This wasn't surprising, given the moment: Earlier that year, and 20 minutes away, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began marrying same-sex couples at City Hall. A month later, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the State Supreme Court stopped them, and those 4,000 couples who were married, some of whom had kids at Tam, found themselves in a legal gray area that wouldn't be resolved in their favor until the landmark Supreme Court decision that defeated Prop 8 last summer.

Inspired by what Newsom had done, a group of drama students had been developing a Laramie Project–style oral documentary play called Are We Married Yet?: How the Rainbow Reached Marin. "This has taken on special resonance as anti-gay incidents have recently surfaced on the Tam campus itself," director John Warren stated in the play's pink playbill.

After a quiet winter break, the crimes erupted again. The GSA had put up fliers that included statistics about the frequency of LGBT teen suicide. One was found on Mary's car, alongside blocky words in column, instructing "SO DO IT." "DIE FAG" was written in dry-erase pen on another teacher's classroom door.

Then one afternoon, Nina Hirten recalls, she and Mary walked out to Mary's car, which was parked by the football field. After they got in, Mary slammed her fists into the steering wheel and swore loudly. Hirten asked what was happening. "The door," Mary said, indicating to the passenger door. Hirten got out and saw another slur written there in big black letters. She was confused as to how Mary had seen it, but more confused that she'd missed it. She sat with her friend as she called the police, as they filed a report. "She was like, 'I don't want to go home right now,' because at that point she'd been egged once or twice at her house. I told her, 'You can stay with me whenever you want' and she did." Each time something else happened, Hirten would get a text. "She was practically living at my house that year," she says. "It came to the point where I felt like I was really babysitting her."

This was in part because Mary was high all the time — cough medicine. Most of her friends knew about it. Teachers occasionally sent her to the counselor's office. Mary's other best friend recalls covering for her a lot: "I didn't think it was my place to confront her about that, given that I was under the impression that she was fearing for her life most of the time."

One night in mid-February, the police found Mary on campus drunk and sent her home. At least once, her mother called the sheriff, worried that her daughter had run away, or worse. One comment Mary made about wanting to drive off a cliff worried investigators so much they put a GPS unit on her car and kept a laptop with them at all times so they could keep track of her. Mary didn't know about this. Neither she nor her mom were aware that the retired couple across the street had allowed a camera to be installed on their property, either.

Fliers blew away or were rained on and then replaced. The edges of the rainbow ribbon on my own book bag frayed. The feeling around campus was one of tension, and slight disbelief: They haven't figured this out yet? Suspects were few, and no theories stuck. Maybe a parent? some wondered. The crimes showed no sign of stopping; if anything they escalated.

Right before the big spring multicultural assembly, which this year would have a big LGBT component, the school's main office received a threatening letter. "I remember having the police there in force, all over the place," recalls Curtis, "for fear that there was going to be some horrible thing that some perpetrator was going to try and pull off."

And then at the end of spring break, in mid-April, five teachers received threatening voicemails. The voice was deep and sounded mechanized. It said: "...force [sic] to tolerate it when we see you every day, we sit in your classes and we tolerate you because we have to. This is our expression: We don't want you here and it's just the beginning. We have supporters and will only get bigger. Take your opportunity to leave now."

"I had to play it a couple times," recalls one recipient, who, along with his other targeted colleagues I spoke with, asked to remain anonymous. "I didn't understand what it was saying. It was a little bit cryptic." At first he wasn't sure if it was a threat or a prank. "I don't think I put two and two together until after, when a number of us were targeted and I'm like, 'Oh, all of us are gay.' And that's when a lot of questions started coming through my mind: 'How did this person know?'"

Mary was turning 18. She and her friends drove out to Muir Beach. They wanted to not think about the attacks. They drank and built a bonfire and planned to spend the night on the cold, gray sand. But Mary was wasted and, Hirten remembers, things got dark: "She was saying, 'What's the point of going on? All this keeps happening to me, why is it happening to me?' At one point she said she wanted to kill herself and we'd all be better off without her."

After a sheriff kicked them off the beach, they ended up sleeping in their cars. They drove back in thick silence the next day along the winding highway. Hirten says quietly, "I just really didn't know what to do at that point."

Nina Hirten says she never suspected the truth. Most of Mary's former friends and teachers didn't. I know I surely didn't. Like many, I remember where I was when I saw the story. It came out on Sunday, May 8, Mother's Day. It was above the fold, next to an infographic about Marin's unsolved murders. It declared: "Tam High Anti-Gay Attacks a Hoax."

"She did admit to police that she basically did it all for attention," Superintendent Bob Ferguson stated in the story. The police and the story did not name her. It was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. The internet was smaller then, and social media more or less nonexistent. A couple of right-wing bloggers — including Michelle Malkin — reveled in it, asserting that odd, hyper-bigoted point that the occasional fake hate crime somehow disproves the existence of real bigotry.

That Monday, that week, we stood around in hallways and on lawns just asking one another what just happened and mostly why. People were confused, people were furious. I remember a particularly hotheaded peer kicking at a chain-link fence. In a subsequent IJ story, the Perry twins expressed "outrage" at their prior arrest. They demanded Mary be punished. "It's still a hate crime," Clayton Andrew Perry said, "She did it to a teacher." She was never seen from again; we heard she was expelled, that her athletic scholarship to a state school had been rescinded.

She did write an email to her friends the day the story broke. Few wrote back. One of her best friends was so upset by it, she set up a filter to block Mary's emails and hasn't had any contact with her since. "It feels to me like the healthy choice, and I feel comfortable with that choice," she says to me now.

I'd think of all this when I'd see another one of these stories: a lesbian waitress who faked a hateful note. A transgender high schooler who lied about being beat up. I am not surprised, of course, that bigots still revel in such incidents, but am surprised by how others, even LGBT blogs, react insensitively to them. (Take this Queerty roundup about five different fake hate crimes titled "Pants on Fire.") Of course this anger, the anger our community felt, makes sense: A fake hate crime is like a mutiny, and in giving ammunition to the enemy it hurts the greater — and very real — movement to end LGBT discrimination and hate. But then I'd remember carpooling to a Weird Al concert with her in seventh grade, and waiting after for autographs, or a birthday party in her driveway where we spun our own cotton candy. The idea that she'd done what she had because she was just evil or something never felt like explanation enough.

"I do feel a responsibility to make amends whenever possible," she wrote when I first approached her. "I'm happy to talk and answer questions, although I may not have any satisfying answers." I was apparently the first person from our high school with whom she'd had contact in nearly 10 years.