She had charisma. Even on MySpace, äRRiel was a magnetic figure. “She was punk before punk was ‘cool’; a MySpacer before MySpace was ‘cool,’ ” writes MySpace friend “-mrk-”in a blog entry. “[She] made free layouts before they were all over the place.”

Strangers actually begged her to be their friend like lovesick high schoolers. One girl named Misty wrote, “Everyone wants to be your friend because you are so damn cool . . . IF you ever decide to add me that would be swell.”

A major allure of äRRiel’s online persona was the gorgeously rough-hewn, deftly narrated, and frank first-person prose on her MySpace blog. At 14, she ran away from her Woods Hole home, eventually ending up in San Francisco. She told everyone she was four years older than she was, “As if no one would notice the under-ripened breasts beneath my slips and fishnet stockings, and the chubby cheeks I hid behind a mask of Robert Smith make-up and teased hair.” She recalls squatting in a burned-out church on Dolores Street in a debris-filled roomand being in a Haight Street alley in San Francisco, “smoking crack and waiting for my heart to explode, thinking, ‘This would be a perfect time for the credits to roll.’ ”

They didn’t. After five months on the road, äRRiel phoned her parents from Boulder, Colorado, and told them she wanted to come home. She ended up back in Boston, surviving as a bike courier, spare-changing on Cambridge sidewalks, and helping homeless kids in the Pit in Harvard Square. She created a superhero alter ego, the Smelly Avenger: the homeless, dumpster-diving protagonist in her self-published zine The Dirty Gurl Chronicles who gets her powers from a rubbish-picked leotard and uses them to fight the MBTA police.

But bad things did happen out on the road. For äRRiel, it was heroin addiction and Hepatitis C, two struggles she writes about with honesty in her MySpace blog. In the past year or so, Hepatitis C severely weakened äRRiel to the point where she couldn’t pedal a bike anymore — and she’d been clean for nearly three years. She was set to undergo 24 weeks of chemotherapy that doctors said could offer a 90 percent chance of cure. But at the last minute, one doctor decided she wasn’t going to let äRRiel go through the treatment because her patient had a history of depression and feared äRRiel would commit suicide — even though her family had already arranged for an extensive network of supporters.

“This threw äRRiel into a total depression — it’s the only way to put it,” Dobie says solemnly. “She went out for a walk on a Wednesday, and I don’t know what happened. She ran into an old friend, an addict . . . Her brothers were out looking for her, everybody was out looking for her, we couldn’t find her.” His voice cracks. “Then Friday morning she sent me a text message saying, ‘Dad, I’m fine, my phone needs to be recharged, I ran into an old friend, I’m very tired, I’ve been up all night.’ And she called me about two o’clock that afternoon: ‘Dad, I’ll see you tonight, I love you.’ I got an anonymous call saying I needed to go to the hospital because something bad had happened to my daughter. I went there and she was ...” Dobie’s voice trails off in a hush.

äRRiel’s ashes sit on Dobie’s desk. “To me, [the site] is more like her living presence,” Dobie admits. “I go there sometimes — well, often — just to be close to her.”

Almost every day, friends still leave äRRiel messages. “We don’t have a gravesite,” explains Marsha St. Claire-Buza, a friend of äRRiel’s from California.  “[The page is] the grave we’re visiting right there.”

“For some of us she knew really well, she really did take a piece of us with her,” says Berrera. Her MySpace profile “is like the piece that she left behind for us.”

There are tributes to äRRiel all over MySpace: forums, posted photos, even an äRRiel fan club formed to cheer her up last March. One of äRRiel’s closest friends, Steve, whose personal page is itself an äRRiel homage, left her a comment on March 7:

I was asked to do an interview on you. I think I’ll pass on it. However, if you are ever curious as to what I would have said....I’ll tell you:
Interviewer: “Tell me about äRRiel”
Me: “She was better than both of us”
That is all.

On the Web:
MySpace: //www.myspace.com
Larry Dobie's MySpace page: //www.myspace.com/arrielsrolemodel
äRRiel's MySpace page: //www.myspace.com/arriel
äRRiel's online portfolio: //www.geocities.com/little_sister_shotgun/
Taylor Behl's profile: //www.myspace.com/doowop
MyDeathSpace: //mydeathspace.com
MyDeathSpace LiveJournal home: //community.livejournal.com/myspace_deaths/
Josh Ballard's former home: //www.myspace.com/jloveb
You're the Man Now, Dog parody site: //ytmnd.com

Email the author:
Camille Dodero: cdodero@thephoenix.com