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Phoebe Prince, right, with her friend at Villiers boarding school in Limerick, Ireland.">

Photo courtesy of Edwina Van Kuyak in the Facebook album "R.I.P Phoebe."

Phoebe Prince, right, with her friend at Villiers boarding school in Limerick, Ireland.

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Phoebe Prince in a gallery of Facebook photos with friends in Ireland. In picture at left she is on the right. In middle photo, with friends at a birthday party, she is third from the right, looking away from the camera. And in the photo at right, she is wearing a green tank top.">

Photo courtesy of Edwina Van Kuyak in the Facebook album "R.I.P Phoebe."

Phoebe Prince in a gallery of Facebook photos with friends in Ireland. In picture at left she is on the right. In middle photo, with friends at a birthday party, she is third from the right, looking away from the camera. And in the photo at right, she is wearing a green tank top.

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Phoebe Prince, left, shopping with a friend in Ireland.">

Photo courtesy of Edwina Van Kuyak in the Facebook album "R.I.P Phoebe."

Phoebe Prince, left, shopping with a friend in Ireland.

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Phoebe Prince, third from the left, attends a birthday party in Ireland for her friend. The girls painted shirts for the party and had a water fight, according to Edwina Van Kuyk.">

Photo courtesy of Edwina Van Kuyak in the Facebook album "R.I.P Phoebe."

Phoebe Prince, third from the left, attends a birthday party in Ireland for her friend. The girls painted shirts for the party and had a water fight, according to Edwina Van Kuyk.

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Phoebe Prince, left, is photographed while shopping with a friend in Limerick, Ireland.">

Photo courtesy of Edwina Van Kuyak in the Facebook album "R.I.P Phoebe."

Phoebe Prince, left, is photographed while shopping with a friend in Limerick, Ireland.

SOUTH HADLEY - For months during her freshman year of high school, Phoebe Prince was subjected to verbal abuse and physical threats that made her life hellish. But friends here and in her native Ireland describe her as an inspiring and intelligent teenager with a quick laugh and talent for writing, drawing and talking.

"She was so outgoing and she just kind of drew you in," South Hadley High School freshman Meghan Kennedy, said in a phone interview. "The second you met her you wanted to know everything about her. She could have this life conversation with you like you knew her. It was really nice to meet her."

Kennedy said when she met her in August at freshman orientation, she invited Prince, who had moved from a tiny village in the west of Ireland and enrolled at South Hadley High School, to sit with her

"She had this thing about her," said Kennedy, who described her as "a beautiful, charming and overall sweet girl to everyone who knew her."

Darragh Joyce, a friend back in Ireland who met Prince the first day of seventh grade at Villiers, a co-ed boarding school in Limerick, Ireland, said she liked to read Shakespeare and Dante for fun. She enjoyed movies like "Donnie Darko" and bands like My Chemical Romance. Her favorite subjects in school were English and home economics.

He said Prince had a "big presence" in every class.

"The teachers were always telling her to stop laughing," said Joyce. "She had a very contagious laugh so everyone would laugh when she would laugh even if it wasn't funny."

As a boarding student at Villiers, Prince doodled on her books and journals and her friends' books and journals. She drew stars, smiley faces and "you're my BFF."

And though Prince made many friends in the four months she was here, according to Kennedy, she also made some enemies.

Some of those students, according to Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, made her adjustment here anything but easy. On Monday, Scheibel announced charges against nine current and former South Hadley High School students related to bullying that led to Prince's suicide Jan. 14.

"Her adjustment problem was she got popular quick and she ran right up against the beautiful kids," said South Hadley parent Lucas Gelinas. He said his son was an acquaintance of Prince's in class. "She started taking some of that magnetism away from them."

Prince lived in a white house less than a mile from South Hadley High School with her mother, Anne O'Brien Prince, and younger sister, Lauren. Her family has since moved out of the house, which now appears nearly empty.

Timothy Scott, owner of Werks barber shop, said he met Prince when she would walk her small dog near Newton Street and Haig Avenue, the street between her home and his shop. He was sitting on the black bench below the barber pole in front of his shop one day when he introduced himself to her in October.

"I was just trying to be neighborly - I saw a new face in the neighborhood," Scott said during an interview in his shop. "I was just trying to break the ice."

"She was a nice kid. I asked her how she liked the States and she said, 'eh'" and shrugged her shoulders, he said.

Darby O'Brien, a local resident who keeps in contact with Prince's parents, said although Jeremy Prince didn't want to publicly comment about his daughter, he encouraged his daughter's friends to speak about her.

"He told me to pass that to her friends," said O'Brien, who organized a group of students for joint interviews with People Magazine a couple of months ago. That story offered a glimpse of her life here, including what her friends say was her excitement about the black dress she bought to wear to the upcoming dance, her aspirations to be a journalist, and the fact that she missed her father, Jeremy Prince, a gardener in Ireland.

Meanwhile, heartbroken friends in Ireland thought her transition in the States was going well, according to Joyce.

"On Phoebe's networking pages she had pictures of loads of new friends," said Joyce, 15. "Everyone thought she got along fine."

In Ireland, he said, "she was the biggest presence in the class and everyone wanted to be her friend."

The school held a memorial in which a teacher gave a speech about Prince.

"Everyone took it so hard," Joyce said. "Some people found their own ways to get through it. Some uploaded pictures of her on the Internet while others tried to keep it to themselves. I tried to keep calm for my friends because if everyone cries the whole place would melt."

Joyce said she seemed to have a close relationship with her sister Lauren.

"She talked mostly about her sister Lauren," Joyce said. One weekend Prince returned to school with a bruise she got from chasing Lauren around the house, Joyce said.

"Her sister was really hyper and young," Joyce said. "I saw her sister briefly when she rolled down the car window and started going 'Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!' She (Phoebe) was just like 'Lauren get lost."

Prince and Joyce got to know each other over weekly strolls to McDonald's.

"She walked a lot but she wasn't a sporty person," Joyce, 15, said. "We're not sporty; that's probably why we got on so well. We were more into drawing and writing things."

Prince decorated her book covers with words and wrote attention-grabbing stories on the inside pages.

"She was really good at writing. In English she'd write amazing essays," Joyce said. "I was always getting a bit annoyed that I couldn't pull off what she pulled off when it came to writing."

Once, Prince wrote a poignant story about her grandmother, an essay the teacher thought was amazing, he said.

"The teacher told her to think of brighter stories because she wanted to see other sides of Phoebe's writing, because she was so good," Joyce said.

Catherine Baum can be reached at cbaum@gazettenet.com.