performing arts camp, and Cam was in heaven. He returned, enthusiastically, for seven years. “The kids were in charge of their own schedule, you didn’t have to be with your bunkmates the entire time, you got to be with like-minded people. That was so important to him.”
They were putting on shows: ventriloquism, magic, circus. “And the most important thing that he kept saying: ‘We get to do it ourselves.’” Natalie said. “‘They trust us. They let us walk alone.’ And he was young.”
Pine Crest was formal and rigid, and his older brother, Julian, loved that, but Cameron chafed. Just before he reached the upper division, he said he wanted to transfer to public school, with the regular kids. “I panicked,” his mom said. She saw him losing out on an elite education; Cam just saw a nightmare of rules. He was not unruly, selfish, or disrespectful—just contemptuous of dumb rules that had outlived their usefulness.
Natalie got comfortable with public school when she realized they had been here before. An instant replay of the summer camp debacle. “I was wrong about school and I was wrong about camp,” Natalie said. “And then I just released it and I let him do what felt right. I just have this pattern on hearing what he has to say, having my own thoughts and breathless moments, and going with ultimately what he thinks.” He’s highly intuitive about what will work for him.
2
A month before the attack, Christine Barclay had a problem. Barclay ran a performing arts studio at the Boca Black Box theater in nearby Boca Raton, where she taught young actors and staged student and semipro performances. She was casting a slate of spring musicals: Seussical, Legally Blonde, and Spring Awakening. She had plenty of talented girls, but boys were a problem. Her flamboyantly out tech assistant, Spencer Shaw, who had transferred from Douglas a year earlier, waved off that problem.
“I can get you boys,” Spencer promised. “Don’t worry about boys.”
He posted a story on Snapchat and Cameron showed up the next day. Cameron and Barclay hit it off instantly. He returned with more boys day after day, and by the end of the week, Barclay’s small studio was packed with talented young actors. “Where are all these boys coming from?” she asked her assistant. Cameron. He gathers, he draws, he organizes; it’s what Cameron does. “I had this amazing foundation of a company,” Barclay said. “This Cameron Kasky kid comes in and fills all the holes.”
Cameron had his eye on two shows, but Spring Awakening really grabbed hold of him. It was based on a seminal nineteenth-century German expressionist play about teen sexuality and neglectful, pious parents—a toxic combination. Cameron was after the male lead of Melchior, a radical freethinker and something of a pied piper, whose naive girlfriend dies from a botched abortion. His best friend also commits suicide, and the play climaxes in a graveyard scene in which Melchior pulls out a razor in despair and argues with his friend’s ghost about slitting his throat to join them. Broadway heavyweights Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater had been so distraught by the Columbine massacre in 1999 that they adapted Frank Wedekind’s play, subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, as a rock musical. They retained the period setting and costumes, but reimagined it with much more heart, and juiced it with a rock score.
“Wedekind was writing a sort of scathing social critique about the moral imbecility of adults,” Sater said. “He was certainly empathetic to his younger characters, but not so focused on their inner worlds. I always wanted to remain faithful to Wedekind, but we found that by introducing songs to the narrative, we grew more invested in those young people—we had access to their hearts and minds and all their unspoken desires. And so we began creating heroes’ journeys for our three main characters.” So Sater added a classroom scene, in which Melchior stands up for his troubled friend Moritz. “And that made us care more deeply about Melchior, it helped us root for him.” Sater elaborated: “Melchior has an entire song, ‘Touch Me,’ in which he imagines how sexual pleasure must feel for ‘the woman.’ So, it only made sense, from the perspective of who he’d become, that what had been a scene of rape in the original play evolved into a love scene,” with the character Wendla embracing her own urges. “Again, we didn’t want Wendla to be just a victim,” Sater said. He wanted her to have a journey