Emily Elizabeth Jacobs

Emily Elizabeth Jacobs was killed by a drunk driver early the morning of December 27, 1998. She was 18.

For three summers during junior high and high school, I attended a so-called "program for talented youth", Duke University's Talent Identification Program, in Durham, NC. The summer program, 'TIP', was a three week island of friendship, learning, growing, and happiness for a few hundred students from all over the US and overseas. It was an escape from the structure of the classroom which all too often stifled the creativity of those who wanted to learn more than what was spoon-fed to them, who wanted to go beyond the boundaries of traditional memorization and multiple-choice tests. A few hundred of us came to the hot, thunderstorm-prone summer Duke campus and discovered that our 12-16-year-old dreams and plans weren't all that farfetched, weren't so unique that we'd never find anyone to share them, weren't impossible. We were TIPsters, and we were in love with each other and the future we suddenly saw wasn't the impossibility some of our teachers back home told us it was.

My second summer at TIP, I arrived at Raleigh-Durham International Airport with a bulging duffel bag, a name tag, and instructions to look for a tall woman wearing all yellow with a TIP sign. My flight had been delayed out of La Guardia, and so I was somewhat nervous that the ride van might have left me behind. I wandered around the baggage claim area, and a voice shouted above the din of the PA system. "TIP person! with the name tag!". I looked around, but couldn't find the voice in the crowded room. Pushing towards where I'd heard the caller, I finally found a shortish girl of about 11 with round silver-framed glasses, shoulder-length black hair, a t-shirt depicting the Milky Way galaxy with an arrow noting "you are here", and a suitcase rather larger than she was.

"Hi-I'm-Emily-Did-we-miss-the-van?" her words rushed out on top of each other in a high-voiced stream.

Oh well, there went my hope for someone who actually knew what was going on.

"I think we did. I haven't seen anyone else."

Emily looked crestfallen. I offered to help her with her bag (it later turned out that she'd packed a pretty impressive library), and via an assortment of helpful airport people, telephone operators, and program administrators, we finally made it to campus.

Normally, Emily would have been in the first-year dorm, and I across the quad in second-year. Emily, however, had bad allergies and needed to be in an air-conditioned room, and the first-year dorm's wiring couldn't handle air conditioners. So later that night we found ourselves next-door neighbors; in fact, we shared a door adjoining our rooms which, while locked, yielded easily to five fellow students armed with a battering ram (read: chair).

Emily was the anti-stereotyper's nightmare. Every bad stereotype you can dredge up about a prepubescent nerd girl with a penchant for unicorns, biology, and NASA, applied to and seemed to be defined by her. She was arrogant and annoying and loud and demanding and presumptuous and and

and quiet and sweet and dazzlingly, brilliantly intelligent and had the tendency to seek out with eerie accuracy and quickness whoever was sick or exhausted or having trouble with their studies or was emotionally crashing into a brick wall because of the sheer intensity of the whole place, the work, the play, the whirlwind teenage and preteenage romances that squeezed what seemed like years of a relationship into a week, a day, or in one notable case, forty-five minutes. She would seek them out and cuddle with them in a chair in the corner of the sunny Lilly Law Library on East Campus or would drag someone away from their books and onto a bus to West Campus to wander among the flowery trails or sit in the Duke Chapel (an odd name for a large cathedral, but that's another story) contemplating God, life, or whether there were any intracampus buses running at three in the morning (yes, but not many). I was blessed with this treatment on more occasions than I deserved, by dint of being her neighbor.

We were of course in love. Everyone on our hall knew it except the two of us. We fought constantly over music, whether my roommate and I should be allowed to keep the door open and so share the air conditioning, wake-up times, and pretty much everything else two people in a quasidomestic situation can disagree on. And we spent pretty much every waking moment together that we weren't asleep, in class, or pointedly not speaking to one another.

The three weeks ended too soon, but we wrote to each other dutifully throughout the year. Of course, a letter every day turned into a letter every week turned into a month, two months ... and then she got a Compuserve account and we were writing every day again.

The next summer was similar. The one after that, I was in a regular non-TIP undergraduate class at Duke, but she wasn't at TIP, having gone abroad to an exchange program in Japan. We wrote nearly every day, and I kept her as updated as I could on what was happening at TIP, given I wasn't a part of it, but on the same campus.

Over the past 3-4 years, we wrote less and less, writing only every month or two, but always as if we'd been together just the day before.

I last saw Emily in Boston in 1997. She was passing through the area with her family, and we arranged our schedules so we could go to a concert together. We hugged and talked and smiled a lot, and argued loudly over the proper amount of sugar to put on cereal, and whether or not lining up Cheerios and calling it 'serial cereal' was funny.

Yes, Emily, I agree. It's pretty funny.

My love to you always.