December 29, 2004 – September 28, 2024

Molly Nicole Sims

A positive light with an unforgettable smile

When Lindsay Milheron pictures Molly Sims, she’s usually sitting beside her in the Dutch Bros parking lot, sipping a Picture Perfect Freeze after a long day. Sometimes, she’s goofing off during band practice and sharing in Milheron’s deadpan humor. Other times, she’s in bed in her freshman dorm room, dozing off while rewatching her favorite episodes of “Modern Family.”

“It was on every night; when I came home to my dorm, it was playing,” Milheron said. “I would hear the theme song from outside the dorm and walk in and see Molly asleep.”

Whatever the image, there’s usually one constant — Molly’s laugh.

“She would laugh so hard every time,” Milheron said. “I could say something funny, and she would laugh for like 10 minutes straight. She had a fun laugh. It was very contagious.”

Milheron met Sims during their freshman year of high school when the two both were on drumline for Clark High School’s marching band in Plano. By the end of their time there, they were inseparable.

“For me and Molly, we were both good listeners,” Milheron said. “We would just say two words to each other, but it had more meaning than two words. We would always talk to each other. We had a very sarcastic relationship. … She was the person that like, if I wanted to hang out with someone, I wanted to talk to someone, that’s who I’d go to. She was my best friend.”

Scrolling through the photos on her phone, Milheron can point out a thousand examples of her and Sims’ hijinks — like the night they drove to Paris, Texas on a whim or the restaurant where Milheron loosened the lid on a parmesan shaker, causing Sims to inadvertently pour a mountain of cheese on her pasta. 

There are pictures of the duo smiling in front of the cowboy Eiffel Tower, as well as Sims proudly posing with a thumbs up next to her parmesan peak and countless other moments from their friendship, now living in an album titled “Molly’s Photos.” 

One of Milheron’s favorites? The turtles. It started at a drumline competition in their junior year.

“Our band director was walking around,” Milheron said. “He put a canopy over his head, and he was like, ‘I’m a turtle.’ We heard that. We thought it was hilarious. Nobody else was listening.”

After that — and partly because Milheron and Sims were the only ones around to see it — turtles became their thing. Coming across any sort of turtle would always elicit a laugh.

“Now, if I see a little turtle figurine, I’ll buy it,” Milheron said. “I have a bunch on my walls. Our friends and me were talking about getting a little tattoo for her of a turtle. That was one of our things.”

Both Milheron and Sims shared a love for animals. When they came to Texas A&M together, their dorm room in Rudder Hall quickly transformed into a menagerie of animal artifacts, with a photo gallery of otters living at one end and an oversized stuffed bird occupying the other. They named the bird “Lerald” after Gerald from the movie “Finding Dory.” 

Sims was always coming up with names for things; her car was named “Arnold.” And when she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor on the first day of senior year, she approached it the only way she knew how — by naming it “George.”

“She was very positive, even with her diagnosis and stuff,” Milheron said. “She would do all different sorts of treatments, but you could never really tell. It never really affected her. She’d always show up to school. She’d always show up to band rehearsal and be there. She just never really let it get to her. You couldn’t tell just by looking if you didn’t know. She was very positive about the whole thing..”

Sims spent the next two years living her life more or less the same as always. Milheron said not even George could diminish her contagious laugh. She chose to come to A&M to study anthropology, fascinated by forensic anthropologists from the TV show “Bones.” Like Temperance Brennan, Sims loved to write; free moments were filled by either reading her favorite books or writing her own.

“I’d call her sometimes and be like, ‘What are you doing?’ She’d be like, ‘I’m writing my book,’” Milheron said. “She’d write a bunch of stuff. [Her parents] have a whole tub of her writing. It was something she always did. They read a couple of her letters that she wrote at her funeral, and they were really good. I’d never actually read anything that she wrote. I just knew that she liked to write.”

Her writing now lives with her family, her friends and her boyfriend, Nash Lowry, who Sims had been dating since sixth grade. Milheron said they were a perfect match, and although Lowry attends the University of North Texas, he’d frequently come down to visit her.

“He really does like it here,” Milheron said. “He talks about the school as if he goes here. We bumped into a Yell Leader and he was like, ‘See you around!’ I was like, ‘You’re not going to see him around because you don’t go here.’” 

Lowry visited College Station last week with two friends from high school to watch the LSU game. This time, however, it was just Milheron he was staying with. The apartment she shared with Sims only has one tenant now. The trio spent the weekend in the stands at Kyle Field — poking fun at their friend, who attends LSU, when the Aggies beat the Tigers — as well as wandering campus and reminiscing. But Milheron said it was clear there was someone missing from their group.

“It’s just like, I don’t know,” Milheron said. “I tend to downplay things, so I downplay in my mind what’s been going on. But obviously, it’s a big deal. It’s strange to not have somebody around that you’ve been friends with for years. It’s like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do now?’ I live in the apartment that we lived in, and now it’s empty. Just me and my turtles and my bird.”