The bus tour was a time of reckoning. Exhausting, monotonous, and mind-numbingly repetitive. It mirrored the strains that tear apart so many touring bands: same faces, in the same small space, repeating the same greatest hits every night. They had been honing their best lines and best anecdotes for six months. So sick of their own words. The cities, the stages, and the faces staring back changed, but blurred together too quickly to make an impression.
But for some, it was also invigorating. Like troubadours, they were drawn to it. “You just picked up a hitcher / A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway,” Joni Mitchell once sang.
The timing was also consequential: six months into this new relationship with their new selves. If the first four seemed breakneck, it was nothing compared with this. And as they gazed ahead to the last stops, a new version of their old lives awaited them. The younger contingent would arrive back in Parkland on Monday, have a single day off; then on Wednesday morning, they’d start their senior, junior, or sophomore years. And for others like Emma, it was a bigger change. First day of college, first day of adulthood—which they had been thrust into prematurely on Valentine’s Day.
And so, as the tour wound down, everyone was reevaluating. Some would be moving on with their lives. Others would be collecting themselves for even bigger roles.
Jackie landed in the reinvigorated camp. On February 13, the day before her world changed, her plan had been to graduate in the top 1 percent of her class and then pursue a nursing career. “I was on the road to getting straight A’s this year, and I was going to, but I was on a trip for the Time One Hundred gala, and I couldn’t take my math final,” she said. For the first time, Jackie had to choose between academics and activism.
Even after she skipped the final, her precalc scores were high enough to give her a B plus, her second ever. “I was top one percent of my class, but now I’ll be like top fifteen percent. That’s fine,” she said. “It messed up everyone. Everyone in the group is smart, and all of our GPAs dropped, because we just didn’t have time.”
Her fall schedule was dramatically different too. They turned in course cards the week before Valentine’s Day, and Jackie had four AP classes scheduled for senior year. She ultimately pared it back to just one. “Honestly, the end of this year was so hard for me—not only because of the emotions, but also because I always had work to do,” she said. “And I didn’t feel the need or want to force interest in precalculus. I’ll look at the board in my English classroom and be like, ‘This isn’t helping me.’” She kept one AP course, government, “because it’s probably what’s going to intrigue me,” she said.
A week after Tallahassee, she was starting to consider a career in politics—a prospect she found startling but also electrifying. Then she spent months mucking around with politicians. She was not impressed. “I don’t really know what I want to do, but I feel like I don’t want to be a politician when I’m older,” she had concluded by June. “Politics is always going to be dirty. And I don’t want to be around that environment.”
She envisioned a nonprofit role helping improve kids’ lives. She planned to keep up the gun fight for a while, but not forever. “I feel like I work well with kids,” she said. “I quit my camp-counselor job this summer to do Road to Change, but it breaks my heart because I’m not with my girls.”
One thing is certain: uncertainty. “Before all this, I was always the person who had my future set and planned. And now there’s nothing about my life that’s set and planned. So it’s a very different way of living, but the discomfort is kind of . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know the word for it. I’ve been getting adjusted to the discomfort, actually—that’s a better way to put it. Because before I was always comfortable, and this discomfort is new, yet welcome.”
David had gone in the opposite direction. He had a seven-year plan laid out, culminating in 2025, when he turns twenty-five, and will be eligible to serve in the House of Representatives. Yes, politics would be dirty—so who better to wield the spade? David was leaning into his gap year, to hurl all his energy into the midterms, an arrangement he hoped to repeat in 2020, helping to elect a worthy new president. Before and after, he would go to college, starting in the fall of 2019, and “read a shitload of books.” That would give him plenty of time to prep for that first congressional run.
Ryan Deitsch and Delaney Tarr also ended up deferring college for at least a semester to throw everything they had into the midterms.
Matt Deitsch continued to defer his college career to keep working at MFOL full-time.
Lauren Hogg and Daniel Duff were sophomores now, eager to stick with MFOL and excited to start taking on more responsibility. After six months interacting with the media, Daniel was thinking about joining us. He had a few years to pick a college major, but was starting to lean toward journalism. “I’m spending a lot of my time with like film and TV production and all that,” he said. “But I’m also very interested in creative writing and journalism, and they kind of go hand in hand.”
A temporary casualty of the MFOL success was the Douglas drama program. “It decimated the drama program,” Alfonso said. He chose not to go out for the fall play; so did Cameron and most of the others from MFOL. Too much at stake. Cameron didn’t even return to Douglas. Broward County had an online course program for homeschooling, and Cameron enrolled in that to finish his high school education. He would spend most of the fall in Los Angeles. Alfonso also enrolled in most of his courses online, heading over to school just for drama class. He skipped the play but kept the class.
Several of the Chicago kids went on to college. Alex King headed to Grand Valley State University. He was majoring in theater, a happy coincidence after six months with the Parkland drama kids. “My mind was set on it long before I met any of them,” he said. Alex was the first in his family to make it out of the neighborhood and into university. Realizing the dream.
When the movement was just beginning, and its future uncharted, Jackie foresaw a generation of struggle, to make the world safe for the kids she would raise someday. Five months later, with thousands of miles in the rearview, she confirmed that assessment. “Though election cycles can change things, it’ll take a generation of people to understand that they don’t need these weapons,” she said. She met a lot of people in gun country, and heard a lot of them say, “I’m a responsible gun owner; I didn’t do anything wrong.” She understands that. But her generation, trained to expect a gunman to burst into their classroom any day, tends to see it differently.
Her goal was not a decisive win in November and sweeping gun reform the following spring. It was passing one reasonable law after another, to reduce gun violence without cramping the style of responsible young gun owners. “When they have kids, when they grow up with this all the time, and they’ve seen the positives that these laws will create from a young age, they will understand,” she said. “It’ll take a generation. And it’s unfortunate, but I just hope that when we have children, they will probably, hopefully, end up in a society where these laws are implemented.”
The tour wound down toward a finale at Sandy Hook, with a reunion of all the kids from both buses. The penultimate stop was New York City, and many of the kids from the Southern Tour had already rejoined them there. Spirits were high. It was exciting to be in the big city, but Lauren Hogg was downright bubbly. She bound around the auditorium on the Upper West Side, chatting, giggling, and hugging old friends and new. The pop band AJR made a surprise appearance, and closed a short set with “Burn the House Down,” which the MFOL kids had adopted as their theme song. Lauren said they played it all summer long on the bus. The bouncing beat, and the lyrics about casting aside doubt to take a stand against injustice had saved her on all those long, dreary rides.
Lauren sang along to the first verse and danced in her seat. As the first chorus approached, she could barely contain herself, until the stage door flew open, and Emma, Matt, Cameron, and a dozen more friends rushed out to join the band, while she dashed up the short steps, with more friends at her heels. They sang along, and danced about with silly moves, but no one matched Lauren’s glee. Still not out of the woods, but on her way.
Cameron Kasky, who had gathered the team in his living room, was the first leader to depart. September 15, he tweeted: “Taking a break from Twitter for a bit so I don’t lose my mind. I encourage you all to try the same if you think it’s becoming too much.” Four days later, he announced his departure from MFOL on Fox News Radio. “If I thought that my friends and the people I worked with couldn’t do it without me, I would not have done that,” he said. “But alas, all of our efforts looking forward looked like they didn’t really need my involvement.” He could have helped, but he wasn’t crucial, he said. “These kids are the real experts. Look, I have some very intelligent friends. Some friends who can intellectually run circles around me, but I’m not the expert in pretty much anything. I’m a Spider-Man fan, and I can tell you with great platform comes great responsibility.”
Cameron looked back on the bus tour plaintively, describing a person he met in Texas who had bought a semiautomatic to protect his family. “I learned that a lot of our issues politically come from a lack of understanding of other perspectives.” Just as disheartening were all the young firebrands locking horns in debate with the sole intention of beating each other. “I’m working on some efforts to encourage bipartisanship,” he said.
And he lamented his own role in that. “I’m very regretful of a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way,” he said. “One of the things I never really did was watch myself. If I was on a screen I kind of tried to run away from it. I’m not entirely sure why.” His deepest regret was setting out to embarrass Marco Rubio. He said there were seventeen people in the ground, and he was looking for someone complicit in the killer getting the weapon. He saw Rubio. “I’m not going to kick myself for it, because I’m seventeen,” he said. But then he did. “I went into that wanting less conversation and more to embarrass Rubio and that was my biggest flaw. I even name-dropped the murderer.” He didn’t even think about that at the time, but it had weighed on him since. “Looking back, it ticks me off so much when people do that, because then you’re getting that person’s name out there and making them a celebrity. That’s one of the worst things you see come out of these horrific mass murders, is name recognition.”
Cameron didn’t stop tweeting entirely, but he scaled back from his earlier frenetic pace. Three weeks later, on October 9, he revealed why—in a series of tweets: “Lately, I’ve been a lot less active not only online, but in general. I understand the timing is pretty inconvenient with midterms around the corner, and I apologize. I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety in a stronger form than I’ve ever seen it.” He asked people to be kind to each other, simply because they are people. “And sometimes, people hurt. And it’s OK to hurt. Waking up is hard for me lately, and for the first time ever, it’s not because I was staying up late. And that’s just something I have to deal with. I started medication today and I’m hoping that’ll put me on a better path, but please . . . Remember that the sun will rise in the morning and the world will spin on. It’s so hard, I know. It really is. But we can do it.”
And then Cameron really took a Twitter break—for a while. He was back to tweeting heavily leading up to the midterm elections. And he never lost his sense of silliness. In November, he landed in the hospital for an intestinal virus, and tweeted, “I actually like being in the hospital. I get to wear a dress all day withOUT being judged.”
Most of the group remains committed. They expect MFOL to endure, and plan to lead it for a long time, but no one really knows for sure. Five or ten or twenty years from now, MFOL may be a powerhouse organization, or it may have faltered, or evolved into something new. But somehow, in some way, the fight will go on. And when Jackie, Emma, David, Matt, or whoever is still fighting hands the reins to the next generation, their vision for this movement will prove a force more powerful than the NRA.
They will need some big wins for that to happen. They expect some punishing losses as well. But they had to score some blows the first round. That was coming November 6.
As their mobile home for the summer pulled into its final stop in Newtown, Connecticut, August 12, MFOL had another frantic agenda. They had to get those waves of new voters to the polls. They had thousands of new affiliates in the field, and the big task for the fall would be building a stronger infrastructure, “so a random kid from Texas could talk to someone in Idaho and connect and organize together,” Jackie said. They had twelve weeks to tighten up their organization for Election Day, and two years to prepare for 2020.
Three days later, Jackie was back in Parkland for the first day of her senior year. A week later, I asked about school, and she groaned. “Oh God. It feels like a side project for me now. Every year of my life it would’ve been my main priority, and now it kind of feels like an extracurricular. Every day I go to school, and then I go work on March for Our Lives for the rest of my night. I don’t really know what my main thing is, but I’m pretty sure it’s March for Our Lives.”
As she looked forward into a gloriously uncharted future, and wistfully back at the past—at the crazy summer on a tour bus, and the thousands of aspiring activists pouring into her life—a single face stood out. Jackie had met Natalie Barden at the Teen Vogue summit in June. Natalie was in fifth grade when she lost her little brother, Daniel, at Sandy Hook. For five years, Natalie avoided the gun conversation; it was just too painful to talk about. Parkland changed that. Parkland changed everything. Natalie went to the march on Washington, “and was moved beyond belief,” she wrote.
“When she saw us do it, she felt empowered,” Jackie said. “Because when her little brother died, she was ten.” Natalie was Jackie’s lead organizer in Newtown, helping her plan the four-hour rally with food trucks, entertainment, speakers, and a meeting of MFOL kids and Sandy Hook survivors. “She did an amazing job,” Jackie said. “When you have a connection to the issue, it doesn’t even feel like a job.”
Jackie felt like she was passing the torch, but she was really lighting activist flames. “March for Our Lives does not belong to us anymore,” Jackie said. It belongs to every kid in America who is ready to heed the call.