Cameron Kasky was always different—different from everyone, but different from his brothers from the start. The Kaskys had three kids, all boys, two and a half years apart. Cameron was the middle child, but the dynamics changed when his little brother, Holden, began to show signs of autism. “It’s not like it made Cam the youngest, but it’s almost like his childhood was kind of rushed because his brother’s needs took over,” his mother, Natalie, said. But Cameron never hurt for attention. When Cameron was a young boy, they went on a Norwegian Sky family cruise. “Jeff and I walked into one of the adult nightclubs, and [Cameron] was performing. He had left the kids’ camp—I don’t know how, because you’re not supposed to; maybe his leaving was how the cruise lines eventually changed their policies. Jeff and I walk in, and he’s up there making all these off-color jokes. The entire audience is hysterical.”
They were howling. You can watch it on YouTube—Jeff posted it before the shooting. It’s “Jokers Wild” open-mic night, and the room has an industrial Vegas prom decor: exposed beams, corrugated metal ceiling tiles, lights reflecting every foot or two off its gleaming polyurethane wood floor. In the middle of it, a microphone stand, lowered to minimum height, is aligned with Cam’s wisecracking mouth. His dress shirt is oversized and untucked; khakis spill over his dress shoes, and curly locks onto his collar. He is completely at ease, working each bit like he’s hamming it up with his grandparents, owning the room. A man watching far behind him doubles over.
Natalie recalls a rush of pride, and an inability to breathe. “This is what a real comedian’s mom feels like. It’s a mix of horror, nerves, and pride.” And almost immediately, one clear thought occurred to her: “This is going to happen so much. Whenever he gets a live mic, he’s going to be entertaining adults. He was seven or eight.”
“He’s taught himself everything,” she said. “He’s taught himself to swim, he taught himself the ABCs, he taught himself to read—this thing about not needing parents is not new.” She reconsidered. “It’s not that he doesn’t need us, he needs support.” Natalie and Cam seem to have a cozy relationship. Cam didn’t need parents charting the movement, but he needed a sanctuary. “I want to be home and protect Holden and stay out of things,” Natalie said.
Swimming was Natalie’s most vivid early recollection of discovering who her boy was. She took Cam to the pool as a toddler and tried to get him started on floating. “Resist, resist, resist.” And one day he was jumping up and down in the pool, then tried it at an angle, a tighter angle, and pretty soon he was swimming. “He didn’t want or really appreciate the need to reach out. It’s like, ‘I can do it myself.’ Just the way he was built.”
Reading was more gradual, but more revealing. She sent Cam to Montessori pre-K, and redecorated the long hallway to the boys’ rooms with alphabet wallpaper at eye level, to make learning fun. “He couldn’t wait for them to come down,” Natalie said. He loved pre-K, reading was exciting, but this “fun” business—he saw right through it and resented it. God, did he hate to be patronized. He didn’t have the vocabulary for that word yet, but the concept was infuriating.
By pre-K he was reading, and in kindergarten it really took off. By first or second grade he was plowing through chapter books. “I couldn’t keep him in books—it was just like flying out the door.” And when he was seven, Jerry Seinfeld did a comedy book for kids, Halloween— “And if you ever checked it out, you’d be like, ‘Of course Cameron was into this.’”
That’s also the period when politics got ahold of Cameron. “About in third grade, I started to notice the undeniable political mind,” Natalie said. “He was very pro-Obama.” He was going to Pine Crest Elementary School, a prestigious private school in Boca Raton, and Barack Obama was facing off against Mitt Romney for reelection. Cameron told her a lot of the kids’ parents were less liberal, and he was getting a lot of pushback. “Basically, his teacher would say he was on a soapbox and didn’t know the appropriate time and place—that eventually, he would have to turn the audience over to the teacher for the day. So there were a lot of those phone calls before the election.”
That went hand in hand with his interest in theater, she said. Mrs. Blakely was the drama teacher, “and she could tell right away that this energy needed to go somewhere. I think everyone kind of agreed, this energy needed to be after school.”
Pine Crest had a strong drama program for an elementary school, but Cameron outgrew that quickly, and moved on to community theater. High School Musical stood out, and Seussical, in which he played the Cat in the Hat. Music became a passion: first the cello, then the upright bass, but eventually Cameron decided his voice was his true instrument. For a while, politics took a back seat. “Because he felt the world was a safe place with Obama,” Natalie said. It came roaring back in 2017, when Trump was inaugurated—“And everything started to be really, you know, ugly? He just felt like he needed to tune in a little more.”
They sent Cam off to Starlight Camp when he was very young, and he was very excited. His older brother, Julian, had gone there, and his cousins too, and for two years they had raved about it. “There were periods, you followed your exact bunk to your exact activity, and he hated it,” Natalie said. Camp was supposed to be fun, and that wasn’t Cam’s idea of fun. So they tried French Woods, a 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.
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 of her own, one in which she embraces her sexuality, and the love she’s felt, and that finally “she embraces the new life within her, just before it’s taken away from her.”
They pushed other elements to be even edgier, adding two masturbation scenes and rousing songs like “The Bitch of Living” and the gleefully bittersweet showstopper “Totally Fucked.” Melchior opens the song:
There’s a moment you know
You’re fucked.
Not an inch more room
To self destruct.
But then he embraces his fucked-up fate and the full cast belts out the chorus:
Yeah, you’re fucked all right and all for spite
You can kiss your sorry ass goodbye.
Despite sweeping the 2007 awards season with eight Tonys and all the major “best musical” awards, including the Olivier in London three years later, the show is too risqué for most high schools. When Barclay asked her kids what shows they wanted to do, they begged for Heathers, Rent, Avenue Q, and Spring Awakening. “Edgy shows about conversations people avoid having,” she said. “We’re all thinking we’re so progressive, but these kids are still desperate to do these shows. Why? Because they’re not being allowed to do them at their schools. I’m not at the school, I don’t have a principal, I don’t have a school board breathing down my neck,” she said. “I’ll be the place that does those edgy things. Someone has to be the place to go out on a ledge and let the kids be dark and be upset and be angsty and sexual. Or there’s no outlet for it. We’re perpetuating exactly what’s happening in the show.”
The cast was having a ball. “These kids have been waiting for an opportunity to sing ‘I’m totally fucked!’ at the top of their lungs. I didn’t choreograph that number, I said, ‘Now jump off that stage,’ and that’s all I had to say. They were ready for it. They took off their own clothes. Cameron does that froggie jump, he shakes his butt and slaps his ass all on his own. I didn’t tell them to do any of that.”
Casting Cameron had been dicey. Sawyer Garrity, another Douglas student, had an angelic voice and had landed the female lead of Wendla. Cameron’s voice was passable, but he would never get to Broadway on a song. But the rebel, the magnet, the pied piper—Cameron was Melchior. And he exuded the frenetic sense of the show. “Cameron’s always been like a champagne bottle that’s been corked too long,” Barclay said. “He would interrupt himself in conversations with me, before even getting to the end of the sentence, and then we’re on a different conversation. He was a live wire, ready for something in life.”
They had a frank talk about his voice. He got it. Cam agreed to an hour of voice lessons a week—intense and one-on-one. Barclay couldn’t make him a songbird, but he was born to play this role.
Cameron threw himself into the part. When he cared about something, he had only one speed. He was bitten by the drama bug, and was eager for more, more, more. Had she found enough boys for Legally Blonde? he asked.
She cast him as the Ivy-Leagued Warner Huntington III, the male lead. Then he brought Holden and schmoozed her for a part for him. Then he offered his Chihuahua, Brutus, for the production. He also landed a role in MSD’s spring musical, Yo, Vikings!, and assisted on its direction, and was directing the school’s one-act performance of Coney Island Christmas for the statewide drama competition. He was hoping to win districts for that in February, and go on to the state competition in Tampa in March. Cameron liked a full plate.
But it was Melchior that consumed him. And he couldn’t get enough coaching from Barclay. “He kind of immediately became an adopted teen son of mine,” she said.
“It’s like magic between the two of them,” Cameron’s mom, Natalie Weiss, said. “They just understood each other right from the start, as so many relationships are like in the theater.”
Barclay was ambitious too. She had moved down from Manhattan and begun the program two years earlier, and it was suddenly gaining traction. She cast her spring slate eight months into her first pregnancy, and scheduled herself straight up to her due date, which was Valentine’s Day. She would leave the staff and the kids on their own for a month of maternity leave—deliciously ironic, given the show—and then six frantic weeks till opening night on May 3. Four months of hoofing for two shows, three hundred seats a night. They could do it, but everything had to go just right.
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, to stand. “This is my friend who is going into the military,” Cameron said. “I need you to tell him that he’s going to live to make it to serve our country.”
Senator Rubio calmly buttoned his blazer while assuring them that Chris would live to serve the country and have a voice in changing its laws.
Cameron took a moment to call for bipartisanship. “Guys, look, this isn’t about red and blue. We can’t boo people because they’re Democrats and boo people because they’re Republicans.” He said anyone ready to change was somebody they need on their side. “So Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?”
The crowd erupted, and leapt to their feet, applauding. It went on and on, and Senator Rubio waited them out with his hands clasped behind his back, sidestepping back and forth, over and over. Cameron fought back a smile and overreached, lamenting twice that he really wanted to take on “the NRA lady”—how she can look in the mirror . . .
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Senator Rubio asked.
“I don’t freaking know,” Cameron said.
“That’s OK.”
“The question is about NRA money,” Tapper said.
Rubio started out coherently, saying he’d been consistent over time, and then grew rambling and confused: “Number two—no. The answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda. And I also support . . .” By the fourth concept he cited supporting—“The things that I have stood for and fought for”—the crowd was beginning to jeer, and Cameron cut off the filibuster:
“No more—no more NRA money?” He tried to brush that off, and Cameron kept repeating it. “More NRA money?”
Rubio, notoriously flusterable, started stammering (and this is how the official transcript punctuated it): “I—there—that is the wrong way to look—first of all, the answer is, people buy into my agenda.”
“You can say no.”
“Well—I—I—the influence of any group—”
He had totally lost the crowd. The jeers were louder and relentless now, and Cameron turned to the crowd to call them off. “Guys, come on, be quiet. We’re gonna be here all night.”
Rubio continued insisting that the NRA was irrelevant: “The influence of these groups comes not from money. The influence comes from the millions of people that agree with the agenda . . .”
Cameron kept pulling him back: “In the name of seventeen people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?”
“I think in the name of seventeen people, I can pledge to you that I will support any law that will prevent a killer like this from getting a gun,” Rubio said.
“No, but I’m talking about NRA money.” Cameron then suggested maybe they could raise enough money for Rubio to replace the NRA contributions, and then circled back: “Are you gonna be accepting money from the NRA in the future?”
“I—I’ve always supported—I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda. But my agenda is—I’ll give you a perfect example . . .” He rattled on until the segment was used up. He’d spent all of it running from the question, and never advanced a coherent point.
The reviews for Rubio were withering. He was the butt of comedy sketches and late-night monologues for days.
Dana Loesch faced off against Emma González a few minutes later, and Loesch came prepared—not just to debate, but to emote. She tried to disarm Emma by praising her bravery and then recasting it entirely as a mental health failure.
After the town hall event Wednesday night, Cameron called Barclay from the airport around two a.m., about to board the red-eye, giddy about taping Ellen in L.A. “Just an excitable kid,” she said. She chided him, half-joking, “Did you bring your script? Are you going to go off-book by the time you get back? Are you drinking water, because your throat sounds like shit right now—you’ve literally lost your voice.”
“Then he’s calling me crying because he’s getting death threats,” Barclay said. “It was really taking a toll on him. From the physical exhaustion, the emotional exhaustion, the death threats—on him, on his friends that he now felt responsible for, because he had started this movement. The stress about trying, I think—it’s what every celebrity kid goes through. It’s like, ‘OK, do I leave my life? How much of my real life do I abandon? How much do I give up? How much do I try to save?’”
Way too much for a seventeen-year-old boy. And the last thing he needed 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.’”
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.”