by Dave Cullen
But maybe I was wrong.
2
Everyone saw a change in David Hogg. Twitter David would escalate, but in real life, the more vicious the attack, the more likely he flipped to anti-David, calmest person in the room. “He’s the one who brought the love and compassion to even some of the most fringe groups,” Ryan Deitsch said. “David would say, ‘Hey, do you want other people to live?’ ‘Yeah.’ And he says, ‘Well, let’s talk.’ And then within fifteen, ten minutes, they’re hugging it out. The white supremacists, the neo-Nazis—we disagree on a great variety of things, but some of them have been willing to support some of the things we’ve been working with.”
David had spent a lot of time around Emma, and some of the kids thought she was centering him. “That’s true,” Pippy said. “He’s very much like a kid when Emma’s around.”
Twitter David’s mellowing was more gradual. By May, several of the kids said they had discovered he got less bombastic if they let him vent a little.
“He’s calmer a lot more recently, but when something ticks him off, like on Twitter, you can’t get him out of it, it’s done,” Pippy said. She said he would obsess and intensify until one of them told him just tweet it already. “And he’s like, ‘OK it’s done.’ It doesn’t last long.”
Cameron and David had grown accustomed to the media glare, but it was striking how they dealt with it so differently. Cameron needed his audience to love him. His yearning for validation seemed boundless and dramatic. David didn’t give a shit. In fact, he kind of enjoyed being attacked. Sure, it pissed him off, but he relished the counterpunch. Few things made him happier than eviscerating an Internet troll.
I bounced that analysis of the two of them off David. He chuckled and agreed. “Yeah, I would say he kind of needs people’s validation. Just being an actor and all.” He smirked. “Not a crisis actor. I like using acting and theater as a symbolism for politics, because it’s spectacle.” He admitted that you need people to like you to be effective, though. “That’s what politicians need, too. It’s just politicians acting in the real world, and never taking down their facade. For me, I don’t have that facade.” He said his brutal candor was “the best and worst part about me. People know how I feel, and if you’re an asshole, I’m going to say it.”
He smiled when he said that. He was smiling a lot now. His parents marveled at the return to serenity—bouts of it, at least. “I just think over time it kind of settled out,” he said. “The anger in this marathon, it’s like a drug. It’s good at getting things done quickly, but not in the longer term. Love and compassion and patience is the stamina you need to make long, substantial change. This is a slow burn. We started out as one spark in a field of tinder, and now we’ve really, really started to burn into the hundred-year-old oaks. That’s what we have to do. If we have to burn down the entire forest to grow a new one, without the sprouting of corruption, through voting, we’ll do it.”
Calmer, but still David. In the middle of his reflection on love and tranquility, the metaphor grabbed hold of him and burned the forest down.
He kept catching himself swearing that visit. He was trying to kick that, at least in interviews. But he still said “fuck” twenty-eight times in two hours. They were softer curses, though, without the vitriol.
The NRA was still most likely to draw a “fuck” out of David. Their five-million-members claim annoyed him. “I highly doubt that. They say they speak for the majority of gun owners. Only one in ten gun owners is actually a member. They’re a loud minority.”
MFOL was speaking for the majority, he said—though he wished his cohort would speak up on Election Days. “Whenever I talk to groups and they ask me why young people vote so little, I look at them blankly and I say it’s because they don’t give a fuck.” David said. “It’s not that hard to get out and vote.”
But he echoed Harvard’s Della Volpe on how to change that. “People need to see impact,” David said. “For somebody to cross the bridge of fear, they need to see materialization.” The real test wasn’t electing the legislators or passing the legislation, or quibbling about what constitutes “meaningful” change. Those were all means, and only the end mattered: driving down the rate of gun deaths. That was a long way off, and until they reached that threshold, it would be “like trying to prove that bigfoot doesn’t exist.”
3
Prom was the same weekend as Spring Awakening. Best chance all spring to put guns aside for one night. “Prom is really important to keep morale high,” Dylan said. “That’s a night of happiness and fun. You can’t lose sight of those things. Somebody brought up this idea of having something about the shooting at prom, and we were like, ‘That’s the worst idea you’ve ever come up with!’ Prom should be a night where they can be normal. Nobody should feel guilty about being happy. It’s something we all deserve.”
But Dylan had never been sucked into a mass shooting vortex before. They were rife with competing agendas, and the most sensitive was honoring the dead. Columbine remained closed for four months after its tragedy, until the first day of fall semester. Students felt so robbed of their school’s identity that they staged an elaborate Take Back the School rally, including a human shield of parents to block the press from witnessing it. The school consulted closely with grief counselors, who recommended that for that one day, the focus be entirely on the kids and moving forward, with just a brief gesture toward the deaths. Minutes after the kids cut the ribbon and joyously retook their school, parents of the fallen staged an impromptu press conference to berate the school for failing to properly acknowledge their loss.
Douglas High was not going to repeat that mistake. The dead were honored several ways at the prom. There was a montage of photos submitted by students, and a memorial mall just outside the main ballroom honoring the four seniors killed on Valentine’s Day—Meadow Pollack, Nicholas Dworet, Joaquin Oliver, and Carmen Schentrup—plus two members of the class of 2018 who had died in 2016. They observed seventeen seconds of silence between dinner and dancing.
But mostly it was fun. The Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort was transformed into an enchanted forest, with a thicket of imitation trees, roamed by actors in elaborate costumes playing wood nymphs, forest creatures, and deer. Real butterflies fluttered down from the roof. Most of the services were donated, so kids had to pay only a fraction of the cost. Many had their hair and makeup done at a free makeover event.
Joaquin Oliver’s girlfriend, Victoria González, went with his best friend, Dillon McCooty. Only seniors and their dates can attend prom at Douglas, so several of the MFOL kids paired off so juniors could go as well. Neither David nor Emma was dating anyone, so they both went with the person they felt closest to: each other. It wasn’t a political statement or any kind of statement. But it sure as hell would be taken that way. The rumor mill would go nuts.
David’s mom, Rebecca, wanted Emma to feel special. David was supposed to get her a wrist corsage, and of course he had no idea what to choose, but Rebecca did. She wanted something unique and exotic. She found a braided silver bracelet, capped by a succulent bloom, tiny green and white bulbs, with rosy pink tips. It was stunning and different, a gorgeous flower but stronger and prickly. It was Emma.
Rebecca wanted three things from that wrist corsage, for three different people. She wanted Emma to light up when she saw it. She wanted David to swell with pride for bringing her that joy. And she wanted to savor that moment and share it with all her friends—on Facebook. She wanted her life back too. Just for one night. She had just one son, and he would never have another prom. Let her be a mom again for one night.
The price was too high, David said. He would love to make her happy, but did she understand what they were up against? This whole movement seemed to be turning into a cult of personalities. The stories were not about the group anymore, or the movement; they had turned into profile pieces now, nearly always about him and Emma. He spent every day fighting that, trying to train the media onto the message, an
d the two of them dating? The Internet would go nuts. So would a lot of mainstream press. They weren’t dating, but that would hardly matter. It would set them back months.
They had a wonderful time at the prom. Social media was awash in photos. Alfonso posted pictures with Delaney. Emma and David appeared in lots of group photos, but none made it out with them as a couple.
Months later, New York magazine ran a profile of David, and he let them mention the prom pairing in passing. It was old news by then, and The Internet likes its rumors fresh. It didn’t cause a ripple.
4
I met Lauren Hogg once or twice a month throughout much of the year, and over that time, her recovery played out visibly on her face. A month out she looked ashen, with a borderline blank affect. At the first school walkout, she held up a hand-painted sign with David at the rally, and spoke enthusiastically about the surprise breakout from school, but she still looked stricken. Defiant, but stricken. Six weeks later, on David’s prom night, she was a completely different person. She looked joyful, like an ordinary teen.
“I guess I’ve kind of gotten better, but I don’t really know how you get better from stuff like this,” she said. “For me, it really just goes in waves.” She had come on board as a full-fledged MFOL member, and that was making a huge difference. “Activism and hanging out with my March for Our Lives friends and my friends from school has really helped. Definitely therapeutic for me.”
Actual therapy was helping too. “My mom makes me go to therapy every week—like if not once, twice,” she said.
Many in the group described a sort of group self-therapy they were conducting during their meetings, which they still held at least once a week. Dylan described a typical recent session: “We all went around to every single person and we talked about how we were doing emotionally and mentally, so it’s all out there in the open. We help each other with it, because we trust each other more than we trust any therapist or shrink. There’s that stubbornness that kids have, that ‘I don’t want to talk to an adult—I’d rather talk to my friends.’ So we are each other’s best help.”
“We would call that a process group,” Dr. Ley said. “Processing the trauma together, with people who’ve been through a similar experience, and who are really a close-knit group, can be helpful, can be lifesaving.” The kids had incredible instincts to create what they needed and ensure everyone participated, she said. But there are limits. “If they reach the level of having psychiatric symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder, or depression, anxiety, I don’t think that process group is going to rise to the level of what they need.”
Many of the kids expressed mixed feelings about professional therapy. Lauren figured it was probably good for her, but she hated talking about the horror, bringing it back over and over. They were great at the beginning, she said—being available in the moment, when the wave struck, instead of dredging it up on a schedule. “When we first went back to school there were therapists literally everywhere. There were therapists in the media center.” Now, if she needed one, if a friend was having a crisis . . . “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you where to go.”
That had been a big problem when The Eagle Eye produced a special glossy edition on the seventeen victims in April. There was a two-page spread on each of them, with lots of photos and magazine-quality production values. It’s a gut punch for even a stranger to read. It was distributed in fourth period, to coincide with the shooting, and Lauren was OK at first, but began to break down as the portraits drew her in. Some girls in the class responded with gallows humor. Lauren mustered all her politeness to say that she was having a really hard time and asked them to stop. “This one girl turned around—I don’t know how she could do this, she was there that day,” Lauren said. “She was like, ‘No.’ They started laughing. And I kind of lost it. I broke down, I started crying—I don’t usually cry at school. But I started crying so hard and these kids were laughing.” She said other kids told them to stop, but she had to get out of there. “I literally got up, I grabbed tissues and I went and stood in the hallway by myself. Because I didn’t know where to go.”
She told the story on prom day, and found the magazine nearby in the living room to show me. She flipped through it again and it brought her right back—to the episode receiving it, and to Valentine’s Day. It was a trigger, but it was also beautiful, and she kept it nearby. “I feel like I’m having an identity crisis,” she said. “I went into that building and I came out a different person. I don’t know who I am anymore. Sometimes I feel like I’m an adult trapped in a fourteen-year-old’s body.”
The MFOL kids were the only ones who understood, Lauren said. “We go from joking around and laughing and being like five-year-olds to being like a thirty-year-old. I feel like I have this capability to talk to adults and politicians in a mature way, but then I kind of sit there and I’m like, ‘Wait, I’m fourteen! Like what am I doing here?’”
David thought Lauren was doing better. Probably. “I think so,” he said. “It’s hard to tell.” It was frustrating. He didn’t know how to help her. So many people he couldn’t help. “I’ll be with friends and sometimes they’ll just break down,” he said. “It’s really fucking shitty to be there for them and not be able to do anything. You can’t bring somebody back from the dead.”
Their mom, Rebecca, gasped at the idea that Lauren was appreciably better. “I think she’s having a really hard time,” she said. “She’s having nightmares about her friends bleeding. Last week she climbed into our bed. Last night she fell asleep at three in the morning, but when she got home from school yesterday, we didn’t see her for four hours because she was sleeping. So her whole sleep schedule’s off. We’ve gone to the pediatrician and I was hoping for something more powerful but they recommended lemon balm. ‘Fuck’ is what I have to say. I was thinking Xanax and sleeping pills. But they’re going the natural route.”
5
Mother’s Day had been looming. Seventeen parents had lost their son or daughter. Some of the victims were adults, but they were all someone’s child. The pain was compounded by the three-month anniversary, landing just a day afterward.
Tío Manny and Patricia were bracing for it. They had a plan. “Mother’s Day is going to be an intimate moment at home,” Manny said. “We can get away by putting some food together, and not have anybody at home. Because the whole approach of people giving condolences at this point, it’s not helping, it’s only making things worse.”
It was horrible, but they got through it. The occasion that really scared them was graduation. “We don’t control what they’re planning to do,” Tío Manny said. “I assume they’re going to have emotional moments, because they always do that. They want to be good. It’s not that they do this to hurt us, but at the end of the day it does hurt us. I would rather have a graduation day where you go there and then be home in a minute.” He considered for a moment, and began to waver. “I need to be there. So I don’t know.”
6
Graduation, for so many school-shooting survivors, is the most conflicted day of their recovery. From that first day of life after “it,” graduation rises dimly on some distant horizon, painfully far and unattainable. Few kids think about it in the early days, as they console each other to “just get through it,” whatever that means. But as graduation approaches, more than any other milestone, the emotional finish line hardens into The Day: graduation from the first horrible phase. So June 3 brought a huge rush of accomplishment, a weight lifted, and for many a big FU moment to the perp. We got this!
But the pain. Meadow Pollack, Nicholas Dworet, Joaquin Oliver, and Carmen Schentrup were missing from their graduating class. That was news to no one, yet the act of eight hundred peers donning caps and gowns to celebrate, moving on to college, to life, to adulthood, without them felt almost cruel.
Graduation day was as bad as Tío Manny envisioned, but he would unleash his rage on a mural in Chicago twelve days later. At the graduation ceremony, he contained it. Tío
Manny attended with his wife and daughter. When Joaquin’s name was called out, his parents came forward, and Patricia accepted his diploma. She wore a lemon yellow T-shirt emblazoned top to bottom:
THIS
SHOULD BE
MY
SON
The crowd roared, Patricia smiled, blew a kiss, and raised her open arms. Manny raised his fist.
“Some people thought that we weren’t going to show at graduation, because it was too sad,” Tío Manny said. “Yes, it is sad, but that’s not as important as sending a message. You need to take these opportunities and just change it. Flip them.”
19
Road to Change
1
Now what? The march was over, summer demanded something big. They could never top DC for national exposure, but they were focused on local networks now—expanding and energizing all the fledgling groups. It was all about direct contact: where they were needed was on the road. They had been traveling in twos and threes—what if they multiplied that? Create some sort of event status, sustained over a season. They kept brainstorming, and a two-month bus tour took shape. The entire summer vacation, essentially, from a week after graduation through the last free weekend before returning to school. They hashtagged it #RoadToChange.
So where to go? There were lots of competing ideas: swing districts, swing states, sites of previous tragedies, centers of urban violence, big population centers, cities with vibrant groups, groups crying out for help.
So they researched it heavily, and mapped out a route to hit all of them. But they all agreed that one element was critical: they had to return to gun country. Their focus was the midterms, but this was only year one; they had to look beyond November as well. They routed most of the summer’s bus tour through deep red states: Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina. “Most of the tour stops are the places where it’s most likely people disagree with us,” Jackie said. The Farm Belt, the Mountain West, and the Deep South. “We want them to show up and listen to what we have to say. They’ll bring back that conversation to other people that disagree.”
