WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ruth Bang was studying in a Brewster Hall dorm room, about 1,400 miles from her Parkland, Florida home, when her phone started buzzing with text messages.

The frantic notifications were distracting, Bang recalled, and she didn’t want to check them. They kept coming. More frequent than usual. Something seemed odd, Bang said, so she looked at the texts.

It was a group chat of friends from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Rumors were spreading that something terrible was happening, but nobody was sure. Within minutes, Bang would learn from her friends that a gunman had opened fire at the school she’d graduated from last spring. The school that, for the last few years, had been part of her home.

Her little sister, Esther, started texting her during law enforcement’s frenzy to find the shooter. Esther is a student at Westglades Middle School, less than a block away from Stoneman Douglas.

“I love you,” Esther texted Bang, soon after the shooting. “… There is a shooter loose at stoman.”

That Feb. 14 afternoon, 17 people were killed at Bang’s high school in one of the worst school shootings in United States history. She didn’t go to that class she was studying for at Syracuse University.

“The tears kept coming in waves,” Bang said. “I would be OK, and then I would cry, and then somebody would call and they needed someone to comfort them. It just became way too much to take in all by myself.”

But Bang, an SU freshman, had to. She was the only person among her high school friends who enrolled for college in Syracuse.

She spent the night after the shooting checking on students in Florida, talking to her friends at colleges across the country and watching the news. She didn’t sleep.

The next morning, Bang felt people at SU continued their lives as if nothing happened. At her Parkland home, hours away even by airplane, mothers and fathers had just lost children, girlfriends lost boyfriends, football players lost a coach and students lost a teacher.

Bang hadn’t made friends at SU who she could comfortably discuss her emotions with, but she and her old high school classmates stayed in touch almost constantly, she said. In the weeks following the tragedy, Bang would grapple with the shooting by connecting mostly with that group of Stoneman Douglas friends.

Like her, Bang’s Parkland friends spread across the country felt increasingly isolated in their college communities even as their connections to each other and their Florida home grew stronger. They’d text, FaceTime and call each other, but the distance from home and their schedules made it hard to come together to reflect on their hometown’s tragedy in the same place.

That was until March 24 — the March for Our Lives, in Washington, D.C.

‘Once an Eagle, always an Eagle’

Pencils, paintbrushes and markers were strewn across the hotel room table. It was about 1 a.m., 11 hours before the D.C. March for Our Lives was set to start. The march would be a massive protest of gun violence organized primarily by Stoneman Douglas survivors.

Bang, four of her Stoneman Douglas friends and another graduate had just started sketching the posters they wanted to bring to the rally on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bang showed Matthew Ionescu — a friend of hers from Parkland — a concept of her poster that had a textbook drawn on it.

“Now I see what you were talking about, the books, I like that,” Ionescu said.

“But what book is this going to be, AP Gov?” Bang asked.

“Or U.S. History,” Ionescu said. “And then you write how many schools that have been shot.”

She pointed to the bottom left corner of the paper.

“I could do a huge number here, whatever it is.”

The friends sketched, ordered pizza and joked about video games and the Syracuse men’s basketball team’s Sweet 16 loss to Duke a few hours before. If someone had looked in the room a year earlier, they might’ve thought it was full of high schoolers pulling an all-nighter to finish a history project. But between the bottles of paint, the jokes and the upbeat Spotify playlist on someone’s laptop, the group peppered their conversations with discussion about the shooting.

Could the Broward Sheriff’s Office have done more to stop the tragedy? Should they call a planned Monday protest at Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Florida) office a “sit-in,” a “lie-in” or a “die-in?” Should they draw an AR-15, the gun used in the shooting, on one of their posters?

Bang said it was comforting to be among high school friends she could openly discuss the tragedy with. Discussing the shooting with people outside the Parkland community, many recent graduates said, was difficult. People just didn’t understand what it meant to have a connection to the Stoneman Douglas Eagles.

“‘Once an Eagle, always an Eagle’ has literally never been any more true until this happened,” said Sydni Lazarus, who graduated in 2016.

Liam Hutton, who graduated with Bang and now goes to Emerson College in Boston, also had to confront the tragedy without high school friends nearby. He tried to keep his connection to the town quiet while at Emerson, he said. He didn’t want the attention.

When Emerson students planned a walk-out to protest gun violence and honor the victims of the Parkland tragedy, Hutton said the experience felt surreal.

At SU, Bang said she’s bonded with her roommate over fashion and art. She joined Delta Sigma Pi, the professional business fraternity. Still, her Parkland friends were the people she confided in in the weeks after the shooting. At least in their group chat.

“We just loved to talk and express what we felt,” Bang said. “The people we trusted most with what we felt, and who would understand it most, is who we turned to.”

In the weeks that followed the shooting, Bang said it was hard to mourn on her own. She said she has felt the SU community lacks concern for what happened at Stoneman Douglas.

“There’s no awareness, and there’s no concern,” Bang said. “So many times I’ve mentioned I was from Parkland, Florida, and the weirdest questions come out of that.”

Bang’s friends shared her sentiment. People have asked them if they knew the shooter, or if they knew people that died. Once, someone asked for a photo.

The day after the shooting, Bang didn’t go to class. Her professors let her miss a day, she said, but that was it. She said she needed more time to mourn and grieve. Time she didn’t get, she said, at least from people in upstate New York.

“That was really frustrating to me,” Bang said. “It’s still hard to pay attention in class.”

Bang had to wait about a month, until SU’s spring break, before she could travel to reconnect with the Parkland community in person. Not all of her friends had time off from school at the same time, but they all said the community was different when they visited.

People are closer. People hesitate to honk at each other on the roads. People have started talking about how lucky they are to live in a wealthy community.

When Felipe Linares, Bang’s boyfriend and fellow Stoneman Douglas graduate, visited the high school, he said he noticed the boundaries between cliques of students had broken down. And when he ran into a teacher at a Florida farmer’s market who was known among students for being strict, she gave him a hug.

“That first hug that you get when you come back is completely different, because it’s like seeing someone in a different light,” Linares said. “You’re not in the same position as the last time you saw them.”

As the March for Our Lives neared, many Parkland community members decided to rally in their hometown, rather than in D.C. Still, the day before the march, Bang and her friends started seeing people from Stoneman Douglas in the nation’s capital — their old teachers and friends and families they hadn’t met since they graduated.

More than 1,000 miles from Parkland, a community started coming back together to stand up against the violence that shook their home.

‘We decide that our voices can be heard’

Bang’s entire family traveled to D.C. for the March for Our Lives. She and her mother, who had flown to Syracuse to meet with Bang the day before, rented a car and drove south from SU. Her sister and father drove north from Parkland.

They’d be joined by other Stoneman Douglas alumni, families, teachers and current students. More than 800,000 people would also descend on D.C. to rally between the White House and Capitol Building. And around the world, more than 800 similar marches would be held, all to protest gun violence and demand stricter gun regulation.

Bang arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue a few hours before the rally was scheduled to start, carrying a poster depicting a “children crossing” sign. Part of the sign was painted over in red, so it said “children dying” instead.

As Bang and dozens of Stoneman Douglas community members made their way into the rally, protesters in the standing-room only crowd parted to let them through. The Parkland group chanted, “Who are we? MSD!” as demonstrators thanked them.

During the rally, Bang said she broke down in tears. She said the event was closure, to an extent. But it was also a start.

“I think that was empowering, more than anything,” Bang said, while with other graduates after the march. “We can really make a difference in our own communities. And I think we take a little bit of that strength back and we go back to our homes, whether it’s UCF, or Maryland or Syracuse and we decide that our voices can be heard.”

After the march, she said it would still be difficult to go back to SU, away from the Parkland friends she could talk face-to-face with about the shooting. But she had new friends in New York, too. People she said she thinks she’ll learn to love and trust.

While in the crowd in D.C., Bang spotted a handful of people wearing SU apparel. She knew buses sponsored by the Student Association had brought in people from the university. A friend from SU had texted her, asking to meet up at the march.

“It’s empowering to know that there’s more people who care (who) I just couldn’t find because the campus is so large,” she said. “Knowing that there’s people that are there, whether it’s just one or two or whether it’s thousands, it means a lot.”