Word: alicia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Paltrow may not be able to--or care to--parlay the role of this adorable meddler into a multimillion-dollar picture deal, as Clueless's Alicia Silverstone did. Still, Emma could conceivably vault Paltrow from her current status as bright ingenue to the top of the list of serious young actresses who combine Oscar eclat and box-office clout--a little Streep, a little Sandra Bullock. Anyway, Emma is a showcase part, handsomely played...
...weeks before she took her life, Alicia seemed particularly happy and motivated. Determined to improve her grades, she asked for a new seat in the math class, front and center. After the tragedy, the teacher, Sandra Crosby, and the students were haunted by that empty seat, and after much discussion, one of Alicia's friends volunteered to fill it. Crosby says she wishes she had known earlier that such a personality change is a common suicide-warning sign, perhaps indicating that Alicia had already made her decision to die and wanted to leave people with positive memories...
Some friends speculate that Amber was simply too nice to let Alicia die alone, and experts say that in double suicides, there is often one dominant, one submissive personality. But again, to the girls' friends this explanation is too simple. "I don't think it's all one person's fault," says Jennifer Champion. The more likely scenario is that the girls confided only in each other--and that each was absolutely the wrong person to help the other break the bonds of depression. "I just wish they'd talked to somebody," says Alicia's friend Michelle Williams...
...light of the earlier suicides, Amber's and Alicia's deaths hit San Pedro High particularly hard. Cyndy Lum, a psychiatric social worker who was part of the crisis-intervention team, describes the scene the first few days after the suicides hit the 6 o'clock news as "a large-scale psychiatric disaster." Students clustered in hallways weeping; classes sat numb and silent; teachers broke down at an after-school meeting. Says math teacher Crosby: "It was the roughest teaching day I've ever had." Because teenagers--impulsive and susceptible to fashion in all things--are considered particularly vulnerable...
...that finality that Amber's and Alicia's friends, at an age when they think they are immortal, are now left to make sense of, and which they understand--almost. "It was dumb," says Michelle Williams. "They didn't even get a chance to live--to feel how it is to drive, to grow up and have kids. They're probably saying right now how dumb...