point or two in every category. (Parkland was 13 percent Latino and 6.5 percent black.) But Douglas families were still far more affluent than most Americans, with 22 percent of the school’s students eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program, versus 52 percent in the United States as a whole. Successful families were drawn to Parkland for the nature, fishing, and outdoor recreation, and above all, the schools. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Douglas in the top 7 percent of high schools in Florida and the top 12 percent in the United States.
It was 1990 when Parkland had drawn enough residents for Broward County to erect a high school on the former swampland. The residents named it after the champion of the Everglades, whom they now held dear. Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to 108, and had turned 100 that year. It’s a suburban legend that Stoneman Douglas rejected the honor or even demanded that construction be stopped. But her biographer was never able to confirm how she felt about it, and said she “had always thought it was a bit of an insult.”
Stoneman Douglas lost the Parkland battle, but the “developers’” encroachment ended there. The high school named in her honor, or dishonor, stands as a marker to what transpired, and an outpost against the perpetual threat. When a gunman struck, the Parkland kids saw poetic justice in the long arc of history, recasting their school so eloquently in the image of its namesake. They had also lost a horrible battle at Parkland, with a human loss this time, but like Stoneman Douglas, they were resolved to mark Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as the final outpost in a generational war.
The kids worked feverishly Saturday morning, while Cameron’s mom raced in from the airport. Finally, she could wrap her arms around her boys, the hugs of a lifetime, and . . .
“When I got home someone put a camera in my face,” she said. “I just wanted a moment alone with my kid. Just to celebrate. There was like a room full of students and there was Cam. It kind of took away the intimacy.”
Quick hugs, then they were on the move. They had to drive to Fort Lauderdale, for a rally there at one o’clock. It had a clunky title: “Rally to Support Firearm Safety Legislation.” They could do better. It was the first political rally most of them had attended, so how crazy that many of them were going to speak. It was organized by multiple groups, mostly moms: Moms Demand Action, Women’s March Florida, the MSD PTA, etc. It wasn’t a huge crowd, several hundred people, but the news vans would supply millions.
Cameron, David, and Delaney all gave speeches, and all were enthusiastically received. But that rally will always be remembered as the moment Emma González called BS.
4
Emma had been thinking about gun safety legislation Wednesday afternoon, before the shooting. She had been thinking about the NRA. She was taking AP US government, and the lesson that day had been the role of special interest groups. They discussed how lobbyists use money to influence politicians toward their agendas—good agendas, like Sierra Club, Emma thought, and gross ones, like the NRA. She hated the NRA. An hour later, she was in lockdown in the auditorium. That night, she discovered that several kids she knew were dead.
Thursday, she went to the vigil. That was painful. “I just wanted to see everybody,” she said. “It was a day full of tears, but really good tears in a way.” Her friend David Hogg was burning up the airwaves all day, and Anderson Cooper’s producers had booked him for the show Thursday night. They asked him to recommend other articulate students, so David texted Emma, and she said yes. Adulatory texts started streaming in soon afterward. “Wow, people are listening to me,” she thought.
The organizers of the Fort Lauderdale rally noticed the texts, and asked her to speak. “I started writing it at eight o’clock last night and I didn’t stop writing until I got out of the car this morning,” she said later that afternoon. And then she gushed about other big things in her life. “I just got my license, I just got into college.” She was thinking a lot about college. A small liberal arts school, New College of Florida, had offered her admission and reached out immediately after the shooting to see if she was OK. That impressed her. “I’m like two seconds away from