1. VALENTINE'S DAY

WHEN YOU OPEN YOUR EYES BUT THE nightmare doesn't go away, you've got no choice but to do something. Our first job now is to remember. Our second job is to act. Remember, act, repeat. Since that day, none of us are the same. But we are alive. And in memory of those who are not, we will remember and act for the rest of our lives. We've always been taught that as Americans, there is no problem that is out of our reach; that if we set our minds to it, we can solve anything. Anything except for our problem with gun violence. That can't be fixed. When that problem flares, it's Hey, wow, that's terrible. Too bad there's nothing to be done about it. Like it's an act of God, or a natural disaster, something beyond our control that we are helpless to do any- thing about. Which defies all logic and reason. We live in Florida, a place which has some experience with natural disasters. What happened on Valentine's Day 2018 was neither natural nor an act of God. What happened that day was man-made-which means that as human beings, we have the capacity to do something about it. Our generation has the obligation to do something about it. In class, we learned about something called entropy. I guess you could say that entropy came to our school that day, and since the shootings, we have seen that there are powerful forces that thrive in chaos. Entropy is what the universe wants to happen. The story of existence and human civilization is the struggle against entropy-working to stick together, not fly apart. To cooperate, not fight. To love, not hate. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I can't speak for everyone. If I was my fresh- man or sophomore or halfway-through-junior- year self, I would just sit here and explain everything. That's how pretentious and overconfident I was, and probably still am, to some ex- tent. But if there's one thing I learned from the shootings, it's that my freshman or sophomore or halfway-through-junior-year self couldn't have survived that day. That's the reason for this book-we all had to find a way to survive, and we all had to come up with our own answers, but it turned out that all of our answers were just different facets of the same answer. That's why the shootings made us stronger instead of destroying us. So I could sit here and tell you the heroic tale of a kid who was so cool under fire and so passionate about justice that he whipped out his camera while the shooter was still shooting. But the truth is that I was thinking about something one of my teachers had been talking about a couple of days before: in the sweep of time billions of people have lived on this planet, yet the world only remembers a few hundred of them. This means that everybody else is just a background character who will be forgotten into the nothingness that is time and the universe. My teacher was talking about being humble, but I'm way too myopic and self-involved for that. My thinking went more like this: Am I going to be just an- other background character? Is this what it's all been leading up to? Just a bullet to the head? And I decided, Okay, I may be another back- ground character, but if I'm going to die I'm going to die telling a damn good story that people need to hear. That's why I hit record. I was almost acting out the role that a journalist plays in a war zone, where you have to ask these questions and stay focused on one simple thing. That's what kept me calm. And to be honest, except for one split second when the fear rushed through me, I really thought it was just a drill. Even after we knew it wasn't a drill, it was still so hard to accept the re- ality of it. But here's the important thing: my sister, Lau- ren, was fourteen that day, and there's nothing myopic or self-involved about her. After the shooting stopped, she was crying so hysterically that I didn't want to be around her. Her friends had been murdered, and I couldn'