Word: amber
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...both girls were in fact known to be troubled--Alicia, in particular, had struggled with depression and drugs--and both had received some counseling. Alicia had run away from home, where she lived with her mother, stepfather and older sister, more than once, and Amber too ran away. According to Amber's father Marty Hernandez, earlier this year the two girls got as far as Santa Monica together and were missing for five days before the police found them...
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...
Famous around school for her mohawk that was pink one day, orange the next, and for her sense of style, Amber "is funny, easy to get along with," says Clarissa Muzzy, still speaking of her friend in the present tense. "She listens to people and speaks her mind." She shone in English class, where, not incidentally, just before her death she had taken the role of Juliet in a class reading. In a two-page autobiography she wrote just a couple of weeks before she died, she said she wanted to be a marine biologist and that the thing...
...unhappy, Amber's father says, it was with "normal teenage problems": she hated her curfew, balked at her chores and thought her parents were too strict. She had tried marijuana a few times, and her parents immediately sent her to drug counseling. "We didn't throw her in and say, 'Fix her,'" Hernandez says. "We all participated as a family." The day before her death, she proudly told a friend that she had not smoked pot in seven weeks...
Hernandez, an environmental-protection specialist for the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, describes his daughter as a gentle soul. One afternoon they went to look at tidal pools together. The tide had come in, stranding hundreds of sea cucumbers. Amber spent the afternoon rescuing the helpless things. "She was a happy girl," he says. "I don't know what happened." He adds, "My message is to love your kids as much as you can, because you don't know what's going to happen...