A few months ago, Kayleigh Raposa decided to paint her room. Filled to the rafters with clothes, photos, books, trophies and ribbons from her years in sports, the Mt. Hope High School junior's room was every bit a teenager's, right down to the color choice: bright pink with dark pink polka dots.

"She picked out the colors," said her mother, Chris, laughing as she stood in the room Monday afternoon. "John (her father) went to Home Depot to get the paint and they were like, 'Are you sure?' "

"That's what she wanted," said Mr. Raposa, shaking his head and smiling.

Smiles and memories - of the pink room, of her laugh, her smile and of her enormous potential - have been getting the Raposas and Kayleigh's friends through the past five days, though it's been hard. The 16-year-old student died early Saturday morning after the car she was a passenger in struck a utility pole on Michael Drive in Bristol. The driver, Julie Alfano, was injured in the crash.

Kayleigh, who grew up in Warren, leaves behind her parents, younger sisters Shaelyn and Shannon, dog Cody, and hundreds of friends. By all accounts, she and her friends were inseparable, from their days in the Warren parks program, through youth soccer and into high school. As news of the tragedy spread through Bristol and Warren early Saturday and in the days since, those friends have closed ranks around the Raposas, sending hundreds of Instant Messages (IMs) to Kayleigh's computer and visiting, in a nearly unbroken stream, the Raposas' home in the Touisset section of Warren. They've been welcomed with open arms, as Kayleigh's friends always were.

"It's actually been good for us, to have them," said Mrs. Raposa. "What's harder is when we're alone. You start to think about it."

Easier, they said, is remembering the impact their daughter made and the promise she held.

Successful student and athlete

A three-sport athlete, Kayleigh ran cross country, played soccer for years and as a "tweener" split playing time between the junior varsity and varsity basketball teams at Mt. Hope. Though she was short- "She was tiny, tiny," said her father - she made up for her size with competitiveness and spirit.

"People describe her as a little spitfire," said her mother. "She was always so tiny until about a year ago. Finally, she doubled in size and all of a sudden blossomed into this gorgeous, gorgeous young woman. She was always laughing or smiling, and we always joke around because she was always the happiest person. Every picture you see of her she's laughing or smiling, except when she was playing basketball or soccer. If they were winning, she was happy. But if they were losing, she was miserable."

"She was a feisty little one," agreed junior varsity coach Kyle Teixeira, the big brother of one of her best friends, Ariel.

"She never quit. She was a good teammate, and she helped out all the young girls. She was always in good spirits, and the young girls really looked up to her."

That competitive drive may have come from her father, who is president of Warren Youth Soccer and has been active in sports most of his life.

One of his favorite stories is of the first time he and Kayleigh trained together for a 5K road race in Warren. That first year, he measured out five kilometers in the neighborhood and started running it with Kayleigh a few weeks before the race.

"We ran it, and when we finished, I pulled up at the end to let her win. Later, before the race, I told Chris that if I'm ahead I'll let up so she can win. When we did the real race, she dashed out right ahead and she just took off. She finished like three minutes ahead of me. I remember I was struggling to the finish and she came out with a watermelon slice for me.

"That was the kind of kid she was."

Nick Massed still smiles when he thinks about Kayleigh. As a coach in Warren Youth Soccer and a long-time friend of the Raposas, he coached Kayleigh for years and believes she was at her happiest with her friends on the soccer field. When he thinks of her, he said, his mind invariably wanders to K-9.

"Starting when she was under 12, she would show up at the games with this big stuffed dog, she would just drag it across the field and put it on the bench. She called it K-9, and she would bring it to every single game. She always had it, it was practically bigger than her, but K-9 became our team mascot."

Kayleigh, always the leader and motivator, made a big impact with K-9, he said.

"It was her way of keeping everybody loose. She was a very special kid."

"She was like my little sister," added varsity basketball team tri-captain Dayna Carissimi. "She was an honor student, she was into sports, she was just really well-rounded; I thought of her as a little sister."

Kayleigh had been scheduled to appear in a playoff game Wednesday night, and Ms. Carissimi said the girls will play the game in tribute to their friend and teammate.

"We're expecting a lot of people to support us Wednesday," she said. "I know the school is asking people to come out as a way of supporting Kayleigh."

Even so, those involved are taking things in perspective. What's important is not the game, but Kayleigh's memory. Team coach Bill St. Vincent remembered Kayleigh as a good kid who used to high five all her fellow teammates during start-of-game introductions. She liked to rally her teammates, he said, and they loved her in return. Now is a time for the teammates to remember her life and the impact she made.

"We're definitely going to miss her," he said. "We tell the girls all the time that basketball is important. But in the grand scheme of things, it really is small. It's times like these you see just how small it really is."

She wanted to teach

Away from sports, children were another one of Kayleigh's loves.

She volunteered at Purple Playschool, a daycare center operated at the high school, which gives students hands-on experience at taking care of youngsters. She hoped this summer to work in "park," as the Raposas call the Warren Recreation Department's summer parks program, and longer-term saw herself studying early childhood education, her mother's profession.

"She had a gift, a real gift," said her mother, a preschool teacher at Tots in Barrington. "When kids saw her, they would light up. She loved it; she soaked up the kids."

Park was a big part of her life, and before the accident she had been putting her resume together in hopes of landing a counselor job there this summer.

According to Warren resident Adam Tracy, Kayleigh would have done a great job. The 22-year-old, himself a long-time counselor in the town's park program, met her when she first joined about six years ago. He was impressed by her from the start.

"She was just amazing. I can remember the first day she signed up. She was the cutest little kid you've ever seen," he said.

She also had a mischievous streak. Mr. Tracy used to have an old, beat-up car, and occasionally he'd give Kayleigh and her friends rides. Unfortunately, he said, he always left his sunglasses on the front seat.

"She would always wear them and get her fingerprints on them," he said.
"I would always tell her, 'Don't get your prints on them,' and she would touch them and then hand them back to me all smudged up, and start laughing."

"She just made everyone smile," said Mr. Tracy.

Always there for you

That's one of the things friend Tara Turnbull, also a Mt. Hope junior, remembers most.

She and Kayleigh were friends since kindergarten. They did everything together. They loved to shop, loved see late-night movies, and loved to goof around together.

One of her favorite photos was taken in November. It shows the two of them walking through the halls of Mt. Hope. Kayleigh is dressed as Tinkerbell, Tara as Snow White; the two dressed up as part of the school's Spirit Week, and she remembers being very nervous as she and Kayleigh prepared to walk in from the school parking lot that morning.

"We were kind of embarrassed," she said. "We didn't know if we were going to be the only ones dressed up. But we got out and she smiled and we laughed about it. We were all right."

The best parts of Kayleigh, she said, were her positive attitude, her smile and her laugh. She used all liberally, she said.

"Everybody loved Kayleigh. I can remember all the times I was in a bad mood, she always cheered me up," she said. "She was always there for me. We would call each other Biffel (Best Friends For Life). It was always her and me attached, whenever we went somewhere."

Hearing about the accident early Saturday morning was heart-breaking, she said. She wasn't with Kayleigh that night - Kaleigh had gone to a boy's basketball game at Mt. Hope, then Classic Pizza for a snack and then a party thrown by a classmate in Bristol - but wishes she had been. When the group of friends went out, Tara said, "we always stuck together."

"I feel guilty, because if I was there, she would have been with me. It was always me and her, attached."

One student who was with Kayleigh was Samantha Cruz, 16, a fellow Mt. Hope junior and one of her best friends. She had gone to the same Bristol party Kayleigh went to, and remembers her smiling and laughing right up until she left with the driver, Warren resident Julie Alfano.

"I was with her 15 minutes before the accident," she said. "I found out later ... I couldn't believe it. We were really close friends. We always knew each other, but we got really close over the last year. We were in a lot of the same classes."

Samantha said Kayleigh was so close to her family that she would come over her house and walk in without knocking. She was part of the family, she said.

"I just can't believe she's gone."

Outporing of support

The Raposas live in an older gray home atop a bluff overlooking the Kickemuit River. It sits across the street from the water and has a view of the river and the Bristol shoreline beyond. The family has always lived there; the home was Mrs. Raposa's summer home growing up. In the days since the accident, it's been a busy place.

Dozens of Kayleigh's friends have beaten a well-worn path to the Raposas' door, which despite recent work - "I chose this week to re-do the kitchen," said Mr. Raposa - has been a good place for the kids to come. The living room walls are filled with family photos, and on the floor behind the couch, hundreds of other photos are heaped in an enormous pile. The Raposas have been pouring through the photos, and friends have been bringing their own.

"It's good for the kids to come and deal with it together, to see," said Mr. Raposa.

Many of those friends first arrived Saturday after Nick Massed, a coach in Warren soccer and the father of a friend of Kayleigh's, called the Raposas to ask if kids could come over and pay their respects. Mr. Raposa said 'sure,' and before long the house was full.

"So they came over, they went into Kayleigh's room and went through her things and cried ..."

"... and sang," added Mrs. Raposa. "They started singing these songs that were all their songs."

Despite her own personal grief, Mrs. Raposa said she's worried about Kayleigh's friends, including Julie Alfano.

"She and Julie played soccer together since they were six," she said. "We don't know what happened, why it happened, but we know that they were together and that they loved each other. Julie's going to need a lot of support in this, too. We really want people to know that."

The other friends, she said, need similar attention.

"We're so worried about them. These wonderful sweet kids shouldn't have to go through this. Seeing them, we're so impressed by how many people's lives she touched. I think that's why she was such a wonderful person, because she had so many wonderful friends, coaches, teachers."

"She really was a wonderful person."

Bill Estrella worries about the same things. The chairman of the Bristol Warren Regional School Committee, Mr. Estrella first heard about the accident after receiving a frantic call from his daughter early Saturday morning.

"We're just trying to take it one day at a time," said Mr. Estrella, whose daughter played on the basketball team with Kayleigh.

"The girls are really just trying to be there for each other now," he said. "It's hard."

A parting gift

It may be hard, but many of Kayleigh's friends are comforted, at least in part, by the gifts she left them with.

Saturday evening, as Tara and the other friends rummaged through Kayleigh's room, Tara found something she didn't expect - a Christmas present that had never been given to her.

Mr. Raposa said the present, a large cardboard card, had been kicking around since the holidays, and he knew his daughter was holding onto it until he could find the perfect time to give it to her friend.

"It was this huge card, a posterboard folded in half, with writing on all four sides," said Tara. "It said things like Biffel, Merry Christmas to my best friend in the whole world."

"We'd have these movie nights, and we'd always go shopping. On the inside of the card there was a gift certificate to American Eagle, with a note saying this was for the next time we went shopping. And she drew a picture of me and her."

"The whole card was filled with all the good times we had. It kind of made me laugh because I could picture all the good times."