crashed the site. And MFOL announced twelve more cities on its Vote for Our Lives tour, a final sprint for the last three weeks to Election Day. “I was so exhausted,” Jackie said. “The last two weeks, I was starting to burn out. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to stick it out. It’s like when you’re really tired, you stay up for two more hours, it’s like, ‘Stay up! You have to do this.’”
Her grades were taking a hit. The same was true for all the kids who were back in school. Teachers had been very forgiving in the spring semester, but that was over. Even after she scaled back to one AP class, an academic breeze for Jackie, her grades were ugly. Choices had to be made.
Emma was coping with college—a big adjustment for everyone, but strange to enter as an icon. “A lot of people here feel like it’s weird that they know about me without me having gotten to know about them,” she said. Shortly before Election Day she reported classes going well, but she was struggling still with the social transition. “You can’t bond at the base soul level when you first meet somebody at school like I did with these [MFOL] people,” Emma said. “I’m working on it. Nobody else is ready to share traumatic experiences with each other.”
It helped to bring someone with her who understood. She had made it through the terror holding hands with two friends, and one of them, Lenore, was her roommate at New College of Florida. That helped. “She and I are the only two people who know what each other was going through,” Emma said. “We already have little movies set up, communicating with pictures instead of words, because sometimes it’s hard to always figure out what words we’re feeling.”
2
As Election Day beckoned, hopes ran sky high. Election day—the concept was anachronistic in much of the country, where more people voted in the lead-up weeks than on the day. And early voting was through the roof. All the demographics MFOL was counting on seemed to be coming out.
Dreams were taking shape. When MFOL marched on Washington, pundits were batting about a “blue wave” scenario, and a big enough wave might actually turn over the House. That seemed like a best-case scenario all spring. Because of gerrymandering, and Democrats being concentrated in cities, it seemed highly unlikely that they could win much more than the twenty-three seats needed to retake the House. And because of a fluke of history, most of the thirty-five Senate seats up for election were Democratic incumbents, several in deep-red territory. They had to defend seats in Montana, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Missouri, states Trump had won by 18 to 41 points. And they had few pickup opportunities, mostly in the Deep South. Tennessee? Arizona? Texas? All seemed like fantasies. The conventional wisdom through the spring and into the summer was that the best the Dems could hope for in the Senate was to give up a few seats. They would have to wait until 2020, when the Senate map reversed, and they could make a potential killing.
But late polls showed some of the long-shot races coming into reach. And with all that early voting, all bets were off. Beto O’Rourke was the breakout star of the year, an unabashed progressive, winning over huge swaths of Texas. A week out, polls showed him within three points of the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz. A Democratic senator from Texas? Two blue houses of Congress? The fantasy might actually materialize.
3
Election night brought reality crashing down. Much of the MFOL crew and their allies, along with parents of the victims, gathered at Hurricane Grill & Wings to celebrate the returns. David was there, and Emma, Jackie, Daniel, and the Deitsch brothers. As polls closed from east to west across the country, the mood turned sour. Twitter felt like a Democratic wake. The House was going blue, but the Dems picked up only two dozen seats. The Senate was going the other way: probably five seats lost. No Texas miracle. The Dems were picking up a lot of governorships, that was nice, but no historic black woman to lead Georgia. And there was a painful personal blow: they were losing both big races in Florida. They were about to have gun safety foes in their governor’s mansion and for both of their senators.
But none of that was the worst of it. Their generation might have let them