Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  Casting Cameron had been dicey. Sawyer Garrity, another Douglas student, had an angelic voice and had landed the female lead of Wendla. Cameron’s voice was passable, but he would never get to Broadway on a song. But the rebel, the magnet, the pied piper—Cameron was Melchior. And he exuded the frenetic sense of the show. “Cameron’s always been like a champagne bottle that’s been corked too long,” Barclay said. “He would interrupt himself in conversations with me, before even getting to the end of the sentence, and then we’re on a different conversation. He was a live wire, ready for something in life.”

  They had a frank talk about his voice. He got it. Cam agreed to an hour of voice lessons a week—intense and one-on-one. Barclay couldn’t make him a songbird, but he was born to play this role.

  Cameron threw himself into the part. When he cared about something, he had only one speed. He was bitten by the drama bug, and was eager for more, more, more. Had she found enough boys for Legally Blonde? he asked.

  She cast him as the Ivy-Leagued Warner Huntington III, the male lead. Then he brought Holden and schmoozed her for a part for him. Then he offered his Chihuahua, Brutus, for the production. He also landed a role in MSD’s spring musical, Yo, Vikings!, and assisted on its direction, and was directing the school’s one-act performance of Coney Island Christmas for the statewide drama competition. He was hoping to win districts for that in February, and go on to the state competition in Tampa in March. Cameron liked a full plate.

  But it was Melchior that consumed him. And he couldn’t get enough coaching from Barclay. “He kind of immediately became an adopted teen son of mine,” she said.

  “It’s like magic between the two of them,” Cameron’s mom, Natalie Weiss, said. “They just understood each other right from the start, as so many relationships are like in the theater.”

  Barclay was ambitious too. She had moved down from Manhattan and begun the program two years earlier, and it was suddenly gaining traction. She cast her spring slate eight months into her first pregnancy, and scheduled herself straight up to her due date, which was Valentine’s Day. She would leave the staff and the kids on their own for a month of maternity leave—deliciously ironic, given the show—and then six frantic weeks till opening night on May 3. Four months of hoofing for two shows, three hundred seats a night. They could do it, but everything had to go just right.

  3

  The baby missed her due date. “When Valentine’s Day happened,” Barclay said, “I immediately texted Cam, because Cam was like the ringleader of my MSD crew.” How was he? Where was he?

  Cam reported that most of this crew was locked up in the drama room. Barclay’s musical director, Ed Kolcz, was with them, because his day job is musical coach at Douglas High. Barclay was driving in to her studio for Seussical and Legally Blonde rehearsals, also packed with Douglas kids. “Every time my phone was dinging, it was Cameron confirming that another kid was alive in our cast,” she said. “So it was just like: ‘Heard from Kirstin, she’s OK.’ ‘Heard from Ethan, he’s OK.’ Finally, we got up to the full cast, and I was like, ‘OK, I didn’t lose any of my kids.’ And then it all started to lift off.”

  Barclay was already a mentor to Cameron, but with his mom struggling to find a way home from the Caribbean, he leaned on her especially hard. “He started to get all these interviews. He started to call me before them. ‘OMG Christine, What do I do?’ He was like, ‘What do I say to Anderson Cooper? His eyes, I’m going to be distracted by his eyes!’—like making Cameron jokes about it.

  “My advice to him—which, I’m not the loudest voice chirping in his ear—was to not be a pot stirrer, not preach to his own choir,” she said. “The problem in our country right now is people are only really willing or able to talk to people who already agree with them.” She said, “Cameron, you’re a child. Because you’re a kid, maybe through the eyes of a child, preaching to both sides, maybe people will listen.”

  Saturday, around the time Emma was calling BS, and Cameron’s mother was getting back from the Caribbean, Barclay went into labor. When Caroline was born Monday, the kids had already done their press gauntlet announcing the Washington march, and were gearing up for Tallahassee the next day.

  Cameron disregarded Barclay’s advice Wednesday night. CNN had invited the Parkland kids and the NRA to its town hall, so anticipation and ratings ran sky high. The NRA was smart enough not to send its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, who was predictably bombastic. He would have come off as the crazy old white guy with no compassion for these kids. It deployed its wily secret weapon, Dana Loesch. She was just as ruthless, but exceptionally nimble. Loesch ultimately never gave an inch, but appeared to in the moment—so calm and understanding. She listened to her adversaries, acknowledged their position and their pain, while gently laying the groundwork for the case that they were perhaps misguided, and she really had their best interest at heart. And she commanded any stage with fierce resolve and striking beauty: straight black hair, a Kennedy jaw, and brown eyes that smote her opponents even as she smiled. Cameron had not come for her. He had come for Marco Rubio.

  The NRA was an easy target—but also slightly off target. The NRA was their sparring partner; they would never defeat it, and why should they? It had a right to exist. The problem was politicians in its thrall, and the goal was to break that connection, remove the NRA boot from their necks. If every politician in America began voting their conscience, this would be solved tomorrow, Cam’s team believed.

  The target was Marco Rubio: Cam’s Exhibit A in the NRA-Congress connection, his representative on the NRA dole. The NRA had donated only $4,950 to Rubio directly, but donations were not its primary MO. It liked to create its own ads, buy the airtime, and control the message. The NRA had spent $3.3 million on Rubio’s behalf over the course of his political career, making him the sixth-largest NRA beneficiary in the US Senate. If Cam could shame Rubio, or scare him politically, into severing that bond—who knows what dominoes might fall.

  Also, Cameron was still seething. His classmates were murdered, his senator seemed complicit, and Cam wanted to take him down. Humiliate him, if possible.

  The moderator, Jake Tapper, introduced Cameron, and he laid right in. “Senator Rubio, it’s hard to look at you and not look down a barrel of an AR-15 and not look at [the killer], but the point is you’re here and there are some people who are not.” He asked his friend, Douglas senior Chris Grady, to stand. “This is my friend who is going into the military,” Cameron said. “I need you to tell him that he’s going to live to make it to serve our country.”

  Senator Rubio calmly buttoned his blazer while assuring them that Chris would live to serve the country and have a voice in changing its laws.

  Cameron took a moment to call for bipartisanship. “Guys, look, this isn’t about red and blue. We can’t boo people because they’re Democrats and boo people because they’re Republicans.” He said anyone ready to change was somebody they need on their side. “So Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?”

  The crowd erupted, and leapt to their feet, applauding. It went on and on, and Senator Rubio waited them out with his hands clasped behind his back, sidestepping back and forth, over and over. Cameron fought back a smile and overreached, lamenting twice that he really wanted to take on “the NRA lady”—how she can look in the mirror . . .

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Senator Rubio asked.

  “I don’t freaking know,” Cameron said.

  “That’s OK.”

  “The question is about NRA money,” Tapper said.

  Rubio started out coherently, saying he’d been consistent over time, and then grew rambling and confused: “Number two—no. The answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda. And I also support . . .” By the fourth concept he cited supporting—“The things that I have stood for and fought for”—the crowd was beginning to jeer, and Cameron cut off the filibuster:

  “No more—no m
ore NRA money?” He tried to brush that off, and Cameron kept repeating it. “More NRA money?”

  Rubio, notoriously flusterable, started stammering (and this is how the official transcript punctuated it): “I—there—that is the wrong way to look—first of all, the answer is, people buy into my agenda.”

  “You can say no.”

  “Well—I—I—the influence of any group—”

  He had totally lost the crowd. The jeers were louder and relentless now, and Cameron turned to the crowd to call them off. “Guys, come on, be quiet. We’re gonna be here all night.”

  Rubio continued insisting that the NRA was irrelevant: “The influence of these groups comes not from money. The influence comes from the millions of people that agree with the agenda . . .”

  Cameron kept pulling him back: “In the name of seventeen people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?”

  “I think in the name of seventeen people, I can pledge to you that I will support any law that will prevent a killer like this from getting a gun,” Rubio said.

  “No, but I’m talking about NRA money.” Cameron then suggested maybe they could raise enough money for Rubio to replace the NRA contributions, and then circled back: “Are you gonna be accepting money from the NRA in the future?”

  “I—I’ve always supported—I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda. But my agenda is—I’ll give you a perfect example . . .” He rattled on until the segment was used up. He’d spent all of it running from the question, and never advanced a coherent point.

  The reviews for Rubio were withering. He was the butt of comedy sketches and late-night monologues for days.

  Dana Loesch faced off against Emma González a few minutes later, and Loesch came prepared—not just to debate, but to emote. She tried to disarm Emma by praising her bravery and then recasting it entirely as a mental health failure.

  After the town hall event Wednesday night, Cameron called Barclay from the airport around two a.m., about to board the red-eye, giddy about taping Ellen in L.A. “Just an excitable kid,” she said. She chided him, half-joking, “Did you bring your script? Are you going to go off-book by the time you get back? Are you drinking water, because your throat sounds like shit right now—you’ve literally lost your voice.”

  “Then he’s calling me crying because he’s getting death threats,” Barclay said. “It was really taking a toll on him. From the physical exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion, the death threats—on him, on his friends that he now felt responsible for, because he had started this movement. The stress about trying, I think—it’s what every celebrity kid goes through. It’s like, ‘OK, do I leave my life? How much of my real life do I abandon? How much do I give up? How much do I try to save?’”

  Way too much for a seventeen-year-old boy. And the last thing he needed was an out-of-school musical, with a suicide onstage, a gun blast, and that graveyard scene mourning his two dead friends, with his character leaning toward killing himself.

  About a week after Tallahassee, and a lot of texts with Clooney, Barclay called him to talk. Her staff was keeping an eye on him, sending her daily reports, and it was getting worse. He had an awful time at rehearsal that day.

  “I was trying to relieve him of the part,” Barclay explained. “I said, ‘Cameron, is this just going to be added shit for you? Not even just lines learning and being in rehearsal, but emotionally?’ At first, he took offense, like I was kicking him out. I was like, ‘I’m not trying to take this from you. I’m merely asking you if this is something you are able to do.’ He wouldn’t give it up.”

  Barclay agreed, but he couldn’t phone it in. “You’re going to figure out how to work this all into your schedule, because I have an obligation to the theater and to the rest of the cast. He said, ‘Just let me get through the March for Our Lives. I probably won’t be too present in March, try to do all the other scenes around me, and if you can do that then I’ll be there, I’ll do it.”

  She said OK, but he had to give up Legally Blonde, “Because I just said, ‘Dude there’s no way.’”

  4

  When Barclay returned early from maternity leave, the kids were just back to school and in rough shape. She gathered the cast, crew, and staff in the theater for a long talk. “Now these kids that I’m looking at are a completely different group of kids than they were the last time I’d seen them,” she said. They talked for two and a half hours. “I said, ‘OK, are we going to do this? What do you guys want to do? And they all said they wanted to do the show. Every single one of them. They all felt like they had to. ‘We can’t let that person take one more thing from us. They’ve already taken so much.’”

  That is a pervasive feeling with school shootings. At Columbine, the one major issue that pitted students against families of the victims was the library, where most of the killing took place. The parents were adamant it be torn down—no one should ever set foot in there again. The students were overwhelmed with a sense of loss—their friends, their name, their identity—and did not want to surrender one more inch, literal or symbolic. Any fragment of their life they could salvage felt like a victory.

  Barclay said she would prioritize security: police cruisers stationed during rehearsals, and metal detectors for the shows. OK, she said finally: What do you want to do now?

  “Totally Fucked.” They wanted to do “Totally Fucked.”

  Barclay said OK. “We turned on the music and we all stood onstage and we all just scream-sang through ‘Totally Fucked.’ Some of them were stoic and some of them were ripping it out, but we did it.”

  With that out of their system, they wrapped around each other and sang “I Believe,” the tender song, sung over the love scene that will do the teens in. It was a different kind of love that day. Sawyer and Cameron laid down center stage hugging; Cam fed her Dunkin’ Donuts while the cast swayed around them, arm in arm, singing:

  I believe

  There is love in heaven

  I believe

  All will be forgiven . . .

  I believe

  I believe

  I believe

  “And I cried, and they cried, and it was like watching soldiers go to battle,” Barclay said. “It was like the walking wounded, and they just weren’t going to let someone take it away from them. The kids who had been through it, the kids who hadn’t been through it—they were like, ‘We’re going to be anchors for you. We’re going to hold the fort while you’re traveling all over the world. We’re going to understudy for you . . .’ And they did.”

  6

  Back to “Normal”

  1

  On Valentine’s Day, Daniel Duff’s parents and brothers feared the worst. They kept texting him like crazy—no response, but the messages showed delivered. “I was like, ‘Fuck, his phone is on!’” his brother Brendan said. “I was figuring a lot of people turn off their phones, and that happened with a bunch of my friends, so that means something.”

  Brendan had graduated two years earlier, so he knew where all the classrooms were located. He didn’t know Daniel’s schedule, but he watched a newscaster talking to a kid in the drama room in the middle of rehearsal, which meant that Daniel would be there. And there was so much misinformation flying around, some of it incorrectly pointing toward drama kids. The whole family was texting Daniel, and it looked bleak.

  Daniel’s iPhone battery had been running low. In a brief lull in the melee, he had decided he’d better charge it. He’d set it down, but panic resumed, and he’d run off without it. He hadn’t even had time to plug it into the wall. But it had enough charge to misdirect his loved ones all afternoon.

  Daniel was in the drama room, along with most of the kids who would become March for Our Lives. All the leaders were juniors and seniors. All the kids had lost someone they knew, but the upperclassmen were less likely to have lost someone close to them. Daniel was a freshman. He lost seven friends.

  As in all these tragedies, a weird hie
rarchy of victimhood reared up. Often it was about loved ones lost—how many, how close—but months later, Daniel’s dad described another aspect. “Some of Daniel’s friends have taken the attitude ‘Wait, you weren’t even in that building!’ There’s kind of a hierarchy of who was closest.”

  That prompted Daniel’s mother to describe a moms’ therapy session she had just gone to. “I was the only mother there, of five women, who didn’t have a child in the building, so I kind of felt guilty. The woman next to me, her son still has a bullet in his arm, and shrapnel—they were very upset. She said he has like a tic now, he doesn’t speak. I almost feel guilty saying, ‘Daniel seems to be OK.’”

  Psychologists discount that sort of reckoning—especially since trauma is etched into the psyche at the moment of terror, by the perception of terror. The norepinephrine flooding the brain is just as toxic whether the killer is five feet away or five miles—so long as the victim believes he might arrive momentarily. Actual danger is irrelevant. Rationally, most survivors realize this, but try telling that to the guilt center of your brain.

  Daniel looked like a young Corey Haim, down to the brown curls, though he let them fall naturally and didn’t tease them out. He had looked up to Cameron since he was little. Cameron was tight with Daniel’s older brother Brendan, and when the Duffs went on vacation, Cameron looked after their dog. Brendan had graduated from Douglas in 2016 and was studying PR at Elon University in North Carolina. He had rushed home to look out for Daniel, and quickly landed at Cameron’s house, advising the group on media strategy. Brendan was a major player in Never Again behind the scenes. He helped the kids understand early on that the message was the mission, and they would get one shot at a public persona.