I knew Claire first as her old AOL screename "Freechild7." This was back in the day when the whole emailing, IMing, and webrowsing thing was new to all my friends. I say new but I guess it wasn't that new since it was around the fall of 1999 I got to know her. It was close enough though since 1997 through about the end of the 2000 school year was when I primarily met all my friends(the ones I know well now) through the internet.

The way it would happen is that someone had compiled a huge list of people they knew with their email addresses( Steve Knight and Alex Brandenburg are some of the culprits fresh in my mind). They would send out a mass email to al their friends. Of course, many of us on the list knew about the dreaded reply-to-all button which would not only reply to that person that sent the email but everyone on the list as well. This button would turn a simple message to be relayed to everyone into a huge forum with everyone's witty/funny/sarcastic/dumb replies to the original message. Often times the replies turned into different topics altogether. There was a lot of people that hated the fact that they got so many different emails that was just replies to some other replies. I guess it could get annoying because if you didn't pay attention to the original email(or didn't care),the resulting subsequent emails replying back wouldn't mean anything to you. I loved it however. I loved everyone's funny little replies to the topic whether it was relevant or not. These email-lists that I so aptly named "shit-lists" is how I meant Claire. She was one of those people( just like a Mr. Jody Barnes a.k.a. Stucohomes) that you could always count on a funny reply in their emails. Like many people on that list, I would know Claire's Screen Name/Email Address before I knew her actual name.

Unfortunately, AOL and AIM didn't have software to log conversations like they do now. Freechild7 and I had many great conversations when I first started talking to her during the fall of 1999. In retrospect, they probably weren't that great since a lot of the conversations weren't much about anything. A lot of it I remember was us just trying to be witty or silly. Something like playing around with the font size(like making it 72 pt. font and saying something like "think big!") or color(like making the text white so that it was invisible) was entertaining in itself. I guess it was back when the whole IMing thing was new so that IMing (in of itself) was fun.

I wish I remembered more of conversations but they're almost all but lost to me now. Claire's personality did shine through her words in IM conversations however. She'd always say "Hi Shawn!" as her greeting regardless of what was going on. And when she said bye(after we talked a while) she say "*love*"(asterisks outside the word 'love' to denote that action inside the asterisks is being done) as a clever way of saying she loves me. She also tried to be witty or funny whenever possible in IM conversations.

I remember one thing about her was that she always put random one word screennames on her buddy list. Her figuring that if they chose such a screen name as "God" or "Happiness" that they must be interesting or cool. We tried to come up with screennames all the time to find people like that. Unfortunately, a lot of them were AOL reserved names that were used my AOL employees. Most the time we IMed something to someone like "God" we'd get no reply no matter what we said. I got warned by AOL-administrators once because I said some "rude or profane" things after getting no reply for 30 minutes.

I remember another thing in our IM conversations was finding uses for other symbols in conversations. This was about the time I started using "(.)(.)" to denote breasts. I remember this because I sent it to Claire one time. She mentioned that she didn't have any. I was said something to the effect of "Oh I'm sorry you have (.)(.)"( my way of saying small boobs). She thought it was pretty funny after calling me a "¤", her made-up symbol for asshole.

It wasn't a while until I actually met Claire in person. I think the very first time I met her I didn't even know who she was at the time. One time I was telling Claire about one my stories from the last Riverhouse party during summer '99, the one that got busted by Steve's parents which I dubbed the "Last Great Party of '99". When I got to the part about Steve's mom walking in, seeing me sitting next to Emily Summerfield, giving me the evil eye, and saying to Emily "whoever gave you that beer to you can be convicted by law," Claire chimed in and said "That was you?!" It turned out we had ran into each other before, we just didn't know it.

I think the next time I'd met Claire wasn't that special either. I remember this was just when I got a CD-burner. I showed Claire my MP3 collection over the computer and she asked me to make a CD for her. After I made it, I told her to meet me at Denny's one time to get it. When she got there, I remember it not being very exciting at all to see her. She looked like she was busy and wanted to leave quickly when she got there. I gave her the CD, she thanked me, and that was about it. Maybe there was a couple more things that happened but Lenny, Emily, and I left pretty soon after that so I probably wasn't thinking about it too much at the time.

It wasn't until the summer of 2000 that I really got to know Claire well as person and not just as Freechild7. This was the heyday of Steve's Apartment. I don't know the specific details of the situation but for some reason she had moved out of her mom's places and decided to stay with Steve. After my last semester at IU, I started going over Steve's place when I was bored over the summer. Steve's place was the definite party place back then. Just like the Clarksville Denny's back then, if you were bored and looking for something to do you could be assured some people would show up to Steve's apartment. I think that's probably why Claire decided to live with Steve; She always seemed like she wanted to meet as many great people as possible.

I remember that my first time that I really got to talk to Claire in person for a long while was that night at Steve's apartment during Ted's 21st Birthday. I guess that would have placed it at Saturday May 6th, 2000 since Ted didn't show up until late with alcohol that night(probably after midnight where he would have been 21). A small party erupted at Steve's place that night. I think it was about 20-30 people. I don't remember much of anything other than the fact that we watched "Being John Malkovich" and that I had a very long conversation with Claire that night. The details of the conversation have since escaped me but that was the night that I real got to know Claire face to face as a person.

In the weeks that followed I ended up hanging out at Steve's place more and more. Steve's apartment was the place to be when you were bored and you were looking for people to hang out with. Half the time Steve wasn't even at his place but it never failed that someone would be over there hanging out. If anyone, it would most likely be Claire since she never really had a job that she worked at for more than a year. We'd hang out there at the apartment and talk about various movies and make many jokes. I had many fond memories of that place and hanging out with Claire, Steve, and whoever else that showed up.

Of all the things I did that summer I can't believe I worked for about a month. A full time 7-3pm job at that. I worked at the census bureau. It was stupid shit work(building kits for the enumerators for the 2000 census), but it paid pretty well. I remembered I heisted pen, pencils, paper, etc. and gave them to Steve and Claire. I don't know why. I guess it seemed like they needed it or something. I remember that they never had to worry about toilet paper as Claire would always snatch the huge rolls that were found in gas station restrooms. She took way more than they would ever use. She had like 30+ rolls by the end of that summer before they moved out of that apartment. I only mention this since it reminded me of the Maryland trip early that summe.

The Maryland trip was another great of experience where not only did I get to know Claire more but also Steve, Colin, and James as well. I forgot how it came up but Steve mentioned one night that Claire was heading to Baltimore for a soccer game. She was going to ride with her teammates but he decided that he would get his parent's van and make a trip out of it. It just so happened to worked out just well that they were going to leave at 4 on Friday so I could meet up with them right after work.

At work before the trip I had brought it my lab coat( as seen here). I don't remember why I wore it to work. Maybe it was because it looked awesome with my security badge that I had to wear to enter the building. Maybe I just wore it for functionality; That day I was making enumerator kits I filled up all the pockets in the coat with pens, paper, erasers, pencils, and such before I left. No one really noticed(or maybe cared) that I had filled up my pockets with that stuff. Maybe it was because everyone that saw me was curious why I was wearing the coat. Who knows? Less than 3 weeks later I would be laid off from the job because they didn't need enumerator kits anymore.

So once I got off work I drove right over to Steve's apartment. When I got there Jody and Claire were just sitting around talking. I unloaded my pockets. Jody asked me about the lab coat, I told him the job required it. Though I said in passing as a joke I think he took it serious later on. We sat around and talked for a bit while we wait for Steve and the others to show up. Once Steve showed up with his mom's minivan, Colin and James soon followed and we were off toward Maryland.

Recalling the Maryland trip is an exercise in memory recall noted mostly with nostalgia. I don't remember the sequence of events that occurred but I just have bits and pieces of what I do remember from the trip: I remember the drive out of Kentucky being a long one; I remember to listening to Moby's just released Play album while looking at the various hills and forests of Kentucky; I remember commenting to James at a busy gas station about how central hubs of transportation, which was like this gas station, fascinated me.

Those were most of what I remember on the way to Maryland. The last I thing I do remember of the trip there was hanging out in the very back of the van with Claire. The seat was laid back so that you lay down on your back to sleep. Claire and I talked mostly about various things. Various pursuits in life was the general topic I remember. I say that because at some point I know we started talking about relationship type stuff.

I know she mentioned a couple things about Mike Brooks. She was beginning to become infatuated with him over the course of the summer as ha came over to visit Steve a lot As a side note, you can look back to footage of her from the latter 2000 summer and tell when she was infatuated by Mike by looking at her facial expressions; Some of them were distinctively Mike's. I later brought it up to her one night at a party and she took it as a compliment. She told me that she liked of a couple of his expressions and intentionally copied them.

I didn't have a person currently in mind that I could relate to Claire about. The closest thing I could come to was my last infatuation with Shelley Yoder which had been probably been over since more than a year at that point. I told her the most unfortunate parts of that whole debacle and left it at that. I had not been happy about that whole thing and I just wanted to leave that topic. As the night went on we became pretty tired. As we confided in each other, she began to rest against me. At some point I decided to massage her back. I stopped at one point when she looked like she feel asleep but told me to keep going. I did until I either fell asleep or she did. I can't remember.

When I woke we found ourselves at the airport. I don't know who decided it, since I was asleep, but Steve was going to go in to try to find out where Claire's team was staying. I decided to go with Steve to the baggage pickup area where called all the local hotels. As Steve sat on the phone, on hold waiting for the hotel clerk the baggage conveyor belt started rolling. While it startled us at first we soon picked up it's rhythmic "chug-chug-ka-chunk" sound. We both came up with the idea that it should be sampled in some techno song as the bass line.