ON FATE AND FRIENDSH IP

8/29/2010 SUSANNAH COMMENTS (0)

In late June of 2000, I stood in line in Knott Hall on the campus of Loyola College, waiting
to register for classes under the guidance of my faculty advisor. It was summer
orientation--2 days of residence hall tours and boxed lunches and that cocktail of emotion most
singularly felt by young adults--of excitement mixed with sheer terror. Waiting there, I was
surrounded by my future classmates, all of them trying to appear like they weren't trying at
all, everyone desperate not to mess up the completely blank slate of the next four years.

I was no different. But rather than waiting to slough off a nerdy reputation or a nickname
you've had since kindergarten, I was trying to leave behind a large purple dinosaur. After
spending two and a half years of my life on one of the most well-known and--among anyone
over the age of four--hated children's television shows of the 90s, I'd been known for most of
junior high and high school as " The (insert name of large dinosaur that I am not writing here in
order to avoid Googlers finding this blog) Girl." Finally, at 18, I had a chance to be "normal." If
all went as planned, I'd graduate from college without a soul knowing that I'd once danced
in red knee socks to "Hey Mr. Knickerbocker" and answered to the name "Julie."

The faculty advisor I sat down with, however, knew because I'd mentioned it in one of my
admissions essays. "My kids watch it all the time!" he said, grinning, as I picked my courses. I
smiled at him, silently pleading "Shut.up.you.horrible.man!" while nervously scanning the room
to see if anyone was listening ot our conversation. After what felt like two hours, he printed out
my course list and said, "See you in September!" I practically ran out of the building, wishing my
dad was in the Mob instead of insurance.

Not five minutes later, as I crossed the pedestrian bridge over North Charles Street, I hears a
voice calling after me. "Julie! Julie, wait! Julie!" Hoping that this was a simple psychotic episode, I
kept going. But the voice followed. "JULIE!!!!" it shouted.

I turned around to see a girl with long, curly red hair speed-walking toward me. "Oh my
God, it's you!!" she said, catching her breath, clutching the same course print-out I had to her
chest. "We have the same advisor Dr. O'Donnell and you were in line ahead of me and he just
asked me if I recognized you and I said I wasn't sure and he said you were on (dinosaur show) and
my siblings watched it all the time and I REMEMBER you and oh my gosh do you still act because I
love acting and singing and the theater and I'm Meg."
I don't remember what I said, but I'm sure I smiled and was polite. She seemed nice, and
definitely interesting, but that didn't change the fact that I wanted to kill her and leave no
witnesses. In two minutes, with that first bellow of "JULIE!" across the bridge, my dream of
blending unnoticed into the Abercrombie and Fitch masses was destoyed. Driving home to
New Jersey later that day, I held back tears and tried to reassure myself. There were
nearly 900 people in the freshman class. Maybe, if I kept my ears open for her distinctive voice
and my eyes open for that distinctive speed-walk, I could hide from her behind trees and in
bathrooms for four years. She'd tell people she met Julie at orientation, but that the poor girl
must have transferred or dropped out or developed a drug addiction. You know how those former
child actors are. I still had a chance.
Six weeks later, I received a letter in the mail with the names of my randomly-generated
suitemates. Elizabeth, Amy, Meaghan. Soon after, the phone rang and my mom called me. "It's
one of your roommates," she said. I picked up and heard the girl on the other end say
breathlessly, "Hi! It's Meg" and with those three words, I recognized her voice and almost
passed out. It was her. The girl who I'd hoped never to see again was my roommate. "Can
you believe this?!" she shrieked. I couldn't. But after the initial shock subsided a bit, I let myself
relax a little. Meg was funny, and smart, and, truth be told, we did seem to have a lot in
common, like knowing the lyrics to Les Mis, Miss Saigon, and Rent backwards and forwards. My
favorite memory of that hour and a half long phone call was when we both admitted to never
having drank alcohol before and discovered that our friends told us we didn't need to because
we were "high on life."

That was the beginning.

On campus that fall, ours wasn't an instant best friendship. We had moments of bonding, like
when I taught her how to do laundry in a hot room, our copies of The Iliad bent before us. But
I'd met a boy and was logging serious hours following him around like a puppy and she
was...well, she was Meg. She was having conversations with people left and right, telling
hilarious stories, auditioning for plays, scoping out clubs. We seemed to constantly circle each
other, operating on different circadian rhythms: her peak hours were roughly midnight to four
a.m., while I felt my best if I'd had a run and high-fiber breakfast by 7:30. Too many of my hours
were spent holed up in a corner, agonizing over papers that I could never keep within the
required page limit, while Meggy would be off on some adventure until three in the morning
and then crawl into a computer lab and pound out an "A" by her eight o'clock class.

In the winter, though, the boy-following fell apart and I spent more time in our suite. We'd talk
into the night and hold sing-along sessions to show tunes blaring from Napster. Both shameless
performers who, given a little encouragement from an audience of two or ten, could turn a "Let
me tell you about my day" into a three-act musical, we became a veritable song-and-dance duo.
I still wonder what the seniors who lived in the building across the way thought when they'd
walk by our basement suite, from which the sounds of two girls belting out "On My Own" and
"Take Me Out Tonight" must have floated out into the cold air at midnight.

Time passed, and we were sophomores, living on the top floor of a renovated apartment
building once occupied by elderly tenants. That year, we both made the decision to go live
in Belgium for our junior year. In August of 2002, I flew from Norfolk to Long Island and
stayed with Meg and her family for a couple of days, since the group was leaving out of JFK. We
took off one warm evening, and over ten-and-a-half-months of riding bicycles over bumpy
cobblestone and seeing The Globe Theatre in London and getting massages from huge
Hungarian women in Budapest and walking the dark roads home on a Greek Island, pink from
sunburns and wine, something changed, and we became more than performance troupe
partners.
I started calling her Meggy--we all did--because when we met Megan M., the two of them
decided to ditch their common "Meg" and go as Meggy and Mac for the year. Meggy was
perhaps the most fearless and enthusiastic study-abroader among us. She ventured
beyond the familiarity of the Americans and befriended other students from countless
countries, most notably a pair of Belgian twins who took her to ballroom dancing lessons
once a week. She traveled alone for days to Switzerland. She wrote constantly and
filled three?four? journals over the course of the year. She went on dates left and right
because why not give it a shot? She wasn't known for being good with planning or itinerary
details, but everyone always wanted her to join their trip anyway. She was rawly emotional, in
a way that people don't often let themselves be. She could be private, sure, but after a time, you
didn't want her to be. No matter what she felt, be it joy or sorrow or anxiety or hilarity,
she lit up the space around her, and made you want to step into it, to feel, too, all the rough
and wonderful parts of being alive.
For our generation, to know someone from the age of 18 to 28 is to know them as a child
and as an adult and as all of the messy, amorphous, and fleeting things in between. Meggy
and I have seen each other at our very worst and our very best, at our most lost and our most
accomplished. We've no doubt hurt and frustrated one another, the way you do before you
begin to love someone for their weaknesses as much as for their strengths. But we've also, at
times of hiccuping sobs and stomach-hurting-laughter, lifted each other up, and made each
other better.
There are lots of things I thought I knew when I was 18 that turned out not to be
true: that tacos would always be my favorite meal, that the only boys who'd ever like me would
always be the weirdos, that there'd come a point when I'd really, finally feel like a grown-up.
But I knew, even in those days when we made s'mores over the flame of our gas stove in Unit
30B, that Meggy was special, the kind of person who is passing through a hundred people's
thoughts right now, in New York and Baltimore and California and Galway and Paris. She's
already done some incredible things, and between you and me, I don't think she's even
gotten going yet. At 28, what I know is that my life would have a lot less luster without her
humor, her love, her friendship, and that fast walk that--thank goodness--brought her to me ten
years ago.