Word: amber
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Just before graduating from ninth grade, Alicia Hayes, 15, and Amber Hernandez, 14, opted out of adolescence at this spot. On the night of Wednesday, May 22, Amber had a dispute with her parents and ran from the house. Sometime later, she and Alicia went to Point Fermin, climbed the fence and stood amid the wildflowers. They took their shoes off, tied their wrists together with twine and jumped. The next day a beachcomber found their broken bodies on the rocks at water's edge, some 150 ft. below. "Mom and Dad, I love you," read the note Amber left...
...case with most suicides, no one really understands what went through the girls' minds at that moment, and in the end perhaps it doesn't matter. What matters is the wreckage the girls left behind: families and friends grief-stricken and bewildered--and extremely vulnerable. Amber and Alicia were not the first students from San Pedro High School to commit suicide this year; in March, Christopher Mills, a junior, and his girlfriend Heidi Chamberlain, who went to a different school, also leaped to their death from the cliffs by the Pacific. So the second double suicide ignited fear...
Unraveling Amber's and Alicia's short stories is a difficult task, made harder still by the swirling rumors passed along among the excitable ninth-graders like trading cards. After Chris Mills killed himself in March, crisis teams went to the school but talked mostly with students in his class, the 11th grade. There was no opportunity then to identify Alicia, who knew Mills slightly, as a particular copycat risk. The local press and tabloid-television reporters made much of the fact that both girls hung with a crowd that wore black clothes and black lipstick and listened to gothic...
...name notwithstanding, amber isn't always amber in color. It can also be milky white, red and even blue or green--more than 250 different shades in all, say researchers--and artists have used just about every one of them...
Because it sometimes contains dead animals, amber was strongly associated with death in ancient times. "It was believed to serve as a ray of light for the dead person in the afterlife," says Faya Causey, a historian of ancient art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Many of the amber figurines carved during the classical period relate either to death or to fertility and rejuvenation. Amber may have been used by Egyptians in the mummification process, possibly because it is a powerful desiccant, or drying agent. It was also valued as a medicine. According to Pliny the Elder...