by Dave Cullen
Big names were already on board, but they were reaching for more. Jackie had just completed appeals with four other girls to Drake, Chance the Rapper, Kendrick Lamar, and Jason Aldean. They coaxed Dwayne Wade to appear with them in one. Jackie was especially hopeful about Aldean, who had been performing in Las Vegas during the Route 91 concert shooting. He felt like a kindred spirit, and could reach red America. “He’s been involved in the issue, but he gets the different crowd,” she said.
Jackie wasn’t sure how the videos actually got to these people—not her problem. She just sent them to 42 West, she said, and whoosh, connected.
They reached out to a long list of performers, because many were previously committed. They didn’t hear from Aldean. But Demi Lovato said yes, and so did Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Platt, and several more.
They had expected to be pulling their hair out that week, but the office was eerily quiet. Things felt so in hand that most of the MFOL team left town. The drama club was off to Tampa for a statewide one-act competition, and the news team had a national competition in Nashville. At first, the whole team wondered if they should cancel, but what they needed right now was a break. “It wasn’t a big deal,” Jackie said. “It’s kind of like a plateau week.” She was not in news or drama, so she stayed back, stressing over her speech. She had never even attended a political rally before Valentine’s Day. David, Emma, and Cameron also skipped the competitions. The teams could take a break, but not them.
Most of the details were delegated. Adults were employed to solve the vexing issues posed by all the in-kind generosity. Airlines and hotels had donated tickets and blocks of rooms, Lyft promised free rides, and so many kids were in need, but who was going to coordinate all that? Invitations were routed to Ryan Deitsch, who texted the information to Jeff Foster, the AP government teacher. Mr. Foster maintained a sign-up list, which ran about 750 students deep, and he built a detailed spreadsheet to capture all the details and match them up. Two other teachers were working different lists, and they corresponded with students to sort the details. Off-loading that clerical work was a no-brainer.
Jackie was drawn to logistics, and dove into the nitty-gritty, where it would make an impact. She decided they would sell blue hats and beanies at the march, but Douglas kids would be given maroon ones. “That was important,” she said. Activists she was meeting around the country were eager to network together at the march, but they all wanted to meet the kids who’d lived through it.
After Tallahassee, Jackie described the experience as a dry run for DC, a small-scale proving ground to master the details. By early March, all that felt like the weeds. A few weeks later, I posed the same question of her biggest Tallahassee takeaway, and got a completely different answer. “I learned that even if I cry in front of a senator, they won’t change their mind,” she said.
“Did that happen?”
“Yeah, it happened. I cried twice in Tallahassee. Hearing them say that they’re not changing their opinion even though we were there. And then the same thing happened in DC. I talked to Congressman Steve Scalise—he was shot during the baseball game—and hearing him say that guns aren’t the problem, I started crying. I talked to Tim Scott of South Carolina—he is from Charleston; his church was the church! And to hear him say guns aren’t the problem—I was crying, there were tears running down my face as I was saying this, and his eyes actually did swell up. I was like, ‘We have a commonality between our hometowns. I don’t understand why you can’t see the one problem.’ He’s like, ‘Mental health is the issue, blah blah blah.’ I just can’t fathom how people don’t understand. They try to find a scapegoat and they think the scapegoat’s the answer. Wake up!”
But that was February. Jackie would never be that naive again.
Jackie had shaken off the political naivete, but she still cried. “I’m honestly like, I’m a very sensitive person,” she said. “Like if someone’s going to be crying in the office, it’s me.”
The office. They were trying to keep a lid on its existence but the kids had started referring to “the office” instead of to “Cam’s.” They told me no press was allowed, but I asked Jackie again during an interview on March 15, at a Starbucks near the school.
“I’ll ask,” she said, and texted as she continued. “I’m asking them, but I don’t really know. It’s kind of Cameron’s call.”
I wasn’t sure who “them” was—obviously a group thread, but who exactly? The entire group, I would soon learn. A massive thread that had expanded to nearly thirty people, hundreds of messages a day, running day and night. It was their primary form of communication, and they were keeping that quiet too. They were functioning as a democracy, everyone equal in theory, but some exerting a bit more weight. They often said they would have to check before sharing something, and when they named a particular person, it was usually Cameron.
Thirty minutes later, Jackie said I could come to the office. “David said not too long though. We can head over now if you want.” David this time. It had been settled by group consensus, but David drew the boundaries in.
2
We drove to a nondescript strip mall on Sample Road, a busy commercial strip in Coral Springs, the next town over, six minutes from the school. It housed a wide assortment of small businesses behind putty-colored stucco walls with green metal awnings: a Weight Control Center, the Neck and Back Institute, and the No Hard Feelings Tattoo Gallery. We parked and I followed Jackie to an office tucked in the back, on the lower level, beside an office supply store and a martial arts studio. The blinds were closed, and the plate glass door was papered over on the inside. “It literally says ‘Nurse Practitioner’ on the window,” she pointed out. “So no one really knows where it is.” Death threats had continued, and some of the team was still jumpy.
She rapped five times loudly on the door.
“Who’s there?”
“Jackie.”
“Prove it.”
We laughed, someone laughed inside, swung the door open, and Jackie nodded at me with a smirk as she walked in. “I’m with him.”
Each time I arrived, it took a wisecrack or two to gain entry, followed by a flurry of silliness inside—mixed with a lot of hard work. The check-in station was empty, like most of the office. It was a tight space, even with most of the team gone. The main room was in the middle of the unit, presumably the nurse’s exam room. Everyone was in there: eight people huddled around the oblong boardroom table that barely fit inside. More than twenty kids squeezed in for group meetings, leaning against the walls or sitting cross-legged on the floor.
The first thing I noticed was I’d never seen some of these people: in person, on TV, or on social media. It was hard to miss the guy in chunky black Rachel Maddow glasses, with flaming red hair radiating in all directions, like an Irish Albert Einstein. I caught them in the middle of a creative session, brainstorming ideas for some complicated Web content, and everyone seemed to be deferring to this guy, all the questions flying his way. But I had promised to be quick about this, so I moved on, and Jackie gave me a tour.
There was less space and less furniture than in Cameron’s living room. “It feels cramped,” someone I didn’t recognize said. It was tight, but it was theirs. No parents, nobody’s house, no community gatehouse.
I counted fewer than ten office chairs, which they wheeled from room to room for makeshift chats, and a cozy beanbag chair in what they called the writer’s room. The space sported a toaster, a microwave with red Solo cups stacked on top, a full-size fridge stocked top to bottom with soft drinks, especially Living Juice bottles, and a minifridge, completely empty. There was a chest-high commercial photocopier with the box for a cheap all-in-one printer stacked on top: an HP Officejet Pro 8710.
“Somebody turn on the AC!” someone yelled. “It’s brutally hot in here.”
Background giggling was nearly constant.
The bathroom was spotless, which shocked me, and I commented on it.
“We treat it like a public bathroom,” Jackie said. No public bathroom I’d ever seen was that clean.
They had made the place their own. There was a globe, an electric piano, and a faceless cloth doll near the toaster in a black and gray jumpsuit, with a clump of bright blue yarn for hair. Jackie reached for it. “This is the Dammit Doll. Slam it!” She battered the table in a burst of rage, as in a moment of possession, and then she was sweet, young Jackie again. It had made such a racket, Pippy rushed back to make sure we were OK.
“I slammed the Dammit Doll,” Jackie said.
Pippy looked a little worried. I had never seen Jackie’s menacing side, raging through her body for just a moment. Pippy apparently had.
I asked how often she whacked the doll.
Frequently.
“Are you still jumpy?”
“Uh-huh.”
What were her triggers?
“When I pass a police car, I duck in the car,” she said.
“Really?”
“I get scared.”
There was a massive photo of Cameron’s brother Holden in the hallway, nearly floor-to-ceiling, just his head with a huge grin. On a front wall they’d made a photo montage from some of the favorite cards they had received. A big close-up of Emma had been accessorized with a curly mustache. A huge US wall map was tacked with green pushpins, one for each sibling march, but just the early sign-ons, because they had come so fast and so furious, it was simpler to track them on their website. The map dominated an entire wall, with a piece of paper taped on either side. Each was creased twice, where it had been folded inside a business envelope. The notes were written with a thick Sharpie, in the same hand. The one on the left was addressed to Alfonso, who had shown it off eagerly on his phone earlier in the week:
DEAR ALFONSO—
SAW YOU ON CNN!
PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR ACNE
—IT’S REPULSIVE!
YOU SHOULD NOT BE ON TELEVISION
Alfonso did have a harsh case of acne. And he was a very attractive young man. Delaney Tarr had no acne problem, and was outright beautiful, so her note was simpler:
DELANY—
SAW YOU ON CNN
SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU STUPID
FUCKING CUNT!
☺
They had been getting mean tweets daily, but this guy had taken the time to stamp and mail these to the school—with his return address. Alfonso said they didn’t post the address, because why be mean? But there was no name on the notes, so it was safe to post. He and Delaney had each photographed and tweeted theirs and then donated them to the wall for the whole team to enjoy.
The prized possession in the office was a gold-colored bust of Robert F. Kennedy. The boys had raved about it during our group interview a few days earlier.
“Robert—such a great guy,” Alfonso said.
“Was he?” I asked. “Cool? I never know.”
“I’m fawning over him in my head.” Alfonso said. The RFK Foundation had about four busts of his head, so they gave the group one, he said.
“Joe Kennedy the Third gave us a statue of Robert Kennedy,” Ryan Deitsch said. “Looks like a macaroni art—”
Alfonso repeated the line to not quite finish his sentence, and they bounced back and forth: “It looked like macaroni art, but we were very—”
“Appreciative.”
“Joe Kennedy escaped a snowstorm to give us the head of his grandfather,” Alfonso continued.
“That’s actually true.”
“He brought it to a Democratic dinner we were also invited to. He had a duffel bag with him. Everyone was just like—”
They all made horror-movie faces, including Daniel, who sat back, gleefully watching the older boys riff. “But it’s amazing,” Ryan said. “He was the keynote speaker and he controlled that room. Kennedy charisma.”
They gushed about Joe for a while, but lamented that he slipped into politician bullshit at one point. “But you know, he gave us some pretty good answers,” Alfonso said.
They were still getting used to the office—to any office, for many of them—and there were lots of functional items. A handwritten key roster, with seven color-coded keys, six of them signed out. A big whiteboard mostly dedicated to instructions on operating the printer. A corkboard with a before you leave list printed in large type:
Please make sure you turn off the air conditioner
Turn off all lights
Lock front and back doors.
Thanks!
Another version, taped to the front door, had a handwritten addition squeezed in:
Make sure trash/recycling go out.
A blue Post-it was stuck to the front door, with an arrow pointing to the latch that read this shocks you every time.
Some bullhorns were stacked up, still in the boxes. Someone had donated them after seeing the kids hop up on cars. Very nice intentions, a little too late, but maybe they would need them again.
3
I circled back to the main room to say goodbye, and meet the redhead—who still seemed to be directing. He introduced himself as Matthew Deitsch.
“Oh, Ryan’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve even got the same red hair.”
“Nah, his is much more red than mine.”
That didn’t seem possible.
I asked if I could interview him before I left town, and he said, “How about now?” I explained my promise to leave quickly, and he waved that off. He had a brutal schedule and right here would be most efficient. And he could clear me to stay.
We headed toward the writer’s room. The guy who had called the space cramped looked up from his laptop and called after Matt, “Do you have explosion on here?”
“No, but you could download a green-screen explosion pretty fast.”
“Should it be an anime explosion?”
Matt didn’t hear. He was already wheeling a chair into the writer’s room. He motioned me toward it and flopped into a beanbag chair. When I asked if it was OK to record, he leaned forward and yelled toward the main room, “Guys! We’re going to be recording, so just don’t yell any racial slurs!” He watched for my reaction, and only then grinned.
Reporters were still wondering whether the kids could really pull this march off so quickly. I peppered Matt with logistical questions and he shrugged. No idea, why would he? “Just not where my focus is,” he said. “I’ve had a month to be an expert in gun policy and write our five main points and platform.” Matt turned out to be the recent grad who had led the research, selecting articles to route to the group. He enjoyed going bookworm. He loved deep dives to learn, and share, and debate. Nothing more gratifying than hearing your conclusions challenged and improving them.
Matt was obviously a force in this movement behind the scenes. But publicly, he and the other alumni were keeping a very low profile. He introduced himself as the MFOL community outreach director, which was true, but not the half of it. Later, they would name him chief strategist, the role he had been gravitating toward from the start. Matt was twenty, oldest of the group, and many of them had been looking up to him for years.
Matt saw MFOL changing the gun debate by adopting a new strategy. “The messaging of both political parties is awful. I think most people in this country have a distaste for politicians because most politicians are scared of actually making the right choice. The right thing to do would be to pass universal background checks; the right thing to do would be to lift the ban on CDC research; the right thing to do would require some form of tracking the guns that are being trafficked in this country. I think it’s really important that we’re all artists, we’re all communicators, because we’re able to communicate this hurt with the nation. We just really know how to be serious and focused and also entertaining.”
Matt had graduated two years earlier but flew back from film school in California immediately when it happened, to be with Ryan, and his freshman sister, Samantha, and all his theater friends. He ended
up at Cameron’s house very quickly. Just mentioning Samantha made him emotional. She was celebrating her birthday on Valentine’s Day, but mourned two friends instead.
Matt had moved back in with his family, but hardly saw Sam, because he was at the office so late, like an absentee dad. So he had signed her out of school for an alleged doctor’s appointment that morning, and taken her instead for comfort food and family time at Chick-fil-A. Their mom and aunt and grandma were all there, and David’s family, whom they met for the first time. Kevin Hogg was quiet but sweet, with a wry sense of humor—not at all what you would picture for an FBI agent, or a navy pilot, for that matter. Rebecca was a hoot. That big group—everyone had gone through it in different ways. Most of them had been miles from the school, but they were all hurting. Cutting up with them was as comforting as the crispy fried chicken. Therapists could get annoying, forcing you back to the tragedy with their probing questions, but it came up naturally with that crowd, and everybody spilled. The empty desks seemed to haunt everyone. “[Samantha] was like, ‘We don’t know what to do with those desks,’” Matt said. “‘Other periods, people probably sit there and they have no idea this desk is the one we all look at in our class.’”
And the bathrooms. So many kids were afraid to use the bathrooms. They kept triggering Samantha. “She says, ‘Now when I go to the bathroom I think if I take a little longer to wash my hands maybe I’ll survive if it happens again,’” Matt said. “Or, ‘If I take the long way from lunch instead of the short way from lunch, will that make me stay alive or will I die because of those choices?’”
Then he shrugged it off and got silly again. Matt cracks himself up constantly—along with most everyone in his vicinity—but he got particularly giggly describing how he first met Cameron. Matt was a senior in drama club when Cameron first showed up as a freshman. It was the first meeting of the Improv Club, started by Matt’s brother Ryan Deitsch, then a sophomore. “He did not know what he was going to do with the club,” Matt said. “Should we do improv games or blah blah blah? And the TV teacher was the sponsor, and he said, ‘You can run with it. You can do whatever.’ He was literally improv-ing the entire experience.”
