The night air hit with a chill as she stepped out onto the balcony. She closed her eyes and listened to the cars passing below. The sound reminded her of something… somewhere different.

She saw it clearly—waves rolling and crashing onto a shore—and it occurred to her that she had a place to run to after all.

But then, the pain would always be with her. The memory of him would never go away.

She stepped over the rail and leaned into the dark, reaching for him. He was so close in her mind.

She wanted to hold on to the rail, to the thought of the waves and to the possibility of a new life somewhere else, but none of that would be enough to hold her back. She let go.

At least, that's how the story goes.

According to legend, Tom Petty's song, 'American Girl,' is about a UF student who committed suicide by jumping from a balcony of the Beaty Towers dormitory. My quest to find the truth about this myth began with a few facts:

• Tom Petty was born in Gainesville and moved to California in 1970.
• The song was written on July 4, 1976.
• U.S. 441 starts in Miami and ends in Lake City, Tennessee. Though the highway runs by Beaty Towers, there is still nearly 1,000 miles of road where this could have happened.
• Nowhere in the lyrics is Gainesville or Beaty Towers mentioned.
• Beaty Towers does not have balconies.
• Beaty Towers A was first opened as a women's dormitory in the fall of 1967. Tower B was not completed until the spring of 1968 and was a men's dorm.

Publicist Lathum Nelson, who was very helpful, had never heard of the story but was very interested. He told me to send him an e-mail with the myth and any questions I had about it. He would “call Tom” to get the answer and then write me back to relay what he said.

Meanwhile, I searched for the answer locally. UF's Division of Housing, the University Dean of Students Office and the University Police Department could confirm anything about the myth.

I searched 13 rolls of microfilm, but couldn’t find an answer. Finally, Nelson said he could not get in touch with Petty because he was working on music for the next album.

It’s doubtful that Tom Petty wrote 'American Girl' about a girl who jumped off Beaty Towers. The University of Florida, the University Police Department and the student newspaper archives cannot confirm the myth. My hunch is that Petty did write the song about a real girl somewhere, since in his appearance in 1999 on VH1's Storytellers (in which, by the way, he did not perform 'American Girl') he said he wrote songs about real people and events. The only person who knows for sure who the 'American Girl' is, perhaps, Petty himself.