was an out-of-school musical, with a suicide onstage, a gun blast, and that graveyard scene mourning his two dead friends, with his character leaning toward killing himself.
About a week after Tallahassee, and a lot of texts with Clooney, Barclay called him to talk. Her staff was keeping an eye on him, sending her daily reports, and it was getting worse. He had an awful time at rehearsal that day.
“I was trying to relieve him of the part,” Barclay explained. “I said, ‘Cameron, is this just going to be added shit for you? Not even just lines learning and being in rehearsal, but emotionally?’ At first, he took offense, like I was kicking him out. I was like, ‘I’m not trying to take this from you. I’m merely asking you if this is something you are able to do.’ He wouldn’t give it up.”
Barclay agreed, but he couldn’t phone it in. “You’re going to figure out how to work this all into your schedule, because I have an obligation to the theater and to the rest of the cast. He said, ‘Just let me get through the March for Our Lives. I probably won’t be too present in March, try to do all the other scenes around me, and if you can do that then I’ll be there, I’ll do it.”
She said OK, but he had to give up Legally Blonde, “Because I just said, ‘Dude there’s no way.’”
4
When Barclay returned early from maternity leave, the kids were just back to school and in rough shape. She gathered the cast, crew, and staff in the theater for a long talk. “Now these kids that I’m looking at are a completely different group of kids than they were the last time I’d seen them,” she said. They talked for two and a half hours. “I said, ‘OK, are we going to do this? What do you guys want to do? And they all said they wanted to do the show. Every single one of them. They all felt like they had to. ‘We can’t let that person take one more thing from us. They’ve already taken so much.’”
That is a pervasive feeling with school shootings. At Columbine, the one major issue that pitted students against families of the victims was the library, where most of the killing took place. The parents were adamant it be torn down—no one should ever set foot in there again. The students were overwhelmed with a sense of loss—their friends, their name, their identity—and did not want to surrender one more inch, literal or symbolic. Any fragment of their life they could salvage felt like a victory.
Barclay said she would prioritize security: police cruisers stationed during rehearsals, and metal detectors for the shows. OK, she said finally: What do you want to do now?
“Totally Fucked.” They wanted to do “Totally Fucked.”
Barclay said OK. “We turned on the music and we all stood onstage and we all just scream-sang through ‘Totally Fucked.’ Some of them were stoic and some of them were ripping it out, but we did it.”
With that out of their system, they wrapped around each other and sang “I Believe,” the tender song, sung over the love scene that will do the teens in. It was a different kind of love that day. Sawyer and Cameron laid down center stage hugging; Cam fed her Dunkin’ Donuts while the cast swayed around them, arm in arm, singing:
I believe
There is love in heaven
I believe
All will be forgiven . . .
I believe
I believe
I believe
“And I cried, and they cried, and it was like watching soldiers go to battle,” Barclay said. “It was like the walking wounded, and they just weren’t going to let someone take it away from them. The kids who had been through it, the kids who hadn’t been through it—they were like, ‘We’re going to be anchors for you. We’re going to hold the fort while you’re traveling all over the world. We’re going to understudy for you . . .’ And they did.”
6
Back to “Normal”
1
On Valentine’s Day, Daniel Duff’s parents and brothers feared the worst. They kept texting him like crazy—no response, but the messages showed delivered. “I was like, ‘Fuck, his phone is on!’” his brother Brendan said. “I was figuring a lot of people turn off their phones, and that happened with a bunch of my friends, so that means something.”
Brendan had graduated two years earlier, so he knew where all the classrooms were located. He didn’t know Daniel’s schedule, but he