For someone who has attended a nice school in a nice town, the explosive events at Littleton come as no surprise. With no space for individuality, few outlets for anger, everyday pressures can become unbearable. PNS commentator Caille Millner is a sophomore at Harvard University, and on the staff of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

Stop telling me that the murders of over a dozen students in Littleton on Wednesday should not have happened in "such a nice town." That's exactly where these explosions happen again and again.

That's why I got out.

Even in my small all-girls high school, I knew people like those two 17-year-old boys that blasted into Columbine High School with automatic weapons and bombs. They were quiet social outcasts, on the fringes of everything, trapped in the suburbs like prisoners of war. They formed their own circles and watched the self-absorbed people who spit on them with scorn. And their anger and hatred was obvious to anyone who chose to look.

I remember watching one of those girls cut herself in the bathroom with a sliver of glass. She had marks up and down her arms -- crosses, stars, and pretty little decorations oozing with blood. Even though most other people in the school made fun of her, she was nice and we were (sort of) friends, so I asked her why she did that.

"When I cut myself," she said calmly, "I concentrate on the physical pain, and whatever's going on inside seems a lot less hurtful." Later on that year she graduated to knives and broken bottles, and soon she had so many cuts on her body that she looked as if she had walked through a glass door.

At this point, girls like my friend -- and the trench coat Mafia at Columbine -- are practically a cliche. Everyone who has been to high school since the early 1980s knew a clique that wore all black and tried to dissociate themselves from the mainstream. So at some point, people stopped taking them seriously. That's the real danger.

Most of these social outcasts only destroy themselves, which is what everyone expected from the trench coat Mafia. In the suburbs, it's just kind of taken for granted that children will go through rebellious phases (hopefully they'll do it quietly, so the neighbors don't find out) and then straighten up. Most of them do. But the anger there is real, and it doesn't fade away.

When you're growing up in the suburbs, there aren't many outlets for your anger or your insecurity. Most teenagers are isolated, living in perfectly enclosed spaces that all look alike -- homes, schools, malls -- their whole lives. Add that to the middle-class pressure to succeed and the suburban conspiracy of silence and you've got conditions that cause lots of young people to snap.

I felt that pressure, too, and I dealt with it by running away. As far away as I could, actually -- all the way on the other side of the country, to a big urban environment where people all lived together in a messy, asymmetrical stew of backgrounds and desires. But I could only do that because I was blessed with the foresight to see a way out, and the high SAT scores to make that happen.

Some people aren't that lucky. The only way they see out is through small moments of transcendence or explosive moments of violence. Until this anger is acknowledged, until the young people wearing black can get an audience instead of mockery, those moments will keep happening.