had only the slightest conception of what she had just accomplished. “I had no idea that my speech was going to be broadcast nationally,” she said later. “My mom killed her battery trying to film it ’cause she didn’t think it was going to be anywhere.”
Emma had been to political rallies. She had heard great speeches and used them for inspiration. She also had done some creative writing and had ideas of her own. “I knew I would get my job done properly at that rally if I got people chanting something,” she said. “And I thought, ‘We call BS’ has four syllables, that’s good, I’ll use that. I didn’t want to say the actual curse words. This message doesn’t need to be thought of in a negative way.”
CNN carried the speech, and it instantly went viral. By nightfall, Emma was a national sensation.
5
After the rally, everyone went back to Cam’s house. They chose five kids as leaders and chief spokespeople: Cameron, Emma, David, Jackie, and Alex Wind. But there was no question the first three were the media stars. “We are the three voices of this,” Cameron told the New Yorker. “We’re strong, but together we’re unstoppable. Because David has an amazing composure, he’s incredibly politically intelligent; I have a little bit of composure; and Emma, beautifully, has no composure, because she’s not trying to hide anything from anybody.”
Emma put it more succinctly: “All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid.”
Cam’s mom, Natalie, helped them settle in and let them have their space. “The first person that I didn’t know that made an impression on me was Emma,” she said. “Her beautiful, giant eyes. They look right into you.” Most girls give you what they want you to see, she said: their makeup, their hair. “But she just gives you her eyes. She had this nymph-like lightness, like a dancer, the way they almost don’t hit the floor, they just tinker.” Emma was often fond of thrusting her arms up and out, in imaginary dance moves. “She never met me before and she just gave me this big hug, like, ‘Thank you for opening up your home,’” Natalie said.
They had their plan, and the Sunday-morning news shows seemed like the place to unveil it. So many choices: Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday. They booked them all.
Most of them slept over at Cam’s. The media dubbed the weekend the Slumber Party. Some of the kids bristled at that: the only relationship it bore to a slumber party was that hardly anybody slept. Eating was an issue—remembering to. TV news crews were filming nonstop, and started bringing them food, which reminded them to eat. “I saw this ice cream, and it looked so good,” David told me Sunday. “And then I realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast, I hadn’t eaten lunch, and it was five o’clock.”
They had a modest website running by showtime Sunday, with a GoFundMe page to accept donations. They would need to set up a foundation to manage the money, which meant attorneys, accountants, and paperwork, but all that could wait. Raising the money could not. They had a tight window—saturation media coverage of the worst tragedies lasted three to five days, and Sunday was day five.
Sunday morning, the five leaders ran the network gauntlet. Their plan was out there now, and nobody laughed at them. Even the hosts seemed to take it seriously. All they had to do now was pull it off.
4
Tallahassee
1
Monday. Jackie had a day and a half to get her buses on the highway. “The hardest part of it was honestly getting together the one hundred kids,” she said. “They have parents that are concerned—they’re letting their child go on a trip with only a dozen chaperones to the state capitol. I was on my phone the whole weekend, just making sure all of the students’ parents were comfortable sending their child seven hours away.”
Most of the kids were dressed up at the organizational meeting in Pine Trails. They had come straight from a funeral. “Two, in fact,” one girl said—for Luke Hoyer and Alaina Petty. It was a big crowd, well over a hundred, because many moms came by—to show their support or to make sure the kids felt comfortable, or both. Many said they had volunteered to chaperone, but their kid had vetoed that.
Jackie started the meeting. Her thin voice didn’t carry, so she hopped up on a chair to shout over the crowd