Casie Horgan

My name is Casie and I was Paige’s roommate this past semester, we shared a double in our incredible Barbour 150 suite.

Before I begin sharing my beautiful memories of Paige I wanted to speak quickly about the gathering I was able to attend at Brown University on Thursday where over 50 students who were at school for the summer assembled to share their memories of Paige. The outpouring of support and love was overwhelming and I wish I could have bottled up every single testimony to the impressions of joy and companionship she made on every person she met. Particularly noteworthy was the outreach from everybody who was affected by Paige’s role as a Women’s Peer Counselor her sophomore year. Freshmen who had been counseled by Paige expressed their gratitude for her helping them get through the difficult transition of freshman year. And while I know Paige learned a lot from the counseling program about leadership I sensed from all of the counselors that they learned an equal amount from her about what it means to be a strong woman. Everyone at Brown campus and people across the world, from upstate Maine, to New Orleans, to Nairobi, Kenya are sending their thoughts prayers and memories this way.

Paige was my creative partner. We knew how to bounce ideas off of each other and build them up to irrational levels of absurdity instantly. We were both human biology majors and thus shared a lot of classes together. Freshman year while studying for our cellular and molecular biology midterm we decided we should put some of the info into a song to help us learn the subject matter. After a few hours of time, which may have been slightly more productive if it were spent actually studying, we had crafted a masterpiece. To the tune of Salt and Peppa’s ‘Let’s Talk About Sex’, our hit ‘Let’s Talk About Cells’ quickly turned into a local cult phenomenon. We entered it into the school’s Alternative Science Fair where we placed second…some questionable judging bias was involved. Paige decided to email the song lyrics to our Cell bio professor, so he could see what his class inspired. On the day of the final exam we both arrived to the classroom, incredibly nervous to take the exam. Our professor quieted the class and announced ‘You’ll notice you’ve only had the opportunity to earn 25 of the possible 50 bonus points for the semester. The final 25 points, depend on a performance by two students’. He then had Paige and I report to the front of the 300 person lecture hall and perform our science rap, a capella, dance routine included.

Paige started a new tradition in our room this year, which she later spread to include the entire suite that was called ‘Song of the Week’. On mornings when I didn’t want to get out of bed or wasn’t feeling well or just needed a laugh, she would plant herself at the foot of my bed and do this awkward dance that only she could possibly pull off where her feet remained planted and only her torso would move. Once I was eventually out of bed, we would put on the song of the week and dance together in our room to it. This often led to injuries while we were flinging ourselves into our beds and dressers or falling off the common room couches. Paige was the one to dub Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ our official rallying song of Spring Weekend 2010. Many found this song a questionable party anthem but for our suite it just made sense. Paige was our creative spark; our ‘ideas’ person; the person who would play a song on repeat for a week straight because she liked it and that was enough; the person who would spend an entire afternoon speaking in accents with you so we could ‘practEESe our FRONCH’; the person who juggled 15 activities and classes at the same time and never once made someone feel unimportant or a hassle; the person who would lie in bed with you when you were feeling upset or angry or alone until 2 in the morning even when she had to be up at 6 for a Frisbee tournament.

I’ve been struggling these past few days with how to properly continue on in a place where that person, that spirit, doesn’t exist. I ask myself ‘what would Paige want us to do’ and hundreds of answers have come to my head, but I’ve decided that I think mostly, Paige would want us to dance. She danced to a beat that was so beautiful and so original and so perfectly Paige. I am forever grateful and honored that I got to dance alongside her, even for a short time, and that she shared her tune with me. I hope we all find time to dance in these upcoming months and to celebrate the spirit she planted in each of us and that I can feel with me everywhere I go. And on days when it feels difficult to breathe and too hard to move, maybe we can just plant our feet and move our torsos and know that she is there. I love you Paigey.