Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  A few minutes later, Aarayln Hughes took the mic and wowed the crowd. “It hurts for me to see all these kids crying,” she said. “No kid should be going through this. I want my voice to be heard because no other sixth grader is doing this. I want this generation to make a change for everyone: big, small, teenagers, adults—even if you’re eighty years old, I don’t care, make a change. These gun laws need a change!”

  Her applause was even louder than David’s. Aarayln Hughes had found her voice. She was not meek now.

  2

  Jackie was thrilled. What an amazing day in Parkland, and gun safety was dominating the national conversation again. And they hadn’t had to organize this one. That helped. The march in DC was ten days away.

  One reaction had left her with a sour aftertaste, though. This is her account of the following day.

  Jackie walked into math class that morning, AP calculus AB. Her teacher asked, “Who’s walking out today?” All the hands went up. “I bet half of you don’t know why you’re walking out,” he said.

  Jackie was stunned. He knew she and Alfonso were in the class. “I wasn’t going to let him do that,” she told me.

  I know why I’m walking out, she told him.

  Why, Jackie?

  For disaffection for current gun legislation.

  Do you even know current gun legislation?

  I actually do.

  “And so we basically got into that for a little bit,” she said. “And he proceeded to call me immature and said I would never understand the complexity of this issue until I’m an adult. But he actually didn’t say it like that. He didn’t say ‘the complexity of this issue.’ I just made it sound smarter—he just sounded dumb.”

  “I think I happen to be more mature than more than half the adults in this country right now,” she said.

  I beg to differ, he said. But we don’t have to get into that.

  “And then he started teaching math but as he was writing on the board he continued to say, ‘This walkout won’t accomplish anything. You’re just going to walk out to get out of class.’”

  This is a statement, she said. People have been protesting for centuries and it’s the largest message. Look at Selma, look at the Little Rock Nine. It made a statement and it made history.

  “He’s just stuck in his own world,” she told me. “He actually just got a cell phone for the first time after the shooting. So he’s clearly stuck a hundred years back. He doesn’t understand. We were actually arguing for twenty minutes and the entire class was silent.”

  I asked how old he was.

  “Probably in his sixties. He’s the one who doesn’t understand the complexity of it. He hasn’t heard enough of our side, because he won’t listen to us because he thinks we’re just kids. As do a lot of adults.”

  “Are you getting that from a lot of adults?”

  Not so much in person, she said. “On Twitter. The random old dudes will have like three grammar mistakes in their tweet and be like, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But there’s an overwhelming amount of love from adults. The only people obviously giving hate that I’m aware of, other than the people on Twitter, are the kids at school because they think I’m doing this for attention.”

  “Really? How many are you getting that from?”

  “It happened to be my old friend group. It’s a good assortment of fiftysome-odd kids. I just had my study hall and was crying. People weren’t talking to me, because people just don’t talk to me anymore. They shun me. I sat alone during lunch today because I couldn’t find Emma. I’d rather be by myself than with people who talk bad about me behind my back.”

  “And how are you getting wind of it?”

  “Oh, there’s people that still support me that are telling me who’s saying stuff. And I appreciate them telling me. I made a lot of new friends out of this. They make me so happy. I genuinely haven’t been this excited to be with a group of people in years. So that’s what’s been going on—it kind of sucks. Especially in school, because I have all my classes with them, but when I leave school—like I’m going to the office after this [interview]. Every time I go there, it’s kind of like a sanctuary. I love everyone there.”

  Losing all her friends? This was the second time she had mentioned it in the past few weeks. I clarified what she meant by “old friend group”: pre–Valentine’s Day? Yes. Her friend group from before Valentine’s Day was gone. Then she corrected herself: they had been her friends until her Twitter follower count took off. “It sucks, but it’s happening to all of us. Which is how we’re rising above it—with each other’s support.”

  Falling out with one close friend can be devastating for a high school student. But amputation of her entire social network, for a highly social person, at a time of crisis, while taking on absurd responsibility—that could have ramifications way beyond Jackie’s understanding at seventeen. I also wondered whether those friendships were really over, or just badly stressed. Inadvertently escalating to the media—beyond the friends’ reach—might be the real end.

  Meanwhile, in the thick of it, Jackie saw it as an opportunity. She had a fresh perspective on the girl she had been. “Honestly, Stoneman Douglas actually follows the stereotypical high school,” she said. “And I would classify myself as used to be a part of the popular group, that’s where I fell. I’ve always been kind of stuck in my area because it was just who I grew up with and I never was exposed to the other sectors. I’m really glad I am now because they’re amazing people and I love them and I’m very intellectually stimulated around them. And I haven’t really experienced that a lot. Like, I’ve always been this way, but I kind of had to hide the intellectual side of me.”

  3

  Friend loss wasn’t a big issue for most of her new group. Most of their friends had formed MFOL. Ryan, Alfonso, and Daniel hit on the more common problems in our group interview that week. They hated to see their town’s name branded as the latest term for tragedy—but so much better than their school. MSD’s seven-syllable name had probably saved them that indignation. But what did they call the shooting—obviously not “Parkland”? Columbine survivors had coalesced around “the tragedy,” but other communities favor “the shooting” or “the attack.” In New Orleans, it was commonly “pre-K” and “post-K” for Katrina. The boys pondered it a minute. They didn’t seem to call it anything. “It!” Alfonso finally said. “Before it happened, I was blah blah blah blah, but after it happened—”

  The others nodded. “Basically, whatever you say, you understand what we’re talking about,” Daniel said.

  And how were they doing? They seemed to be OK, but . . . That was an extremely touchy subject for survivors. They tended to put on a brave face, but deeply resented people reading that as recovered.

  “I’ve gotten this a lot,” Alfonso said. “See, kids are like ogres, and ogres are like onions, because they’ve got layers. On the outside, the onion has the cover. We have the cover of being funny and saying dumb shit. But on the inside, it’s completely different.”

  Daniel and Ryan rolled their eyes. His riff on Shrek had fallen flat. Alfonso was always trying out new material—most of it clicked, sometimes it bombed. He shrugged, smiled, and turned to Daniel.

  Daniel mocked him gently, agreed, and elaborated. “It hits me in waves. Like right now I’m totally fine, but I have like two of my classes . . .” He described the empty chairs again. It was still bothering him. It was bothering a lot of kids. Couldn’t they do something? Move that desk?

  “The class that I had with Gina was in the freshman building so it’s technically not exactly the same scene,” he said. “But the other, the class I had with Jaime, the teacher moved the desks around, but I can always picture where would she sit if she was still here.” Daniel slumped in his chair. I asked them about triggers.

  “Sirens, helicopters,” Daniel said.

  “Sounds,” Ryan said.

  Daniel whacked the table to demonstrate. It had a glass top b
alanced on a metal frame, and it made a hell of a sound. Despite watching the windup, Alfonso and Ryan practically jumped out of their chairs. They went white and silent for a moment, then everyone laughed hysterically. “That was a lot louder than I thought it would be,” Daniel said.

  That reminded Alfonso of a trip to the Capitol. He and Delaney Tarr were meeting with the Democratic House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, when a buzzer sounded, alerting members to a floor vote. “It was just like a beep beep beep beep, and the second it started everyone was completely fine with it, but me and Delaney were, like, freaking out—our eyes the size of orange peels,” Alfonso said. “And I mean, Nancy Pelosi was talking to us, so I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey! Shut up! I don’t care what you’re talking about, I’m really scared!’ So I mean, we kept our cool but—” He shrugged.

  I asked if she picked up on their freak-out.

  “No.”

  Ryan laughed. It had unnerved him too. “It’s so loud, and goes on way too long. No wonder they get nothing done in that building.”

  They discovered they were all sensitive to different sounds. Ryan went quiet. When they got on a roll, it was usually Alfonso riffing with Daniel, or Alfonso with Ryan, or Alfonso with Alfonso. Daniel and Alfonso went at it this time.

  “Sirens don’t like trigger me,” Daniel said.

  “Me either,” Alfonso said. “But alarms—”

  “When I hear a siren, I think of a shooting.”

  Alfonso nodded. “Oh yeah.”

  “Also.”

  “Guns.”

  “Obviously,” Daniel said. “My friend told me he was gonna go to a gun range and shoot an AR-15. I don’t know how that would ever help someone, but apparently that’s a way of coping.”

  “I’m gonna be honest, I’ve shot a gun before,” Alfonso said.

  “I’ve never.”

  “I’ve shot several. It’s fun to shoot guns. It is. I went to a range.”

  I asked about coping mechanisms:

  “Joking,” Daniel said.

  Alfonso smiled. “This.”

  “Activism and jokes,” Daniel said. “And, I mean, unfortunately they don’t go well together, because when you are joking during an activist thing, then people—”

  “Oh no, they love it!” Alfonso paused, reconsidered. “No they don’t—”

  “But the people that don’t like you are like—”

  “‘Oh, you’re so not funny! How dare you joke—’”

  “‘They’re not real, because they’re having fun—’”

  “By the way, he asked about coping mechanisms,” Alfonso said. “I think there’s three very clear answers. One, Never Again activism, obviously. Two, absolute trash food. I seem to be incapable of eating healthy, which is a real pain. I just started going to the gym consistently and then all of this happened.”

  “That’s terrible,” Daniel said.

  On his way to the third one, Alfonso got sidetracked on his girlfriend. They’d just broken up, that week, a few days shy of their six-month anniversary.

  Was it related?

  “Yeah, definitely. Beforehand we were having little problems, but after this we— My worldview changed. I’ll be honest: one thing I’m noticing more is, I hate to admit it, but I’m pretty materialistic. There are those people in life, I am one of those people, I’m never gonna turn down a Gucci bag. You know like, how could I, right?”

  “I could so easily turn down a Gucci bag.”

  “Me and Daniel are different.”

  Ryan chimed back in. “I’d be like, ‘Ohhhhh, a pretty sack.’”

  “Wow, a twenty-thousand-dollar sack,” Alfonso said.

  “With a shiny ‘G’ on it,” Ryan said.

  They kept rolling with it for a while, until Alfonso’s smile suddenly sagged, followed by his shoulders, and his pitch. “People just mean a lot more to me. Because the reality of losing someone is a lot more real.”

  Everyone dropped the playful tone. “When I’m like texting people, I make sure to always say goodnight to them,” Daniel said. “And I always hug like everybody now.”

  “I respond to everybody,” Alfonso said. “I try to always be there for people that have been there for me—beforehand, not just now.”

  “I think I’ve become just altogether more social,” Daniel said.

  Ryan had gone silent again, so I asked him how it was affecting him. “Pretty much same thing. But I like didn’t break up with my girlfriend.”

  “He’s still with her,” Alfonso said.

  “It’s been tense but like we just spoke at a church in New York last night.”

  I asked if both girlfriends were Douglas survivors. Yes, they said. Daniel seemed stunned about the breakup and asked if it was really over.

  “We don’t speak about that,” Alfonso said.

  I asked if he was comfortable sharing her name.

  “No, you know, privacy. And I try to be respectful as much as possible. And by the way, please get this on the record: I’m an asshole, OK.” He was smiling again.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m gonna put quotes around that.”

  There would be many more breakups ahead of them. When Columbine happened, the federal government rushed in a huge team of grief counselors. One of the leaders, who had just spent years with Oklahoma City survivors, outlined what lay ahead in the first week: Lots of long, healthy relationships would snap for no apparent reason—or sometimes for obvious reasons that had been brushed aside for months or years. Boys who had never kissed a girl would go on dating binges. Kids who had never sipped a beer would go on benders. They would take up smoking, or rock climbing, or weight training—or quit. Secretive kids would suddenly open up to their parents, talkative kids would stop. Drastic change was one of the most common coping mechanisms—to correct a problem, or for the sake of change. It was generally temporary. Most survivors settle back into old habits eventually, but for weeks or months or years, chaos can reign.

  The activism seemed to be helping, but does it ever get to be a lot, I asked. Too much?

  “It’s a lot,” Ryan said. “But—”

  “It’s manageable,” Alfonso said.

  “It’s something we have to do,” Ryan said. “We have to stand for the families of those who are grieving and not just in our community. I was in New York last night, at a church and these women from Harlem talked about losing their children years ago and they said that they’ve been fighting this fight for eleven years and nearly nothing has changed. And now like maybe change will happen here.”

  12

  The Memes Men

  1

  Nine days until the march. They were all about the message now. A million little details to work out, but that was not the focus at MFOL headquarters. No one would remember if the buses got snarled getting folks there, or if some fine was levied for parking them wrong. If they failed to inspire young activists, they lost. If the march came off as too juvenile, too unfocused, too privileged, too white, or even too boring to keep millions tuned in to TV . . . loss. Every previous group of survivors had gotten a four-day window of relevance. The MFOL kids were the first to get a second shot, a shot they created, and they had to make the message sing.

  They had mapped out message strategies for before, during, and after the march. During depended on the stage: the pacing, the visuals, the performers, and all the optics, because millions would be receiving their message through their eyes even more than their ears. The message was gun safety for all kids, so they all had better be visible. They had spent the spring meeting young urban activists, so they had a wide talent pool to draw from. Alex and D’Angelo from the Peace Warriors were no-brainers: passionate and articulate speakers—voices the world needed to hear. About half the performers and speakers would be people of color, representing hard-hit urban areas like Chicago, Brooklyn, and South Los Angeles.

  Another major visual choice would be to exclusively feature kids at the podium. They wanted adults as allies—performers, for examp
le—but their message would be delivered by kids. That was a powerful message itself. But they were wise enough to realize that kids were relatively new to this—and none of them had played a stage this big. They were not just handing them the mic cold. They had conducted a series of conference calls with speakers and organizers for DC and the sibling marches. “We want to make sure all of them have the same ideals that they’re pushing,” Jackie said. “Because people aren’t very clear about that, even though we’ve made the message pretty clear. People still are a little cloudy.” Repetition, repetition, repetition. They would keep scheduling conference calls until they heard everyone singing the same tune.

  But even the world’s best orators could never hold a worldwide TV audience for two hours. They calibrated their own short attention spans: Who would they watch? They needed lively performers and big names. 42 West had opened doors; it was up to the kids to woo the talent.

  Jackie’s top priority was recording personalized video for each performer they wanted—no frills, just straight to camera, expressing what it would mean to have them. They were casting a wide net, dreaming big and audacious, across hip-hop, pop, R&B, and country. Country was vital, Jackie said. Diversity didn’t always mean color—this time it also meant conservatives, who had been tough to reach. Diversity meant gun enthusiasts, making sure the performers also included a streak of white.