three hundred seats a night. They could do it, but everything had to go just right.
3
The baby missed her due date. “When Valentine’s Day happened,” Barclay said, “I immediately texted Cam, because Cam was like the ringleader of my MSD crew.” How was he? Where was he?
Cam reported that most of this crew was locked up in the drama room. Barclay’s musical director, Ed Kolcz, was with them, because his day job is musical coach at Douglas High. Barclay was driving in to her studio for Seussical and Legally Blonde rehearsals, also packed with Douglas kids. “Every time my phone was dinging, it was Cameron confirming that another kid was alive in our cast,” she said. “So it was just like: ‘Heard from Kirstin, she’s OK.’ ‘Heard from Ethan, he’s OK.’ Finally, we got up to the full cast, and I was like, ‘OK, I didn’t lose any of my kids.’ And then it all started to lift off.”
Barclay was already a mentor to Cameron, but with his mom struggling to find a way home from the Caribbean, he leaned on her especially hard. “He started to get all these interviews. He started to call me before them. ‘OMG Christine, What do I do?’ He was like, ‘What do I say to Anderson Cooper? His eyes, I’m going to be distracted by his eyes!’—like making Cameron jokes about it.
“My advice to him—which, I’m not the loudest voice chirping in his ear—was to not be a pot stirrer, not preach to his own choir,” she said. “The problem in our country right now is people are only really willing or able to talk to people who already agree with them.” She said, “Cameron, you’re a child. Because you’re a kid, maybe through the eyes of a child, preaching to both sides, maybe people will listen.”
Saturday, around the time Emma was calling BS, and Cameron’s mother was getting back from the Caribbean, Barclay went into labor. When Caroline was born Monday, the kids had already done their press gauntlet announcing the Washington march, and were gearing up for Tallahassee the next day.
Cameron disregarded Barclay’s advice Wednesday night. CNN had invited the Parkland kids and the NRA to its town hall, so anticipation and ratings ran sky high. The NRA was smart enough not to send its CEO, Wayne LaPierre, who was predictably bombastic. He would have come off as the crazy old white guy with no compassion for these kids. It deployed its wily secret weapon, Dana Loesch. She was just as ruthless, but exceptionally nimble. Loesch ultimately never gave an inch, but appeared to in the moment—so calm and understanding. She listened to her adversaries, acknowledged their position and their pain, while gently laying the groundwork for the case that they were perhaps misguided, and she really had their best interest at heart. And she commanded any stage with fierce resolve and striking beauty: straight black hair, a Kennedy jaw, and brown eyes that smote her opponents even as she smiled. Cameron had not come for her. He had come for Marco Rubio.
The NRA was an easy target—but also slightly off target. The NRA was their sparring partner; they would never defeat it, and why should they? It had a right to exist. The problem was politicians in its thrall, and the goal was to break that connection, remove the NRA boot from their necks. If every politician in America began voting their conscience, this would be solved tomorrow, Cam’s team believed.
The target was Marco Rubio: Cam’s Exhibit A in the NRA-Congress connection, his representative on the NRA dole. The NRA had donated only $4,950 to Rubio directly, but donations were not its primary MO. It liked to create its own ads, buy the airtime, and control the message. The NRA had spent $3.3 million on Rubio’s behalf over the course of his political career, making him the sixth-largest NRA beneficiary in the US Senate. If Cam could shame Rubio, or scare him politically, into severing that bond—who knows what dominoes might fall.
Also, Cameron was still seething. His classmates were murdered, his senator seemed complicit, and Cam wanted to take him down. Humiliate him, if possible.
The moderator, Jake Tapper, introduced Cameron, and he laid right in. “Senator Rubio, it’s hard to look at you and not look down a barrel of an AR-15 and not look at [the killer], but the point is you’re here and there are some people who are not.” He asked his friend, Douglas senior Chris Grady,