Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “The Never Again Kids and The Friends I’ll Never Forget” by Kyrah X. Kyrah (she/they) is a writer and creative. She is reclaiming her life after escaping abuse in the fall of 2023.
For us, nighttime usually meant passing a blunt around a double-occupancy hotel room. It was our way of winding down on tour. We cracked windows to cheat the fire alarm, ignored the fact that we didn’t know each other very well, and sparked up. We weren’t doing any of that tonight. Our friend had a meeting with the tour organizers. Based on the last of these meetings, he was going home.
Our friend was 18 years old and a little under four feet tall. He’d made a career as a motivational speaker, visiting high schools across the country to promote anti-bullying. The same person who invited me on tour invited him. Encouraged by their friendship, our friend cleared his schedule and caught a flight to whatever East Coast city we had stopped in that day. We welcomed him with open arms. By we, I mean the various minority peoples March For Our Lives collected like Pokémon.
When I got the invitation to join the March For Our Lives Road to Change summer tour, I knew I’d say yes. I was working as a cashier at a fast-food restaurant. Before February 14th, 2018, I planned on quitting. I filled out applications at Cold Stone Creamery and Red Lobster, trying to secure another source of income so I could put in my two weeks. A coworker was sexually harassing me. He clung to me like a bad smell. He’d tell me he loved me and get upset when I wouldn’t repeat it, pull my body to his for hugs I didn’t ask for. This went on for months. I knew I was supposed to report him to my boss and get justice, but what’s ideal isn’t always compatible with reality. I was a 16-year-old weeks into my first job in a male-dominated workplace where the same man who sexually harassed me laughed with my boss like old friends. I felt quitting was a better option than being accused of lying.
Then February 14th happened.
Work was a distraction from the news vans, funerals, and gun discourse trending across social media. I stopped entertaining the idea of leaving.
On our first day back at my high school, exactly two weeks after February 14th, we met with all of our classes in short twenty-minute periods. It was the school’s way of easing us into a routine. Class time was strictly designated for Play-Doh sculptures and Jenga towers as well as debriefs on the bizarre nature of our new normal. Our campus was an active crime scene. News anchors filmed packages on the grass borders of the sidewalk, feet away from the school grounds. Photographers squinted and captured us crossing the street on our walk from the student parking lot, and those pictures often appeared in articles the same day.
I hated my experience at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was my introduction to Parkland, Florida - a white, wealthy suburb. White, wealthy, and racist. My classmates would say “nigger” like it was a trendy swear word. Our principal used his school Twitter account to spout his political opinions, one along the lines of “real Americans stand for the anthem” in response to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling. Our school resource officer pinned a minority student against a lunch table for fitting a vague description of an alleged campus threat. No one seemed disturbed by the status quo.
I had two periods with Helena. The first was Trigonometry. The desks in the room were reorganized into groups of four, so it was hard to tell which was hers. There were just floor tiles where her desk should have been at the back of the room. I tried my best to talk with a friend. My second class with Helena was U.S. History. There wasn’t a friend to talk to. I sat alone. I continued to sit alone until Cameron pulled up a desk. I didn’t like him. I attended the CNN Town Hall taping a week earlier and felt the performance in his on-stage confrontation with a conservative politician. He was clearly riding the wave of all of this newfound attention. But I didn’t tell him to get up.
Cameron spoke to me for the entire class period. About benign things, but mostly concerning the stroke of celebrity he was experiencing as a part of the “Never Again MSD” viral student group. He gave his phone to me so I could watch a video message sent to him by actor Idris Elba. Next class, it happened again. This time, he had updates on the Washington, D.C. national march scheduled for later in the month. I gradually saw less of Cameron until he stopped taking his seat in our history class altogether. I opened his Twitter profile a couple of days into summer break and sent a direct message. It was not unlike something I would’ve written in the back of his yearbook. He responded with his phone number. And a message saying he was planning something exciting I might want to know about.
I said yes to the tour for myself. I’d seen Helena’s name misspelled, her age incorrect, her list of hobbies the product of a telephone game in which reporters just rephrased whatever they found about her online. She didn’t feel human anymore. I wanted to say her name. Without a social media platform or the connections amassed by a viral moment, I felt like a spectator to the call for gun violence prevention. Cameron’s offer changed that.
I typed up a resignation letter and turned it in to my boss the day before my last shift. He blinked at the paper like I’d written in Japanese. But I was finally free. I reminded myself my goodbye wasn’t a “see you soon.”
Touring with March For Our Lives was seeing behind a veil. The first meeting I attended in their Coral Springs office quickly devolved into a screaming match. Afterward, the members dispersed. One person acknowledged me. The group as a whole was standoffish. I greeted a full room with a “Good morning” the next day and heard nothing in response. I was there on a technicality, and they treated me like it.
We left for Chicago on an early Friday morning. I sat by myself on the charter bus that took us to Fort Lauderdale International Airport. The group was split into two. One would tour cities in Florida, holding community panels and voter registration events. The other would tour sixty cities nationwide, doing the same in a three-leg itinerary. I was assigned to tour Florida, but after proving I was useful to March’s social media management, I was told I could accompany them to meet Michael Brown, Sr. in St. Louis, Missouri. That offer extended to the duration of the tour.
I preferred the company of the Chicago natives. For a week, there were about seven of them on tour. Later, the number hovered around four: an 18-year-old with a voice resonant like a reverend who lost his nephew, a 19-year-old with just an undeniable coolness who lost his older brother, an 18-year-old girl with gorgeous gap teeth who lost her father before the age of 10, and a 15-year-old with the rambunctious energy of a younger brother muted with the trauma of losing friends - all to gun violence. Unlike with members of March, befriending them was as easy as if we were on an elementary school playground. The difference was we saw each other as equals. The same went for every addition to the tour.
Members of March were able to temporarily adopt the minority activists that impressed them. They would use nightly town halls as auditions. A trio of brothers who co-owned a fashion line joined us in St. Louis, two women in their early twenties joined us in Iowa, and a curly-haired activist with a gallery of pins on her denim jacket joined us in Wisconsin. The people behind March For Our Lives leveraged their ability to provide free housing, travel, and a massive platform. An offer must have felt like getting a golden ticket. Invitees were whisked into a different world upon agreeing to join the tour. We went from an event space in their hometown to local restaurants to three-star hotels in hours. Having Black and brown faces beside them, particularly from communities they could never speak for, was March For Our Lives' response to claims of being self-serving and dismissive of BIPOC gun violence prevention organizers.
Touring came with a four-figure paycheck. Every flight, meal, and hotel stay were covered. We were in the Never Again Kids’ world. This was their normal since the 14th. We traveled in a ten-bed tour bus adorned with flat screens and later a gaming system. If we needed clothes, or in one case, a glasses repair, nothing came out of pocket. New additions like me who didn’t have a March-issued per diem card were given stipends of around 300 dollars in cash for each two-week leg. A camera crew traveled with us to film a March For Our Lives documentary.
Tour life looked like a hotel continental breakfast. It looked like meetings with gun violence survivors, hours-long testimonies of death and trauma, and then a break for lunch. It looked like community town halls. Someone from the group hosted, while about four of us took seats on stage, interspersed with local activists. The incentive was to sell the audience on the necessity of gun violence prevention and voter turnout. It doubled as one-sided therapy sessions in which we repeatedly relived our traumas for an audience of hundreds. We’d typically be asked to speak a couple of hours before.
Saying no could mean being sent home.
The first person I saw sent home was a member of March. In an East Coast hotel lobby, they were asked to explain why they shouldn’t be sent home to a 20-year-old member and the middle-aged owner of the agency that worked with March since its inception. The person’s transgression was refusing to participate in town halls. A flight to Fort Lauderdale International was booked in their name shortly after.
Weeks later, we were watching the same situation play out with our motivational-speaking friend. It didn’t make sense. He was more than willing to speak into a microphone. He participated in town halls and was overall a good sport. It’d only been a week since he flew out. In the same hotel room we smoked in the day before, we waited for him to return from his meeting. We opened the door to him in tears. They sat him down not to have him plead his case, but to share his flight details.
“I feel like I’m in high school again,” our friend said. That is exactly what touring with my classmates felt like. Back in February, it didn’t surprise me that the “famous” group of Douglas students looked nothing like me. Nor that they weren’t interested in taking on new members. Teachers recommended well-spoken students to them in the weeks following February 14th, and they’d turn them away. Their advice was for us to start groups of our own. It was this weird, selfish approach to the platform that came from our situation’s publicity. And it gave them power. Cameron inviting me on tour reflected the inappropriate amount of power he had gained. Something as small as him liking my end-of-the-year message led to a flight to Chicago being booked in my name.
Members of March thrived off of the power hierarchy they’d created, the bottom of which was exclusively colored. My job running social media required me to report to two members of March every time I drafted a post. None of these checks and balances existed for anyone else. Posting a Twitter thread without approval led to me being scolded on the tour bus. I was cut off and spoken over in almost every group conversation. And my opinion, often about ways we could honor the 17 victims and Black people affected by gun violence, was almost always ignored.
I wrote in my journal then, “The only power I have is over the food I eat.” Decisions on tour weren’t democratic. A group of maybe six Black, Asian, and Latin youth and I were told what we were doing the day of. There wasn’t space to say no. We were told we’d be touring the basement of the AME Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina where nine people were murdered in a white supremacist attack. At a member of March’s request, we were told we’d be touring a Virginia plantation museum. We were told we’d be having a steak dinner with the mother of a Columbine killer in Little Rock, Colorado. We waited for her in a private room and within minutes of her feeble body finding a seat, she asked for a retelling of February 14th. Members of March indulged her in a conversation so graphic and uncomfortable a queue of us gathered in the bathroom to wait it out. We were subjected to these bizarre scenarios because consideration for how we’d be impacted was less than an afterthought—it didn’t exist.
The Road to Change Tour was Douglas on wheels. Their enforced power hierarchy was poorly disguised racism. During our week break in between legs, I was called into a room in March For Our Lives’ office. I’d come in thinking I was finally receiving an organization email address. Two members of March asked me to “reel in” another Black girl. They told me the way she spoke at panels was embarrassing. I should intervene because clearly - their words - we were friends. When they got what they were looking for from me, I was dismissed.
For a town hall in Salt Lake City, Utah, we took a six-hour drive from our previous stop in Colorado. It was a scenic route, painted with mountain tops and a highway clear of traffic. About two hours out from our destination, I looked up to see a group had gathered in front of my seat on the tour bus. Three members of March were leaning over a phone screen. It was one of the rare occasions where I sat in the front of the bus. The back, with its automatic partition, was reserved for playing video games or sleeping. I was lost in my phone, listening to music until they got my attention. “Kyrah,” they asked, “Do you think we’re racist?”
A classmate, a Black girl who had spoken at the Washington, D.C. March For Our Lives, apparently said so in an interview. So they asked me, a Black person conveniently located feet away, if I also thought they were racist. It was a rhetorical question. I was en route to their panel, seated on their tour bus, with a hotel key they paid for in my pocket.
Months later, I heard that the same Black girl they asked me to disagree with had called me and the other minority people on tour “tokens.” She worded it more graciously than that, probably, “They’re using them as tokens.” At the time, I mistook it for an insult. But she had just put words to my frustrations. We were constantly posing for pictures to go up on their social media. One picture of us, three Black girls and one member of March, holding hands became the header of their Twitter page for several months. During our stop in California, they pulled a few of us to sit with them for a scene on Keeping Up with The Kardashians. It was decided among themselves who was chosen.
I signed on to the tour thinking it was an opportunity to do something. But I was a chess piece in service of the March For Our Lives brand.
It’s criminal that March For Our Lives used the resources that came from the murders at my high school to tokenize and retraumatize minority youth. The thousands of dollars spent on securing minority presence on tour were a drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of maintaining an illusion of inclusivity—a manufactured legacy they still benefit from.
The nightmare of surviving the 14th was heightened by the nightmare of this particular group of students having the power and connections to let their egos run rampant. The Road to Change Tour was a toxic workplace. I constantly felt the weight of my blackness. It wasn’t a safe space to be a girl either. On tour, my “boss” greeted me with a kiss on the head, offered to cuddle me in one of the beds on the tour bus, and casually joked about the size of his penis. Another member of March, significantly older than the rest of the group, made unsubtle romantic advances on a minority youth activist to the point that she debated “giving him what he wanted.”
Journalists continue to catch up with March For Our Lives co-founders in the years since the tour. In these interviews, they relate themselves to child actors, reflecting on the ills of celebrity. Some may throw a bone and say, “We didn’t know what we were doing back then.” Most will be honest and say, “I’m so proud.”
***
I graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the spring of 2019. Then from Howard University in 2022. Today, I’m working a remote job that pays just enough for me to afford groceries and housing expenses. I hope to figure things out to the point that I can become a full-time novelist.
The curly-haired girl from Wisconsin is a close friend. We never lost contact after the tour. She works with youth in an artist studio and splits rent payments with roommates. She’s an artist and musician.
Social media fills me in on the lives of the other people I met on tour. One works with March For Our Lives as a member of their executive board. Some are still involved in the activism that put them on March’s radar. Others are just trying to survive.
***
A month before Helena’s murder, the two of us sat in the back of our Trigonometry class and listened to our teacher read a script on Douglas’ new safety regulations. Fire drills would now require us to exit campus based on classroom location and stand in a single-file line. There would also be active shooter drills. Three corners of the classroom were designated “safe places.”
I turned to Helena as our teacher spoke, she’d inadvertently painted a nightmare in my mind. “Girl, I cannot die at Douglas.”
Between Helena and I was a history of conversations about the hell that was being Black at Douglas. She was sitting at the last desk. Her back was to stapled sheets of cardstock with cartoon math equations printed on them. She shook her head, the nightmare clear to her as well. “Me either.”
Helena turned seventeen on January 19, 2018. I ran to her in the school courtyard and threw my arms around her screaming “Happy Birthday!”
We hugged so tight I’d entered the cloud of her afro, her curls tickling my cheeks.
Helena Freja Ramsay, a British-born, Jamaican-Scottish, cat-loving, K-pop enthusiast gem of a human being, would have turned 23 this year. She often talked about her love for England. In her words, she felt “so much happier there.” She was unfazed by my argument about its miserable weather. I can see her living back home, holding an umbrella over her head as she walks through a signature British downpour.
As a little girl, Helena was incredibly sweet. When I first got a glasses prescription in the second grade, I felt like Harry Potter sitting at the lunch tables. Helena and a friend caught eyes with me from another table and started doing thumbs-ups. I couldn’t help but smile. As a teenager, she was the same girl, but self-assured. I’d never seen her bend to social media trends or fads. During our free time in class, she’d put in her earbuds and play songs I’d never heard of, often titles from Korean pop idols she admired or alternative tracks that would take months for me to hear.
Helena was the kind of traveler I try to emulate, nonjudgmental and adaptable to different cultures. She’d traveled to Spain with a group of Douglas students on a summer trip to a handful of European countries. In an anecdote she shared, the students gagged at a serving of escargot. Her response was, “What’s the point of traveling to Spain if you’re going to be disrespectful?” to me in class. I’m sure that in the moment, the most she gave was a subtle eye roll.
Sometimes I scroll through our old texts. Helena was an expert at banter, quick to catch on to a double entendre or silly phrase. There’s always a text that makes me laugh.
Helena was one of a kind.
January 19, 2024, was the sixth birthday she hasn’t been able to celebrate alive.
Hey @kyrah x., so loved this piece. It really spoke to me and drew me in, urging me to read the next paragraph, and then the next, and the next right to the end.. and as a reward, I got to learn more about your sweet friend, Helena. I am so very sorry for your loss, the loss of this special friendship and all she was and could have been in your life. I feel grateful for being able to read your words here, and I hope you continue to write your truth, and get it out there, out here, wherever you wish.. wherever that is please put me on your list. Trish. Love. ❤️
To have to deal with MFOL’s bullshit and racist hierarchy after the mass shooting…is unreal. I’m so sorry. The world should have protected you and Helena more. She should be in this world, travelling, texting you, having a full life with a friend like you. There are these events in life that completely distorts life as we once knew it, and yet, the world continues on and there is no relief from its bullshit. Sending you my love. Thanks for sharing this with us and I hope you have more ways of sharing your voice with us completely and unrestricted.