It didn't take long for me to realize there were countless Phoebe Princes.
Again and again I found myself referring to her as Phoebe.
I had never met the girl about whom I was writing, but, like everyone else, I had my own personal Phoebe Prince.
With the resolution last week of criminal charges against the six former South Hadley High School students accused of doing bad things to Phoebe Prince, it would seem that the saga of the 15-year-old girl who tragically took her own life is winding to an end, at least on the stage of public opinion.
In reality, her story will live on in legislation, song and print. As long as anyone can conjure her in their mind, there will be a Phoebe Prince.
Covering suicide is always touchy. Unless it's a public spectacle or involves someone famous, it's usually deemed a private matter.
In the case of Phoebe Prince, a fragile high school freshman who hanged herself in her own home, it was neither. But there were signs early on that this story was bigger than any of us.
I was emailing my kids from Mexico last year when Phoebe Prince's image popped up on the screen. At first I thought I'd accidentally logged onto MassLive.com, the online home of The Republican; it turned out it was Google.
On the way home, I was browsing through an airport newsstand in Florida when I spotted that same photo of Prince on the cover of a national magazine.
Once I was assigned to the story, it didn't take long for me to realize there were countless Phoebe Princes. People who had been bullied, people with an ax to grind against school bureaucracy, outcasts, parents of outcasts, the outraged, the sympathetic, the vindictive, the lonely - everyone had their own Phoebe Prince.
If you were a nerd in school, this was your chance for revenge. If you were Irish, it got your Irish up. Phoebe was everyone's patron saint.
And how perfect she was. Newly arrived from her native Ireland, Prince was trying to fit into a new environment in a new school in a new country, only to find heartbreak.
She was pretty, delicate and vulnerable. She filled the bill in a way which Carl Walker-Hoover, who was 11, black and from Springfield, never could, although he also hanged himself after being bullied at school.
As I followed Prince's story, I struggled to maintain some perspective, to keep in mind that I didn't really know her, only what other people said about her.
One day, someone sent me an email that was linked to a Phoebe Prince Facebook page. For half an hour, I clicked through dozens of photographs, spellbound by what I saw. This was a Phoebe Prince I hadn't encountered, a Phoebe Prince with friends. She mugged for the camera, flashed hip-hop signs, laughed. It was a girl full of life.
The lawyer for one of the defendants in the Prince case told the judge he had tears in his eyes when he finished reading the file on her. "I would have liked this girl," he said he had told his wife. Some Phoebe people dismissed it as posturing, but I know how he felt.
This will come as no news flash to any woman who has been one or any parent who has had one, but being a teenage girl is no picnic. You're trying to piece together an identity by taking cues from other kids who are trying to piece together an identity.
It can turn nasty, hurtful and traumatic, perhaps now more than ever in this era of super skinny models and relentless social networking. It's survival of the fittest and woe to the weak. At the same time, kids are often pulling away, painfully, from their parents as they outgrow the nest. We can only imagine what turmoil raged inside Phoebe Prince.
Frankly, listening to people use Prince as their whetstone gets old. That's their Phoebe Prince.
And lest we forget that there's money to made off Phoebe Prince, the court has barred the six teenage defendants from profiting by their association with her. Prince's story has spawned cottage industries that include well-compensated bullying experts, consultants and lawyers.
It's also good copy. At least now we won't be seeing "How I Bullied Phoebe Prince" books and magazine stories and TV talk-show confessions.
When I need to keep things in perspective, I think of Prince's family. They had to render their beautiful Phoebe's body into ash and bury it in the ground. With those ashes went all the promise of a vivacious girl's life and all the joy she might have given them.
Everyone else's Phoebe Prince pales in comparison.
Fred Contrada is a staff writer with The Republican. He can be reached at fcontrada@repub.com