Natalie said all this three months later, in a leisurely interview in her living room, and it seemed like she had mostly forgiven herself. That day was so fuzzy. She wasn’t even sure where she had been. Somewhere in the Caribbean. When the call came, her surroundings evaporated. “It was like a book slammed shut. When he said ‘active shooter’ and ‘I’m hiding in a closet with Holden,’ everything else was surreal.”
They would not be home until Saturday. Natalie was desperate to hug her boys. She was trapped on a boat. They searched for a faster way back, but couldn’t find a way. “There was so much guilt,” she said. “Should I be put on a helicopter? Can I afford a helicopter? What do I do? I knew he was safe. I knew he had his dad. But as a mother, it was like torture.”
She had been going to therapy since the shooting—made sure the whole family went. “You need it now. If you don’t do it, you’ll just need it ten times more in the future. We made that a priority.”
Cam got home with his dad, got right to a computer, and began posting on Facebook. He summarized the carnage, anxiety, and false rumors in one long, horrifying paragraph. And then he got political: “There are two less obvious awful things here. First of all, [Marco] Rubio and [Rick] Scott are about to send their thoughts and prayers. Those guys are garbage and if you voted for them, go to hell.”
He added several more thoughts, and concluded: “Please don’t pray for me. Your prayers do nothing. Show me you care in the polls.”
His next post lamented not thanking his teachers enough. He offered eternal thanks for all they did, and then singled one out by name: “Driscoll, if you’re reading this . . . thanks. Everything my little brother and I ever do in the future is pretty much completely because of you. We almost slipped through the cracks. We almost kept walking. We almost went right into the danger.”
He created a Twitter account. He tried to sleep. He got up. “Can’t sleep,” he posted, again on Facebook. “Thinking about so many things. So angry that I’m not scared or nervous anymore. I’m just angry. And a little confused. Trying to get the word out and talk to people. I don’t even know what I want to say necessarily. I just want people to understand what happened and understand that doing nothing will lead to nothing. Who’d have thought that concept was so difficult to grasp.”
And then he did something so simple, but so vital . . . the single most significant moment of the movement. He asked for help. He gave out two more social media handles—Instagram and his new Twitter account—and asked people to message him. “I want people talking about this. I can’t let this die like all the others. I need this to be the end. Everybody needs this to be the end. Talk to me.”
Then he got some sleep. And messages poured in.
5
Jaime Guttenberg, Jackie Corin’s fourteen-year-old ballerina friend, was not “missing.” She was dead. She was one of the seventeen memorialized Thursday evening at a huge candlelight vigil. Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz attended and met up with Jackie afterward. A family friend had forwarded the Facebook message, and Wasserman Schultz wanted to help. By now Jackie had ideas germinating, and her instincts were to make something happen immediately, which meant Tallahassee, not Washington. Passing something in the Florida legislature was merely implausible, not impossible. So Wasserman Schultz connected Jackie to Lauren Book, the state senator representing Parkland.
Book was instantly on board. She encouraged Jackie to think big. They started brainstorming Friday, and began to hash out a plan. They had to act fast, because Florida was about to enter week six of a nine-week annual legislative session. “We have about ten days to craft really important legislation,” State Representative Kristin Jacobs explained a few days later. “Because it’s a whole year before the legislature comes back together, and the momentum will be completely lost.” The ticking-clock scenario could be a blessing or a curse. But the stall tactic—a cynical maneuver that had shut down every previous movement after every previous tragedy—was off the table.
Jacobs was a Democrat and represented Parkland in the Florida House. While Jackie organized the event with Book, Jacobs was quietly working behind the scenes with Book and the Republican leadership to craft a bill. If they