The bus tour was a time of reckoning. Exhausting, monotonous, and mind-numbingly repetitive. It mirrored the strains that tear apart so many touring bands: same faces, in the same small space, repeating the same greatest hits every night. They had been honing their best lines and best anecdotes for six months. So sick of their own words. The cities, the stages, and the faces staring back changed, but blurred together too quickly to make an impression.
But for some, it was also invigorating. Like troubadours, they were drawn to it. “You just picked up a hitcher / A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway,” Joni Mitchell once sang.
The timing was also consequential: six months into this new relationship with their new selves. If the first four seemed breakneck, it was nothing compared with this. And as they gazed ahead to the last stops, a new version of their old lives awaited them. The younger contingent would arrive back in Parkland on Monday, have a single day off; then on Wednesday morning, they’d start their senior, junior, or sophomore years. And for others like Emma, it was a bigger change. First day of college, first day of adulthood—which they had been thrust into prematurely on Valentine’s Day.
And so, as the tour wound down, everyone was reevaluating. Some would be moving on with their lives. Others would be collecting themselves for even bigger roles.
2
Jackie landed in the reinvigorated camp. On February 13, the day before her world changed, her plan had been to graduate in the top 1 percent of her class and then pursue a nursing career. “I was on the road to getting straight A’s this year, and I was going to, but I was on a trip for the Time One Hundred gala, and I couldn’t take my math final,” she said. For the first time, Jackie had to choose between academics and activism.
Even after she skipped the final, her precalc scores were high enough to give her a B plus, her second ever. “I was top one percent of my class, but now I’ll be like top fifteen percent. That’s fine,” she said. “It messed up everyone. Everyone in the group is smart, and all of our GPAs dropped, because we just didn’t have time.”
Her fall schedule was dramatically different too. They turned in course cards the week before Valentine’s Day, and Jackie had four AP classes scheduled for senior year. She ultimately pared it back to just one. “Honestly, the end of this year was so hard for me—not only because of the emotions, but also because I always had work to do,” she said. “And I didn’t feel the need or want to force interest in precalculus. I’ll look at the board in my English classroom and be like, ‘This isn’t helping me.’” She kept one AP course, government, “because it’s probably what’s going to intrigue me,” she said.
A week after Tallahassee, she was starting to consider a career in politics—a prospect she found startling but also electrifying. Then she spent months mucking around with politicians. She was not impressed. “I don’t really know what I want to do, but I feel like I don’t want to be a politician when I’m older,” she had concluded by June. “Politics is always going to be dirty. And I don’t want to be around that environment.”
She envisioned a nonprofit role helping improve kids’ lives. She planned to keep up the gun fight for a while, but not forever. “I feel like I work well with kids,” she said. “I quit my camp-counselor job this summer to do Road to Change, but it breaks my heart because I’m not with my girls.”
One thing is certain: uncertainty. “Before all this, I was always the person who had my future set and planned. And now there’s nothing about my life that’s set and planned. So it’s a very different way of living, but the discomfort is kind of . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know the word for it. I’ve been getting adjusted to the discomfort, actually—that’s a better way to put it. Because before I was always comfortable, and this discomfort is new, yet welcome.”
David had gone in the opposite direction. He had a seven-year plan laid out, culminating in 2025, when he turns twenty-five, and will be eligible to serve in the House of Representatives. Yes, politics would be dirty—so who better to wield the spade? David was leaning into his gap