Becky Wilson #5627

Becky Wilson was boy crazy.
“Don’t freak, but I think I like Adam.” She said it with a sympathy-inducing grin her eyebrows arched in mock-anguish before turning back to the road. I was riding in the passenger seat of her hand-me-down minivan on our way to a chick-flick movie.
“Adam?” Savannah Gregory was in the backseat.
“Yeah…” Becky sighed loudly, and made a right into the theater parking lot.
Savannah and I didn’t really have anything to say about Becky’s undying love for Adam. Everyone on the news team already knew. Becky had been gifted with the inability to conceal her true emotions. What you saw was what you got. Thus she was unable to work on-camera, and had been propelling herself toward becoming a producer.
“I mean, I thought I liked Jason, but I definitely know I like Adam. He’s just so cute!” The news team crew was predominately male. Savannah and Becky only knew each other so well because they were the only girls on crew.
“I mean, isn’t he!?” she gushed.
We shrugged. It was an uncomfortable topic. Adam was considered ambiguously gay.
I was not on crew. I was on-air talent. I read the news on Tuesday nights. Still, I was a non-major of the Mass Comm department, and I didn’t really fit in with the other on-air girls. They were usually blonde, always perky, and only sometimes very good at what they did. I was brunette, more often sarcastically morose, and always very good at doing the news. This is not to say that I could do their jobs today and really be a reporter or an anchor lady, but that in terms of editing and cold reading, I was somewhat exceptional. Okay, I might have been the bomb. I anchored in my first semester of college, having no idea what I was doing, and no experience besides speech and debate.
But it was people like Becky and Savannah that made me want to take another look at Mass Comm. They were close friends. And I hadn’t had close friends since, well, speech and debate.
“Do you really think he likes you back? He did hang out with you a lot.”
“Oh, yeah, Adam and I were like peas in a pod until I thought maybe I liked Jason.”
“Well isn’t it weird that you like Adam now after he knew you liked Jason?”
“He didn’t know I liked Jason.”
Savanah laughed.
“Beck, everyone knew you liked Jason. You still do.”
“I do not!”
They were so funny together.
“I think Jason’s kinda cute. In maybe a nerdy sort of way,” I chimed in.
The two girls looked at me from their seats in the car before squealing with girly glee.
“You like Jason!?”—
--“I know right?!”
I laughed half at their reactions, and half because I had never admitted this.
“He’s sort of shy and quiet, but really funny,” I said through my grin.
Jason had a “late night” show on the campus tv-news station. He was so quiet during the day, and then all of a sudden at 9pm on Thursdays he was Letterman, wearing artsy glasses and a blazer with elbow patches.
“I remember thinking that about Tim.” Savannah had a boyfriend who also worked crew. They had been together for over a year, and were very nearly attached at the hip.
“That he was nerdy, or shy and funny?” Becky snorted.
She was a collection of characteristics that could be both charming, and obnoxious.
“That he was shy and funny.”
“Is he still shy and funny?” I asked.
“Funny, yes. Shy, no. He pushed me off the bed yesterday. We were joking around and he pushed me so hard that I actually fell and busted my elbow a little bit.”
“Tim! What a jerk!” Becky said, smiling. “Did you hit him back?”
“I got him good.”
Unlike Savannah, Becky, bed, and boy, were not three words that had ever been said at the same time. She was just hopelessly awkward when she was trying to hide something, and the feeling could be exponentially multiplied if she was trying to suggest something. Instead of subtlety, Becky was blessed with candor. Her obvious nature made her a danger zone for most guys, and she seemed never able to gain the experience that could make her “cool.”

Savannah, Becky, and I walked toward the ticket line outside the theater. The two girls were not blonde or unusually perky. They were real, and I liked that. They were also very different from me. And as I checked my phone for the tenth time to see if anyone had called, I knew I could never really be close with them.
I didn’t want to talk about who Becky liked, or what Savannah’s boyfriend had done the other day. I wanted to hunt down Jason myself, if I had to. I’d much rather have been at the movies with him or whomever else I was waiting to hear from. It was almost less pressure to be with boys, because dates were easy. It was being with these girls that was hard. I had to fit in, say the right things. Girls didn’t give you brownie points for being pretty. You had to be the right kind of person.
I guess I just never felt like I was.

Becky is a producer now. Savannah married Tim. I still wonder if I could have been friends with them if I had only had the right things in common.
And I wonder if I wouldn’t be wishing this stupid copier in front of my cubicle a death threat if I had only been a Mass Comm major. Is there really only one version of yourself that can find true happiness? Did I miss that turn on my GPS or something?