When a friend of Elasah Durgin's ran away from her home in Georgia, she knew who to call.

After hanging up the phone that day, Elasah, a tall, athletic honor student at Winlock High School with a knack for attracting friends' confidence, agonized over the choice before her.

"I'm so afraid that if I tell where she's going, next time when she runs away she won't call me and nobody will know where to find her," Elasah's mother Cathy Durgin recalled her daughter saying.

"It was a very difficult thing to a 14-year-old to break that trust," Cathy said.

Eventually, Elasah knew what she had to do. "Every time that girl would call, she would get more information about where she was," said Cathy. Police found Elasah's runaway friend in Olympia, Cathy recalled.

The two hardly spoke again until this December, Cathy said, when they patched things up to some extent.

Early on Christmas Eve, after a late night joking with her older sister Rhesa and, later, on conference calls with her boyfriend and other friends, Elasah died in her sleep. Doctors told the family the teenager's heart simply failed, and that she probably felt no pain. They are still investigating the cause.

Elasah, who went by Lasa, lived with her family in Winlock. She held the first clarinet chair in band. She also attended Christian Fellowship of Winlock, played for a traveling soccer team, and dabbled in track, basketball, ice skating and ballet. She enjoyed camping and hiking, and learned snowboarding from her now-23-year-old brother Jeb, a professional in the sport.

Central to almost all her activities, though, were her friends, who family said came to her easily. She was always tying up the phone lines, said Rhesa, 20.

From her mother's perspective, Lasa sometimes risked taking on too much responsibility as a confidant.

"She liked to mother everybody, so a lot of kids came to her with her problems," Cathy said. "I just worried that she needed more skills to help them through their problems."

Lasa occasionally wrote poetry and other creative work. After her death, her sister found on her computer two undelivered letters to former middle-school teachers, one of them urging a young teacher to keep a hard nose in dealing with troublemakers.

Rhesa, Lasa and Jeb were extremely close siblings, their mother said, and enjoyed teasing their father for his love of "Star Trek" or their mother for her supposedly advanced age.

Lasa also loved dogs, volunteering to raise seeing-eye dogs for blind people when the family lived in California. When her family moved to Washington, Lasa couldn't find a local group that did that work, so she tracked down a group in Olympia, who helped her raise a dog, Lotus, for 18 months.

Lasa shared her enjoyment of life with friends and superiors alike. In a letter to Lasa's family, her one-time English teacher, Kristy Iverson, remembered one May Day when, unexpectedly, the girl appeared in her garden with a bouquet of flowers and a note expressing her appreciation for Iverson "as a teacher and a person."

"The world needs more people like Lasa," Iverson wrote.