There is no god. Or at least Caleum doesn't think there is. He asked all the same questions anybody would after losing a family member or witnessing something horrible or whatever. If there is a God then why is he letting this happen to me?
Mo's falling apart. Her drug addiction is getting a little better, but she's completely emaciated. Her PTSD has taken complete control. She's skin and bone, her hair's falling out but she's kind of confident. Kind of. She's comforting Caleum now as he breaks down and reverts to the same alcoholic tendencies that his estranged father had. Mo's completely plagued by physical pain, and she's 'doctor shopping.' As one doctor doesn't prescribe her pain meds, she moves on. When she finds one that does, she keeps him, but she never stops the 'shopping.' The more doctor's prescribing pain meds the better. As Caleum reverts to drinking, Mo's a narcotics addict. Eventually the cops find her 'doctor shopping' out and she gets hauled into the station. Mo's forced to find a shrink and start going to NarcAnon meetings. In a pitfall of rage, Mo goes off on Caleum who has taken her drugs away. To prove his point that they're in this together, Caleum drowns the pills in a river of alcohol.

Now Lamb does something that I never expected. He pulls away from his story and starts telling the reader about someone completely different, someone who we've never heard about. Now I'm questioning if I've just been out of the news loop lately because I feel like this story must have an underlining meaning. Something that relates back to Columbine but I just can't put it together yet. Lamb tells the story of Jesse and Morgan Seaberry. Sound familiar at all? Not to me. Jesse's the screw up of the family - the drug addict, the criminal, the unwanted one. Morgan on the other hand is the star. He's practically perfect in every way. He's a star student, a funny kid. He has charisma and a hunger for knowledge. They're brothers battling for attention and Morgan's winning.
The mother is the narrator. She figures that even though the elder Jesse's a screw up, she must have done something right eventually with the incredibly intelligent Morgan and the kind-hearted Alyssa. The mom gets cancer, she beats it, she pulls through. Happy story. By the end of the chapter Jesse's still a screw-up, Morgan's still perfect and Alyssa is still the lovely baby.

I guess I had let it go unnoticed, but the book apparently is compartmentalized in parts. Part one, Butterfly. Butterfly included the event, the immediate effects, and Caleum and Maureen's downfalls. At the end, Mo decides she can't stand it living in Colorado anymore and they decide to move back to Caleum's roots in Connecticut. I believe the actual idea for naming it 'butterfly' comes from the conclusion chapter. At a gas station, Caleum runs into a substitute teacher from Columbine. He recognized him from his revealing confessions about his fear of becoming a father at the Columbine recovery session held at the school. During Caleum and the sub's conversation a 'cabbage butterfly' softly landed on the sub's shoulder. it went by unnoticed. Right as the sub thought he was feeling excited about having his first child with his girlfriend he expresses feelings of fear, fear that his own son will turn out like Dylan or Eric. Caleum reassures him, even though he knows nothing about fatherhood. Caleum then asks him who he had been subbing for that day and it turns out that he had been the sub for Caleum's English class. The butterfly gets shooed away.
Part Two: Mantis.
It opens one year after the event. Mo's answering a questionnaire about her trauma. An evaluation maybe. For the first time we get to see the clinical side of Mo's PTSD, besides her Xanax abuse. This woman is really messed up in the head. She's got some problems.
Caleum's cleaning out a drawer at the farm, he comes across his old date book where he kept to do lists and important dates. After the event there weren't many entries, except for one written on July 29, 1999. Caleum reflects on that day, it was a day on the road coming from Colorado to Connecticut. They stopped at a Cracker Barrel, he chased the dogs outside to get them some exercise while Mo stayed inside, attempting to eat. He noticed she was completely unaware of what was going on. He called it 'psychic numbness.' As he reflects on the passage he lets the reader know that that was seven years ago.
Caleum starts to show his own obsessive compulsive tendencies. He keeps all old news clippings of the Columbine event stored in a large Tupperware container. Every once in a while he'll get drunk and stay online for hours, just searching and searching for info on the boys. Searching for some way to eliminate the troubles that are taking control of his and Mo's life. He describes the weapons they used. The way they dressed in Nazi-like attire. The way they got a hold on the guns they used. They're not you're typical evil monster, but the reality of their terror makes them even more scary.
Caleum becomes obsessed with connecting Chaos Theory to Dylan and Eric's actions. He's persistent, almost too persistent.

A note: I don't know if I can refer to them by their first names anymore. It doesn't feel right.