Apr. 16 - The camera sat on Kelly Fleming's dresser for months, the film inside waiting to be developed.

Her mother, Dee, thought little of the camera. After all, Kelly would rarely allow her picture to be taken. And she never, ever smiled for pictures while she still had her braces on.

"I left it sitting on her dresser all through the summer," Dee Fleming says. "Finally I had the pictures developed just to see what was on there."

Five pictures of Kelly Ann Fleming were on that roll, pictures that her parents never knew existed. She had taken the camera to school sometime in the weeks before the shootings, letting down her guard among friends and giving her parents a last, unexpected bequest.

"This one was on top, smiling back at me," Dee says, revealing a shot of Kelly outside her home with an uncharacteristically wide grin on her face. "It was like a gift, a gift that she left for us."

Dee is making scrapbooks, sifting through the thousands of photos she and her husband, Don, took in Kelly's 16 years. It's therapeutic, she says.

In her living room, stacks of letters and cards from around the world nestle neatly in plastic containers. Each, Dee says, has helped.

On a table nearby, under glass, are the plaster casts of two hands intertwined. One hand is Kelly's. The other is that of her 19-year-old sister, Erin.

Angels stand guard throughout the house. Pictures of columbines line the hallways.

Outside, Dee has a garden where she planted many of the flowers that were given to the family. Again, angels stand watch, and a small sign proclaims it "Kelly's Garden." Bright green columbine plants are growing rapidly, waiting to bloom.

Upstairs, in Kelly's room, everything sits much the way it did on April 20. Her close friends have taken a few mementos. Her mother, unable for weeks to change anything in the room, finally straightened the covers of the bed.

About the only thing that has been added is a plain, wooden chair - the library chair Kelly sat in as gunfire erupted in the school.

"When we toured the library right after, it was real important to be in the space she had been, to touch the ground where she was lying, to touch the chair I know she sat in moments before all hell broke loose," Dee says. "For me it's more of a comforting thing, just to know she was sitting in that chair. And that was the last happy spot where she was." On the floor, in the corner of the bedroom, a Coke can sits where Kelly left it the night before the shootings.

"I just can't take that out of there. It's like I know she was at that spot that night," Dee says. "You want to freeze that moment in time." But time has moved forward. As they wait for April 20 to come again, the Flemings are trying to move forward as well. Both Dee and Don are back at work - Dee as a data manager for Honeywell, Don in the rental-car business. Erin is in college.

"We did think about moving, but we have such a terrific support group here with our friends and neighbors," Dee says, "and especially the families of the other shooting victims.

"They're invaluable. We can talk to each other about many things. And they know. They know better than anybody what we're going through." Although they've remained private over the last year, the Flemings have been active in the effort to raise $3.1 million to convert the Columbine library into an atrium.

"The library was really the heart of Columbine," Dee says. "And it should be again." It was also the place in the school where Kelly felt most comfortable. A shy sophomore who had moved to the Columbine area just a year and a half before, she spent her free hour in the library every day, reading or writing before heading to lunch with friends.

"Kelly loved the library. For her, the library was just such a safe place," she says. "But I know Kelly would never have been able to go back in the library if she'd have survived." Since last April, they've heard from Kelly's former teachers in the Phoenix area, where trees were planted in her memory. An elementary school in Houston, where Kelly was born, has a memorial to her in its library.

"Kelly would never have believed the way she touched so many lives," Dee says.

She draws a deep breath.

"You wake up every morning and just try to pull yourself together and get through the day. I'm never far from her," Dee says. "It's just real unpredictable. You never know at any given moment when something's just going to bring back a memory. Sometimes I hear certain songs on the radio, and it brings back so many things." But in many ways, Kelly is part of the present as well.

"She always seemed to be a lot more sensitive to things than most people," Dee says. "She'd stop to watch the birds fly over. She'd notice the sunrises and sunsets. Just the little things that most people pass by.

"I feel like I'm seeing life more through Kelly's eyes now, like she's showing me a lot of things.

"Your priorities change. Things that seemed so important before just don't seem as important now." And little things can mean the world.

"When we were at the funeral home, they asked if we wanted her braces off. That was very, very important for me," Dee says. "She doesn't have her braces on now." A picture comes to mind, the one of Kelly smiling.

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Kelly A Fleming