himself briefly, tossing out various French words like “croissant,” then flipped right back—“and I’m like, ‘Get the message through, man! Like I want to fucking talk to you, but I can’t if you take so damn long.”
More than once, David grew irritated at me lingering on a topic and snapped, “Next question!”
2
The kids were on a wild ride, and their parents were buckled in with them. At home the kids were often uncommunicative. That left the parents feeling rudderless.
Parents had been invited to an early meeting, and the kids said it took three times as long: concerns about everything, I have an issue with . . . The kids had heated discussions of their own, but they were on the same wavelength, with their own silly process that moved along at their own pace. So parents were banned.
Since the parents had been banished from the kids’ meetings, they were holding some of their own. Mostly just to compare notes, make sure the kids were all right. The parents were often thrown together on the kids’ relentless touring schedule. Rebecca got to know Jeff Kasky on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles, and she could definitely see where Cameron got his sense of humor.
David’s mom, Rebecca, described her life as “a whirlwind,” which was an improvement on the “shitstorm” she experienced in February. David’s remarkably calm father, Kevin Hogg, was a retired navy pilot. He had then served as an FBI special agent at Los Angeles International Airport until he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. He retired again with disability benefits and moved the family to Florida, where the cost of living was lower. David transferred to Douglas in the middle of freshman year, and it took two years before he felt like he fit in.
Kevin had kept his diagnosis private out of embarrassment, Rebecca said. The concept of privacy was laughable now. The TV cameras were trained directly on David, but the Internet was obsessed with his dad. “FBI special agent” was catnip for conspiracy theorists, even with a “former” in front of it. Wild stories abounded, and no secret from his past was too obscure for a meme.
Retirement simplified chaperoning duties. David was on the road constantly, and they never let him travel alone. Rebecca worried about the pressure on David—but Lauren was her big fear. At least Lauren’s pain was visible. David’s trauma was hard to read. Anger blacked out everything.
All the parents worried about what their kids had taken on. A twenty-year national crisis loaded onto the shoulders of traumatized kids? It seemed to be helping them—but it seemed like a lot. “I’m terrified,” Emma’s mother, Beth González, said. “It’s like she built herself a pair of wings out of balsa wood and duct tape and jumped off a building. And we’re just, like, running along beneath her with a net, which she doesn’t want or think that she needs.”
Rebecca worried about packages. Every week a huge new stack of letters showed up at school, and some came directly to the house. Their address was out there; that was unnerving. Most of the mail was positive, but the bad ones were threatening.
Mail delivery was Kevin’s favorite part of the day. David could be harshly contrarian and rebuffed all of Kevin’s attempts to help, but he had conceded the mail. It piled up fast, and what a nightmare to process it all. When would David have time?
That’s a common problem. Shooting survivors often describe unforeseen guilt. Public support means everything, but it quickly becomes a burden too. Even when it’s 98 percent positive, it’s the vicious 2 percent you remember. You never know which envelope will be toxic, and they go right for the jugular. Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis said he let thousands of letters build up, and he felt obligated to at least read them all. So he assigned himself a quota of twenty-five a day, but that was overwhelming. “My counselor said that was putting me in a bad place,” he said. So he boxed them up and put them away for a few years. (That story had a happy twist. He finally pulled the boxes out in 2002 while going through a divorce. One of the letters was from his high school girlfriend. They reconnected and they’re now married.)
Kevin foresaw some version of this. Plus there were checks in there, and random bits of cash like $5 bills—not to mention heartfelt wishes from people who deserved a reply, or at least a read. Kevin