with it, and I do.”
Cameron had no idea what an impact Emma González would have.
“For me, it started with Emma,” David wrote in his memoir. “She was friends with this kid from the drama department named Cameron Kasky.” David knew him just slightly, from a single class in common, though he had noticed Cameron’s “sly, kind of edgy sense of humor.”
“Emma was the link that brought us together,” David wrote. She coaxed him to Cameron’s house on Friday, and his first impression was, “Wow, these guys are extroverted.” A house run amok with right brains. So many talented creatives, but who did they know with a knack for getting stuff done? They needed an implementer. They needed a Jackie Corin. Cameron called her.
“It was so late,” Jackie said. It was nine thirty. “My bedtime is usually so early, I go to bed at like eight o’clock.” But she couldn’t sleep, so she came right over. Cameron laid out his plan. “Then I told him I was taking kids to Tallahassee,” Jackie said. “He was like, ‘You’re taking kids to Tallahassee?’” She thought that’s why he had brought her in. He was incredulous. “He was like, ‘I just thought you’d be perfect for this,’” she said. “The things we were working on just collided perfectly.”
2
A march on Washington: What would that entail? What would it cost? Most of the core team was assembled now: Cameron, Jackie, David, and Emma, plus Alex Wind, Delaney Tarr, Ryan Deitsch, Alfonso Calderon, and several more. They brainstormed, and researched. The Women’s March on Washington the previous January provided an upper-end template. It had drawn nearly half a million people to the capital, but the real story had been the sister marches. A detailed academic analysis of 653 reported sister marches around the nation estimated a grand total of 3.3 to 5.2 million participants, with a “best guess” of 4.2 million. That translates to 1.3 percent of the population and would make it the largest single-day demonstration in recorded US history. So that was the top end. The Women’s March had set a fund-raising goal of $2 million, with big-ticket line items for bus parking, outside security, and a massive supply of Porta Potties. They didn’t quite make it. Eleven days out, they were at only $849,000, but a huge rush of money poured in in the final week. On march day, they stood at $1.8 million, ten percent short, but the march was an unqualified success.
Two million seemed ambitious. One? A million dollars seemed audacious for a tiny group of high school students. But attempting this on the cheap and putting on a massive fiasco would reinforce the stereotype the Right was throwing at them: that these were children, in way over their heads.
A million it was. They would announce it on the morning shows, and try not to flinch.
How soon? Five weeks seemed like the sweet spot: potentially doable, but such a mobilization that the organizing would create its own story, and provide a month-plus metanarrative to sustain the interest they had already established. They would convert the narrative of angry kids to one of proactive kids, taking control of their destiny. And if it did get huge, it could jump-start . . . whatever they came up with next. They would start working on that highway once they built the on-ramp.
Still, five weeks. It felt borderline reckless, but it had to be. They set the date, March 24, and a name that captured what they were feeling: the March for Our Lives.
3
Saturday came early. Still more kids, but most of the team was assembled now: nearly two dozen MSD students, and five recent graduates, who had been close to them in drama club. They were good friends from high school—a little older, a little wiser, and had some distance from the horror, which could be a good thing. Two of them were film students, and another one was in communications; they were going to need those skills. And Pippy—legally Kaylyn Pipitone, but nobody called her that—was a born mom, and man, could they use one of those right now. They all had moms, but moms didn’t always understand. Amazing to have a make-believe mom, who was one of them. “I was the mom when I was in drama club too,” Pippy said. “I just took everyone under my wing.” Eventually the group would be open about the recent grads, but in the early days, they had them keep a low profile. They were