identity, their school as scene of "the greatest mass shooting in the history of America." Did this feel more like the Columbine massacre, when many were in elementary school, or 9/11, when many were in middle school, or the Washington-area sniper attacks, when many were in high school?

And how would they even reach out to those high school seniors deciding right now whether they could come to Tech?

Hunkered in an apartment off-campus with fellow students in the early hours of yesterday, freshman Jay Gannon said, "We're trying to figure out how to talk to people who are thinking of coming here next year. It's a great place!"

"One of the reasons I came to Tech is the ridiculous sense of unity," said Gannon, who is from New Jersey. "Everybody reps the VT colors all the time."

Back on campus, at the Drillfield, that grassy expanse that Holmstrom idealizes as admissions-catalogue perfection, the still and deserted green was elegantly illuminated by old-fashioned street lamps. Off in the distance flickered the ice blue of police cars at their posts.

At one end of the green, students used cardboard and wood to erect a five-foot-tall version of the familiar orange-and-maroon VT logo. The contraption was originally designed a couple of years ago for a football game day pep rally, but a group of roommates repurposed it from Hokie football to Hokie shrine. At 2 a.m. yesterday, the keeper of the shrine stood vigil wrapped in a blanket.

Small clusters of students stood mutely before the makeshift shrine and took turns leaving messages, then went on their way.

For every message of "We know you're in a better place" and "You are in my prayers," there was a "Proud to be Hokie" and "Hokies stay strong, come together, we will be ok."

A few hours later, the sun rose, the joggers appeared, and then the international media moved back in.

Jessica Micsan, from Reston, sporting dyed red hair, two rings in her lip and one in her nose, told the McClatchy news service that she never felt as if she fit in on campus. Taking a cigarette break with friend Sarah Giles of Richmond, she said, "You feel like you become a Hokie when something like that happens." Danica Van Horn, a freshman from Vermont, lives in the dorm where the first two students were killed and knew one of them in passing. "It's an amazing school," she said. "I've loved every second of it. People asked am I going to transfer. No. It's my school. It hurts to see something happen to a school you love."

She remembers Columbine. It happened the day after her birthday. And now, in a few days, she will turn 19, on a spring day that will come every year around anniversaries of both deadly school rampages. The first was somewhere out West. The second is here, on a campus she knows so well. That's what's so surreal.

"What makes it hard is everything looks the same," Van Horn says. "The sun's still shining. All the buildings look the same, you walk in your room and everything is the same."

But Tech is not the same. And the girl in the Virginia Tech sweat shirt is not the same.

"When I see friends grieving," Van Horn says, "that's when it starts to sink in."

Staff writer Tamara Jones contributed to this report.