Last Thursday evening, I arrived at Pine Trails Park, in Parkland, Florida, just as the candlelight vigil to honor the dead was ending. The cars were still arriving, in long lines that gleamed under halogen streetlights, waved through intersections by officers of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. Flashlights and phone lights bobbed along the sidewalks that bordered the road as families passed on foot or on bikes. It was just past eight o’clock, darkness had fallen over the palm glades and cul de sacs and strip malls of this city at the edge of the Everglades, and, if you hadn’t known the circumstances, you might have expected a Fourth of July celebration.

Instead, the people here had gathered for a different kind of national ritual. After the fatal shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, on Valentine’s Day, the aftermath at first had a familiar pattern: the initial news alerts; then the psychological profiles of the killer; the repetition of “thoughts and prayers”; the news scrum; this vigil. The funerals would begin the next day, but the long-term prospect was of another lull in the debate until the next act of spectacular violence—a routine so predictable that a couple of days later I saw that someone in Fort Lauderdale had drawn it in imitation of the Krebs Cycle and printed it on a T-shirt. The first hint that something might be different this time came the morning after the shootings, from a Douglas High School sophomore named Sarah Chadwick, who informed the President of the United States, via his favorite medium, in words that quickly went viral, “I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot.” In the hours that followed, others joined Chadwick in rejecting the platitudes. On social media, and on live television, the victims were not playing their parts. They were not asking for privacy in their time of grief. They did not think it was “too soon” to bring up the issue of gun control—in fact, several students would start shouting “gun control” within the very sanctum of the candlelight vigil. What was already becoming clear that night, less than thirty-six hours after the shootings, was that the students were going to shame us, all of us, with so much articulacy and moral righteousness that you willed the news anchors to hang their heads in national solidarity. It was a bad week for a lot of reasons, but at least we had evidence of one incorruptible value: the American teen-ager’s disdain for hypocrisy.

Most of the grownups had departed after the vigil. In the hours until the county sheriff’s officers made their rounds in golf carts asking people to leave, the students sat in clusters on the floodlit crabgrass talking, crying, and praying. Many of the students were seeing their friends for the first time since the shooting, and were now telling the stories of what they had seen over and over, still mapping out the chronology of the event. They gathered around crosses placed in the ground or stood in twos and threes in front of the amphitheatre stage, which had been turned into a vast altar decorated with seventeen angels.

I introduced myself to three students who were standing in a circle and talking. Rebecca Bogart, a senior with curly brown hair, wore a tie-dyed school T-shirt and running shorts. As she recalled the previous day’s events she leaned against her friend Josef Bagiv, a junior, in moments of agitation. Bogart and the third student, Ashton Boukzam, had been together in a class on the history of the Holocaust when the shooter had begun his attack down the hall. The students had run together with their teacher and several others to hide behind the teacher’s desk, where they hid holding hands. As Nikolas Cruz passed by, spraying bullets through the door, two students, Nicholas Dworet and Helena Ramsay, were killed.

“We were all doing our homework, just doing work in the classroom, everything was fine, it was a fun day so far, just Valentine’s Day,” Boukzam, a tall seventeen-year-old who wore several stud earrings, said. “Then we heard shots behind us and everyone didn’t even think it was real.”

“Right now I just keep replaying the scenes in my head and just, like . . . ,” Rebecca said.

“Seeing Nick and . . . ,” Ashton said, leaving the thought unfinished.

Rebecca started to cry.

“We could just keep hearing his footsteps walking,” Ashton continued.

“You could just hear screaming, us holding hands, on the phone with 911,” Rebecca said.

“After he shot up our classroom he just kept going down the line,” Ashton said. “Thank God he didn’t go in many classrooms.”

“Thank God.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.

The funerals began the next day, a Friday. At 10 A.M., the police officers were again directing traffic, this time into the Star of David Memorial Gardens Cemetery and Funeral Chapel. Golf carts shuttled the elderly or infirm to the entrance of the chapel, teen-agers in glittering black formalwear and prom heels picking their way behind them. The mourners were too many for the chapel, and spilled out into the atrium, the stairways that flanked it, and onto the sidewalk outside. They stood for the duration of the service, some sobbing as the friends and family of the fourteen-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff recalled a soccer player and honors student who loved the movies and summer camp, a thoughtful girl who would call her grandfather when he was sick without even being asked. Outside, a teen-age girl fainted; plastic bottles of water were passed back. The final eulogy was delivered by Alyssa’s mother, Lori. I had watched Lori Alhadeff being interviewed on CNN from the breakfast room at a Best Western in Boca Raton, where a room full of people suddenly forgot to chew their waffles as the grieving mother, distraught and furious, had trained her eyes directly on the camera, addressed the President and yelled, her voice breaking, “This is not fair to our families, that our children go to school and have to get killed! Do something! Action! We need it now!” Now, as she recalled her daughter, her voice stayed steady. She asked those of Alyssa’s friends sharing stories with one another on social media to share the memories with her, too. “Honor Alyssa,” she said. “Breathe for Alyssa. Do something good with your life.”

After the service, the mourners parted and Alyssa’s coffin was silently wheeled out, the traditional pine box draped in a black shroud with a white Star of David, followed by her family, whose members clung to one another. The other mourners closed ranks and proceeded behind them to the burial site, forming a dark line that snaked out across the flatness of the land in the brilliant midmorning sun.

I returned to Pine Trails Park, which had become the central gathering place for media, students, and members of a disaster-activated national consolation machine: volunteers from the Red Cross; a van of therapeutic golden retrievers and their owners from Christ the Shepherd Lutheran Church, in Alpharetta, Georgia; the television anchors as lurid as exotic birds. It was now midday and eighty-five degrees. Few people were in the park. The self-appointed consolers stood around beaming with compassion and turning down offers of pizza. I introduced myself to Ray and Betty Bombardieri, two members of the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team who had come to do what Ray Bombardieri described as “praying people up.” They now stood chatting with Nancy Veile, a local representative of Therapy Dogs International, whose two rat-terrier rescues, Birdie (“a jailbird who flew the coop”) and Breezy (“she sneezes a lot”), sat at her feet wearing harnesses labelled “EMOTIONAL SUPPORT.” Veile was a local, and in addition to the dogs she had also had the experience of losing a child. As she spoke to me, two teen-age girls in Douglas High lacrosse uniforms came up to lay flowers on the amphitheatre’s stage. They paused to pet Birdie and Breezy, who responded with gentle nuzzling. “This is what they do,” Veile said, watching from a slight distance with approval. “They’re doing their jobs.” After pausing a minute to contemplate the altar, the girls and their mother departed for the family-support center.