raeraeFounder

An original since November 2000, Rachel Kelly was the younger sister of thefunkyfresh and the kind of person whose house everyone just showed up at. rocksupastar put it simply: "everyone eats at the Kellys house." delliott101 once stopped by for a haircut before a meeting, ended up staying for dinner, and wrote about it like he'd witnessed a miracle of Christian hospitality -- her brother Matt begrudgingly pretending it wasn't a big deal while their dad cooked. ilikebirds went further, requesting to be hand-fed grapes while Rachel trimmed his hair and someone fanned him with palm leaves. The Kelly household was apparently part home, part salon, part all-you-can-eat buffet, and Rachel was at the center of it -- cutting hair, doing nails, hosting her mom's art classes, and keeping the whole operation running with the cheerful efficiency of someone who'd been drafted into the family business since birth.

Because that's what Rachel actually was: a hairstylist in the making. She launched her business on eZabel itself, posting a news article at age sixteen and politely asking iwz for permission first. She did nail tips for punkprincess, trimmed thatdarngirl's spikey hair on a regular schedule, and eventually landed a chair at Imaginations salon in Hackettstown, working Wednesdays through Saturdays. flomojopoanode once told her that her hair was "pratically matchless" and "sooooo beautiful" -- a compliment she earned by being the person everyone trusted with theirs. She auxiliary pioneered in the summers, went to St. John for two weeks with her family, snowboarded with a passion that had her counting the days until winter, and attended a staggering twenty-six eZabel events -- from the original party to manhunt games to Band From Society shows to a chocolate sleepover. She was everywhere, and she signed every message the same way: "love rachel."

Her comments had a particular rhythm -- long, breathless, building toward something she was already laughing about. There was the time she tripped in her first pair of high heels at a meeting, flat-out into the aisle, nearly landing on a kid she didn't recognize until years later at a football game. There was the discovery that her cat went "absolutely nuts" for Phantom of the Opera, running full speed at her face and pawing it whenever she sang. There was the failed road test at seventeen that produced one of the site's great meltdowns: "NEVER GO TO WASHINGTON MOTOR VEHICLE THEY ARE SONS OF SATAN!!!!" -- which prompted sux2beme to share her own humiliating failure, thatdarngirl to recommend the Randolph DMV instead, and delliott101 to assure her that everyone fails the first time. She was also a quiet grammar stickler -- the kind of person who noticed when people said "foilage" instead of "foliage" and who wrote a journal entry about bad punctuation that was itself a masterpiece of deliberate bad punctuation. iwz knew it too, once catching that an impersonator had logged into her account because the spelling was too sloppy to be Rachel.

eZabel Personality Type: ISFJ -- "The Quiet Anchor." Rachel was part of the inner circle that malibu described as family -- the group with legs, crazygirl, and thatdarngirl who hung out every day and were no longer treated as guests at each other's houses. She wasn't the loudest voice on the site, but she was the one who remembered your appointment, fed you dinner without being asked, and signed off every conversation with love. Her last comment came in December 2004, and her last messages trailed off into 2005 -- checking in about London photos, congratulating friends on talks, staying connected in the quiet, consistent way that defined her from the start.