My knuckles turned white against the steering wheel as the on-ramp to I-90 curved sharply upward. The engine hummed beneath me, gathering speed as the acceleration lane narrowed, forcing me to merge with the rush of vehicles already traveling at highway speed. My breath came in shallow gasps, my eyes darting frantically between my mirrors and the road ahead.

"You're doing fine," my mom said from the passenger seat, her voice steady but distant, as if coming through water.

But I wasn't fine. My heart hammered against my ribs with such force I was certain it would bruise. This wasn't just first-time driver anxiety. This was raw, primal fear—the kind that floods your system when mortality becomes tangible rather than theoretical. Just weeks earlier, my best friend's car had drifted over a median, resulting in a head-on collision that ended her life instantly. Now here I was, a newly permitted driver, forcing myself onto a merciless ribbon of asphalt, just like the one that had claimed her.

I signaled, checked my blind spot through tear-blurred vision, and felt the car sway slightly as I merged onto I-90. A semi-truck loomed in my rearview mirror, and for a moment, I could almost feel what Katie must have felt in those final seconds—that terrible, suspended moment when you know what's coming but can do nothing to stop it.

Death at any age comes as a shell shock, especially when it arrives without warning—sudden, tragic, and unexpected. The universe seems to tear at its seams, revealing a terrible void that wasn't supposed to be there, not yet. Double the tragedy when it's a young person who had just turned 18, te to cross their high school stage and carry their diploma over to their smiling family. The same family now sits in silence, donning all black at their middle child's funeral, their faces masked with incomprehensible grief.

There's something fundamentally wrong about teenagers attending funerals for other teenagers. At that age, we're supposed to be invincible, our mortality a distant concern for some future version of ourselves. We're meant to make mistakes, to recover, to learn and grow and become. Death isn't supposed to interrupt the becoming.

Katie Lynn Bell lived in Shreveport, Louisiana for most of her life. Shreveport isn't the postcard city that tourism boards advertise. It's a place where poverty runs deep, where literacy rates struggle below national averages, and where crime statistics tell the story of systemic neglect. In fact, the city witnessed the largest number of homicides in its recorded history in 2021, eclipsing the previous record set in 1993. Shreveport is the kind of place where dreams often wither before they have a chance to take root, where potential is frequently buried beneath the weight of circumstance.

Katie’s dream was to be a kindergarten teacher, but without access to higher education and stuck working a minimum wage job as a barista, Bell wasn’t sure what was next for her. But she knew one thing, she wanted a future, one where she could contribute to the lives of others. And maybe, down the line, explore the world beyond Shreveport’s borders - as at the age of 18, she had only ever been to Texas and Alabama.

For a long time, Katie felt like a loner, an outsider even among her marching band peers. In the hallways of her high school, she moved like a bright fish swimming against a muddy current—visible but somehow separate. Katie found her solace through online platforms, discovering genuine community in fandom spaces, primarily surrounding pop music. It was there, in the digital embrace of shared passion, that she found her people.

Fandom spaces in the mid-2010s were uniquely welcoming sanctuaries, especially when pop girlies ruled the world. These virtual communities offered something that physical spaces often couldn't—acceptance without prerequisite, belonging without the politics of appearance or social status. Online, you could be judged by the content of your character rather than the brand of your clothes or which lunch table had room for you.

The affordances of online communities were paradoxical—faceless yet deeply intimate. You'd form friendships deeper than ones at school, which were often rejected or misaligned, especially in places like Shreveport. There was freedom in the distance, in knowing that the person on the other end of the conversation had chosen to be there, had chosen you, rather than simply being thrown together by geographic coincidence.

In these spaces, you could be vulnerable without fear of hallway whispers the next day. You could share your deepest thoughts at 2 AM with someone who might be thousands of miles away but somehow closer to your heart than the person sitting next to you in homeroom. The connections formed weren't despite the digital divide—they were intensified by it.

Katie Bell, though, was well loved beyond the digital realm. Her family adored her, and friends who stayed by her side, like Brayden, who she supported early in her transition, were always in her corner. Still, the fandom space was something else entirely—a chosen family bound by shared passions rather than circumstance or obligation.

Unironically, Katie was an avid Katy Perry fan, colloquially known as a Katycat, though she would rather join the football team than be caught calling herself that. Her love for Perry's music was genuine but tempered with the self-awareness that comes from growing up in a place where enthusiasm is often mistaken for weakness.

Katie Bell was fiercely, unapologetically herself, always a ball of light and energy, the funniest person in a room (or groupchat). Her humor crackled like electricity, unexpected and brilliant, cutting through tension or awkwardness with perfectly timed observations that would leave you gasping for breath between laughs. But it was her willingness to stick up for anyone being bullied or feeling ostracized that had me, at 13, in absolute awe.

She wielded her words like shields, stepping between targets and tormentors online with the casual confidence of someone who knows exactly who they are and refuses to let others be diminished. What I didn't know then was that Katie was a few years older than me. I, at the time, was freshly out of middle school, navigating the treacherous waters of early adolescence with all its insecurities and uncertainties. And at the hands of nothing but shared interests both online and in person, I mustered up the courage to message Katie.

"hiiii, we are in (redacted) group chat together, i think you are very funny and seem super cool!"

As embarrassing as that message might seem today, with its excess of enthusiasm and lack of sophistication, it would change the course of my life forever.

We began tapping at each other through screens, exchanging the longest DM messages that Twitter at the time would allow. Our conversations spilled over the artificial constraints of character limits, thoughts tumbling into one another with the breathless energy of people who have found someone who truly gets them. We graduated to FaceTime and phone calls, and I talked to her more than anyone else in my day-to-day life.

We bonded not only over our love of Katy Perry but our mutual obsession with the hit television series "Pretty Little Liars." We both adored the first queer couple we had seen on TV, Maya and Emily, and would talk about our acceptance and celebration of queerness, though neither one of us had registered at the time that we were both definitely not straight.

While I was away at summer camp for four weeks out of the year, Katie would send me hand-typed messages about all the updates happening on "Pretty Little Liars." Watching each episode carefully, picking out all the clues, and keeping me in the loop while I had no access to technology. That's what friendship was. She transcribed entire scenes, analyzing character motivations and plot developments with the dedication of a scholar studying ancient texts, all so I wouldn't miss a beat.

She was there beyond the fun too. She supported me when other people online chose to get under my skin and make fun of me because I was a little younger and a little more naïve. Katie was always there to teach me to stand up for myself and what was and wasn't acceptable. She celebrated me for me, not for who she wanted me to be or who others thought I should be.

That's just the kind of person she was. Her humor was lightning in a bottle—the videos and tweets she shared would truly send me into fits of laughter so intense my sides would ache and tears would stream down my face. It was a crime against comedy that she never got what we in the fandom called "noticed" (a like or retweet from our favorite celebrities), because she truly was so creative. Her humor wasn't just funny; it was insightful, cutting through pretense and getting to the heart of things with surgical precision.

Katie taught me that to be cringe is to be free, to not give a fuck what anyone else thinks of you, and sometimes that breaking frivolous rules was a part of growing up. She lived this philosophy, dancing in parking lots when a good song came on the radio, speaking her mind even when it wasn't the popular opinion, wearing what made her feel good rather than what was on trend. In a world obsessed with fitting in, Katie made standing out look like the only sensible option.

Katie saw me. For once in my life, though I was always picked last and made fun of to my face and behind my back, Katie always picked me first, always lifted me up and reminded me of my worth, even if it was just through a series of memes. She recognized something in me that I couldn't yet see in myself—potential, value, worthiness—and she reflected it back to me consistently, making it impossible for me to forget.

Flash forward to me back on the freeway, panicking: A few weeks prior,I was getting my permit to drive in what felt like minutes following a car crash that led to the death of my best friend. The cruel irony wasn't lost on me—learning to navigate the very thing that had taken her from this world.

I found out while on the chaise lounge of my mom's house, my head tilted in confusion when I got a DM from a friend asking "are you ok?" Unsure of what he was referencing, I thoughtlessly answered, "yeah, ofc, why?" It was a minute later I'd see this on my timeline:

"Katie Lynn Bell, 18, of Shreveport Louisiana died last night in a tragic head-on collision when her car went over the median, details are still being investigated"

I fell to the ground, sobbing violently. The words on the screen blurred as tears flooded my vision, my body curling in on itself as if trying to physically contain the pain that threatened to tear me apart. My mom had no idea what was going on, and I couldn't even get the words out. How do you explain that someone you've never met in person has just taken a piece of your heart with them forever?

I spent a week in bed. Nobody at school cared because their worlds kept turning. It was my "online" friend after all, so who cares if she's gone, she was never anything to anyone but me anyways—that's how it felt. That's what people said to my face. That it couldn't be that serious, we had never even met.

What my in-person peers failed to acknowledge was the fact that they all treated me like a pile of dog shit. That the people on my skating teams would rather see me cry on the sidelines than thrive. That those same girls who went to middle school with me would laugh when I pointed out they made plans without me. The people that I surrounded myself with in my local community did nothing to celebrate me. On the contrary, Katie was always celebrating me.

When you're 14 and your best friend dies, a part of you dies with them. The innocence that you held before knowing the cliff-like feeling of sudden death. There is no coming back from a head-on collision. Not for Katie, and not for the person I was before I knew what it meant to lose someone so suddenly, so completely.

Everything you do afterward is filled with fear, wondering if you or your loved ones would be the next to go. Add on top of it all that you're just now getting your permit to drive, and the moment you step in a car, all you could think of is how scared she must have felt in those final few seconds before her heart stopped.

Death visits adolescents differently than it does adults. When you're young, loss carves out spaces inside you that were meant to be filled with other experiences—first loves, graduation celebrations, college adventures. Instead, those spaces become repositories for a grief that feels alien in its enormity, too large for bodies and minds still growing. You learn to carry it like an extra limb, awkward and heavy, visible to no one but unmistakably there.

Grief at a young age is particularly isolating because the scaffolding of understanding isn't fully built yet. Adults might have encountered loss before, might have developed language and rituals to process it. But for teenagers, death often arrives as an incomprehensible aberration, something that happens to grandparents or in movies, not to vibrant eighteen-year-olds with university acceptance letters and summer plans.

And yet, through this devastating fog of loss, community can become a lighthouse—not erasing the darkness but providing orientation within it.

The Katy Perry fandom community showed up for Katie Bell in ways I couldn't have imagined. Katie finally got her "notice," even if it was posthumous. The hashtag #RIPKATYCATKATIE began trending worldwide on Twitter, enough so that Perry herself noticed, turned it into her screen name, and even retweeted one of Katie's tweets.

“We see you angel and we love and will miss you. KC's, light a candle for Katie. Rest In Peace."