Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  The speakers were powerful, and the mood euphoric. With the Parkland kids leading them, they were convinced they could break through this time.

  But almost none of the Parkland kids were feeling that. Their introduction to their government had filled them with disillusionment. Officials had turned the rotunda over to them for most of the noon hour to address the public, via the press. Jackie had organized about a dozen kids to deliver short speeches, in quick succession.

  Alfonso started slowly and graciously, thanking officials for having them, describing his life just a week earlier: his biggest worries about what show to watch at six p.m., when to do his homework, study for a math test, and fit in theater rehearsals for a show at an elementary school down the road. “We are just children,” he said. And there he took a sharp turn. “A lot of people think that that disqualifies us from even having an opinion on this sort of matter. As if because we’ve been through a traumatic experience, that we don’t know what we’re talking about and that we’re speaking irrationally. We know better than anyone. We understand what it’s like to face a gun, to lose our friends, to return to school, to look at an empty seat.” He faltered there. “And you know that that empty seat is because— Because someone’s— Because someone’s dead.” Parkland was a beautiful town he said, a safe town. “And it’s now ruined!” He packed so much revulsion into that word. Alfonso was the first Parkland kid I heard enunciate that. The Columbine kids had fought so hard to reclaim the word as the name of the school instead of an atrocity, but they had lost. When they went off to college, other kids named their high schools while they said Colorado, or Denver, or anything to avoid the pity and awkward silences.

  Alfonso said he wasn’t ready to go back to school in a week. “I don’t think anybody here is ready.” He had been to grief counselors, but they needed more than counseling. “What we need is action.” The precise action—they were still working that out. But they would not be fooled by platitudes or spin. “We are old enough to understand why someone might want to discredit us for their own political purposes. Trust me, I understand. I was in a closet, locked, for four hours with people who I would consider almost family, crying and weeping on me, begging for their lives. I understand what it’s like to text my parents, ‘Goodbye. I might never, ever get to see you again. I love you.’ I understand.”

  They demanded action, and were prepared to sacrifice, Alfonso said. “I am prepared to drop out of school. I am prepared to not worry about anything else besides this, because change might not come today, it might not come tomorrow, it might not even come March twenty-fourth, when we march for our lives down in Washington, but it will happen, in my lifetime, because I will fight every single day—and I know everyone here will fight for the rest of their lives—to see sensible gun laws in this country and so that kids don’t have to fear going back to school. Thank you.”

  6

  Jackie continued fielding problems and herding strays. She conferred with Book in her office, and savored a few minutes of downtime, playing with Book’s one-year-old twins in their drool-soaked douglas strong T-shirts. The babies briefly defused the pressure and reminded Jackie whom they were fighting for. Would those babies still fear gunmen in their high school? The Columbine students were old enough to be Jackie’s parents. They had never thought to fear for their own kids. We knew better now.

  Jackie looked exhausted. Was all this good for her own recovery?

  The angry cloud hovered through most of the afternoon. “I’m extremely, extremely angry and sad,” Alfonso Calderon said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have faith in my state and local government anymore, because what I saw today was discouraging.”

  But shortly after five, the first group cycled out of their meeting with Governor Scott, and many of them left his office beaming. None of them wanted to talk right off, because dinner had arrived and they were ravenous for their box meals. Once they had eaten, many described the governor as listening, responding, and asking probing questions. “I feel like he really heard us,” sophomore Tanzil Philip said. “I sat right next to him and he was writing down everything we were talking about and he put checkmarks next to the things that were really important to us.” That sure contrasted with the legislators, he said.

  There were many dissenters. Daniel Duff complained that Scott never even uttered the words “gun control.” Still, all the students seemed glad they came. “Oh, a hundred percent,” Daniel said. He looked forward to organizing the Washington march, but also considered attending a local one. “I haven’t talked to my parents about that,” he said.

  They boarded the buses spent, and arrived home around four a.m. A car was already waiting in front of Jackie’s house. After a quick snooze, it whisked Jackie and her mom to the airport for their flight to Los Angeles to tape Ellen.

  7

  On Friday, Governor Scott defied the NRA and proposed a modest gun bill. Two weeks later, he signed a variation of it into law. It banned bump stocks, raised the minimum age for buying a gun to twenty-one, and added a three-day waiting period for most long gun purchases. It did not address assault weapons.

  The kids had discussed those ideas throughout the trip, and most of them derided them as minor no-brainers. The country would still be awash in guns; a tiny fraction of attackers would just have to work a little harder to get a certain deadly type. “Some people know the baloney that politicians feed us,” Jackie said. But she saw a marathon. The gun safety team had lost ground relentlessly, year after year, state after her state—nothing but losses, her entire life. And a prominent Second Amendment warrior had just broken, publicly, with the NRA. No one had seen that coming. Finally, the momentum had flipped to them. Jackie Corin gave her movement something it desperately needed. She gave it a win.

  5

  Spring Awakening

  1

  Cameron Kasky was always different—different from everyone, but different from his brothers from the start. The Kaskys had three kids, all boys, two and a half years apart. Cameron was the middle child, but the dynamics changed when his little brother, Holden, began to show signs of autism. “It’s not like it made Cam the youngest, but it’s almost like his childhood was kind of rushed because his brother’s needs took over,” his mother, Natalie, said. But Cameron never hurt for attention. When Cameron was a young boy, they went on a Norwegian Sky family cruise. “Jeff and I walked into one of the adult nightclubs, and [Cameron] was performing. He had left the kids’ camp—I don’t know how, because you’re not supposed to; maybe his leaving was how the cruise lines eventually changed their policies. Jeff and I walk in, and he’s up there making all these off-color jokes. The entire audience is hysterical.”

  They were howling. You can watch it on YouTube—Jeff posted it before the shooting. It’s “Jokers Wild” open-mic night, and the room has an industrial Vegas prom decor: exposed beams, corrugated metal ceiling tiles, lights reflecting every foot or two off its gleaming polyurethane wood floor. In the middle of it, a microphone stand, lowered to minimum height, is aligned with Cam’s wisecracking mouth. His dress shirt is oversized and untucked; khakis spill over his dress shoes, and curly locks onto his collar. He is completely at ease, working each bit like he’s hamming it up with his grandparents, owning the room. A man watching far behind him doubles over.

  Natalie recalls a rush of pride, and an inability to breathe. “This is what a real comedian’s mom feels like. It’s a mix of horror, nerves, and pride.” And almost immediately, one clear thought occurred to her: “This is going to happen so much. Whenever he gets a live mic, he’s going to be entertaining adults. He was seven or eight.”

  “He’s taught himself everything,” she said. “He’s taught himself to swim, he taught himself the ABCs, he taught himself to read—this thing about not needing parents is not new.” She reconsidered. “It’s not that he doesn’t need us, he needs support.” Natalie and Cam seem to have a cozy relationship. Cam didn’t need parents charting the movement, but he needed
a sanctuary. “I want to be home and protect Holden and stay out of things,” Natalie said.

  Swimming was Natalie’s most vivid early recollection of discovering who her boy was. She took Cam to the pool as a toddler and tried to get him started on floating. “Resist, resist, resist.” And one day he was jumping up and down in the pool, then tried it at an angle, a tighter angle, and pretty soon he was swimming. “He didn’t want or really appreciate the need to reach out. It’s like, ‘I can do it myself.’ Just the way he was built.”

  Reading was more gradual, but more revealing. She sent Cam to Montessori pre-K, and redecorated the long hallway to the boys’ rooms with alphabet wallpaper at eye level, to make learning fun. “He couldn’t wait for them to come down,” Natalie said. He loved pre-K, reading was exciting, but this “fun” business—he saw right through it and resented it. God, did he hate to be patronized. He didn’t have the vocabulary for that word yet, but the concept was infuriating.

  By pre-K he was reading, and in kindergarten it really took off. By first or second grade he was plowing through chapter books. “I couldn’t keep him in books—it was just like flying out the door.” And when he was seven, Jerry Seinfeld did a comedy book for kids, Halloween— “And if you ever checked it out, you’d be like, ‘Of course Cameron was into this.’”

  That’s also the period when politics got ahold of Cameron. “About in third grade, I started to notice the undeniable political mind,” Natalie said. “He was very pro-Obama.” He was going to Pine Crest Elementary School, a prestigious private school in Boca Raton, and Barack Obama was facing off against Mitt Romney for reelection. Cameron told her a lot of the kids’ parents were less liberal, and he was getting a lot of pushback. “Basically, his teacher would say he was on a soapbox and didn’t know the appropriate time and place—that eventually, he would have to turn the audience over to the teacher for the day. So there were a lot of those phone calls before the election.”

  That went hand in hand with his interest in theater, she said. Mrs. Blakely was the drama teacher, “and she could tell right away that this energy needed to go somewhere. I think everyone kind of agreed, this energy needed to be after school.”

  Pine Crest had a strong drama program for an elementary school, but Cameron outgrew that quickly, and moved on to community theater. High School Musical stood out, and Seussical, in which he played the Cat in the Hat. Music became a passion: first the cello, then the upright bass, but eventually Cameron decided his voice was his true instrument. For a while, politics took a back seat. “Because he felt the world was a safe place with Obama,” Natalie said. It came roaring back in 2017, when Trump was inaugurated—“And everything started to be really, you know, ugly? He just felt like he needed to tune in a little more.”

  They sent Cam off to Starlight Camp when he was very young, and he was very excited. His older brother, Julian, had gone there, and his cousins too, and for two years they had raved about it. “There were periods, you followed your exact bunk to your exact activity, and he hated it,” Natalie said. Camp was supposed to be fun, and that wasn’t Cam’s idea of fun. So they tried French Woods, a performing arts camp, and Cam was in heaven. He returned, enthusiastically, for seven years. “The kids were in charge of their own schedule, you didn’t have to be with your bunkmates the entire time, you got to be with like-minded people. That was so important to him.”

  They were putting on shows: ventriloquism, magic, circus. “And the most important thing that he kept saying: ‘We get to do it ourselves.’” Natalie said. “‘They trust us. They let us walk alone.’ And he was young.”

  Pine Crest was formal and rigid, and his older brother, Julian, loved that, but Cameron chafed. Just before he reached the upper division, he said he wanted to transfer to public school, with the regular kids. “I panicked,” his mom said. She saw him losing out on an elite education; Cam just saw a nightmare of rules. He was not unruly, selfish, or disrespectful—just contemptuous of dumb rules that had outlived their usefulness.

  Natalie got comfortable with public school when she realized they had been here before. An instant replay of the summer camp debacle. “I was wrong about school and I was wrong about camp,” Natalie said. “And then I just released it and I let him do what felt right. I just have this pattern on hearing what he has to say, having my own thoughts and breathless moments, and going with ultimately what he thinks.” He’s highly intuitive about what will work for him.

  2

  A month before the attack, Christine Barclay had a problem. Barclay ran a performing arts studio at the Boca Black Box theater in nearby Boca Raton, where she taught young actors and staged student and semipro performances. She was casting a slate of spring musicals: Seussical, Legally Blonde, and Spring Awakening. She had plenty of talented girls, but boys were a problem. Her flamboyantly out tech assistant, Spencer Shaw, who had transferred from Douglas a year earlier, waved off that problem.

  “I can get you boys,” Spencer promised. “Don’t worry about boys.”

  He posted a story on Snapchat and Cameron showed up the next day. Cameron and Barclay hit it off instantly. He returned with more boys day after day, and by the end of the week, Barclay’s small studio was packed with talented young actors. “Where are all these boys coming from?” she asked her assistant. Cameron. He gathers, he draws, he organizes; it’s what Cameron does. “I had this amazing foundation of a company,” Barclay said. “This Cameron Kasky kid comes in and fills all the holes.”

  Cameron had his eye on two shows, but Spring Awakening really grabbed hold of him. It was based on a seminal nineteenth-century German expressionist play about teen sexuality and neglectful, pious parents—a toxic combination. Cameron was after the male lead of Melchior, a radical freethinker and something of a pied piper, whose naive girlfriend dies from a botched abortion. His best friend also commits suicide, and the play climaxes in a graveyard scene in which Melchior pulls out a razor in despair and argues with his friend’s ghost about slitting his throat to join them. Broadway heavyweights Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater had been so distraught by the Columbine massacre in 1999 that they adapted Frank Wedekind’s play, subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, as a rock musical. They retained the period setting and costumes, but reimagined it with much more heart, and juiced it with a rock score.

  “Wedekind was writing a sort of scathing social critique about the moral imbecility of adults,” Sater said. “He was certainly empathetic to his younger characters, but not so focused on their inner worlds. I always wanted to remain faithful to Wedekind, but we found that by introducing songs to the narrative, we grew more invested in those young people—we had access to their hearts and minds and all their unspoken desires. And so we began creating heroes’ journeys for our three main characters.” So Sater added a classroom scene, in which Melchior stands up for his troubled friend Moritz. “And that made us care more deeply about Melchior, it helped us root for him.” Sater elaborated: “Melchior has an entire song, ‘Touch Me,’ in which he imagines how sexual pleasure must feel for ‘the woman.’ So, it only made sense, from the perspective of who he’d become, that what had been a scene of rape in the original play evolved into a love scene,” with the character Wendla embracing her own urges. “Again, we didn’t want Wendla to be just a victim,” Sater said. He wanted her to have a journey of her own, one in which she embraces her sexuality, and the love she’s felt, and that finally “she embraces the new life within her, just before it’s taken away from her.”

  They pushed other elements to be even edgier, adding two masturbation scenes and rousing songs like “The Bitch of Living” and the gleefully bittersweet showstopper “Totally Fucked.” Melchior opens the song:

  There’s a moment you know

  You’re fucked.

  Not an inch more room

  To self destruct.

  But then he embraces his fucked-up fate and the full cast belts out the chorus:

  Yeah, you’re fucked all right and all for spite


  You can kiss your sorry ass goodbye.

  Despite sweeping the 2007 awards season with eight Tonys and all the major “best musical” awards, including the Olivier in London three years later, the show is too risqué for most high schools. When Barclay asked her kids what shows they wanted to do, they begged for Heathers, Rent, Avenue Q, and Spring Awakening. “Edgy shows about conversations people avoid having,” she said. “We’re all thinking we’re so progressive, but these kids are still desperate to do these shows. Why? Because they’re not being allowed to do them at their schools. I’m not at the school, I don’t have a principal, I don’t have a school board breathing down my neck,” she said. “I’ll be the place that does those edgy things. Someone has to be the place to go out on a ledge and let the kids be dark and be upset and be angsty and sexual. Or there’s no outlet for it. We’re perpetuating exactly what’s happening in the show.”

  The cast was having a ball. “These kids have been waiting for an opportunity to sing ‘I’m totally fucked!’ at the top of their lungs. I didn’t choreograph that number, I said, ‘Now jump off that stage,’ and that’s all I had to say. They were ready for it. They took off their own clothes. Cameron does that froggie jump, he shakes his butt and slaps his ass all on his own. I didn’t tell them to do any of that.”