I became friends with Betsy Jacobs the summer of 1980 on a Sunday afternoon, at a church picnic held at the local park, when I was sixteen and she was fourteen.  Betsy was a pretty blonde girl with bright blue eyes, and one I’d certainly noticed, but I’d never talked to her much before that day when we spent most of the picnic together. She called me a few days later to ask me about some problems she was having with a boy and I asked her about things confusing me with a girl and that call set the pattern for our friendship over the next two years.

            In the fall of 1982, I was hopelessly hung up on this long-distance relationship I was in with a girl named Barbara who I was sure I loved. I’d often talk to Betsy about her and our various problems and she’d always help me out. She was my best friend then and I always felt better just hearing her voice.

            That December, I was hanging out with my friend Dan one day and wound up at the home of his girlfriend, Kira. Kira and Betsy were good friends and the four of us had recently performed together, singing and playing guitar, at an event at our high school.

            Sitting in Kira’s living room, the fire going, she got up off the couch and put a record on the stereo. A slow love song came on and I sat slumped in the black vinyl chair staring at the fire and listening.

            I was thinking about Barbara or, rather, I was trying to think about Barbara. It was a sensation sort of like when you’re at a show and you’re trying to see the stage or screen but there’s someone in your way and, no matter how you shift from side to side, you just can’t see around them. My head began to feel tight, as though some metal clamps had sprung suddenly around my skull, and I couldn’t understand what I was feeling. I had the sensation that I should be thinking of Barbara but I wasn’t. I was thinking of someone else. I was thinking of Betsy.

            And that was when it hit me and I heard myself say in my head, “I’m not in love with Barbara. I’m in love with Betsy Jacobs!” I literally shot up out of the chair as though shocked and stood staring around the room stupidly as the song played on. Dan and Kira both looked at me and Dan said, “What? You ok?” Kira laughed a little nervously.

 I wanted to say something but I didn’t know what to say and, really, thought I was going to faint, so I dropped down into the chair, shook my head, and then stood up again, then sat, and then said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. What? Did you say something?”  

            Dan and Kira were both laughing at me now and I shook my head quickly and said, “I have to go home. I have to call Betsy.”

            Kira said, “Oh, cool. You want to all go to a movie? We can see the new Pink Panther film. It’s at the Juliet.”

            And I was so grateful to that girl just then because I’d realized, right after I’d said I had to call her, that I had no idea what I was going to say to Betsy when she answered the phone. I couldn’t very well just call the girl up and say, “Hi. I just realized I’m in love with you. Hope you feel the same!” Inviting her to a movie, though, seemed a lot more reasonable – and safer.

            Dan dropped me back at my house and, heart pounding, I walked to the kitchen and lifted the receiver of the phone – then hung it up quickly. I stood and stared at the telephone and thought how absolutely crazy this feeling was. I had called Betsy hundreds of times and I had never felt this way before. My palms were sweating and my mouth was dry and my heart was pounding inside my chest so loudly it seemed to be echoing in the room.

            What if she didn’t like me the same way? What if I told her I loved her and it just ruined our great friendship? What was I thinking standing there about to make the biggest mistake of my life? But – I realized – I didn’t have to tell her; I was just inviting her to a movie.

            And so I wet my lips, took a deep breath, and dialed her number.

            That was thirty-five years ago.

            At the theater that night we held hands all through the show which, of course, we had never done before as friends.  I didn’t tell her I was in love with her then. I thought I’d sort of `ease’ into telling her. The next day I wrote her a letter in which I didn’t tell her either and the day after that I wrote her another just like it and so on.  It was over a month after my almost-fainting moment that I actually said the words `I love you’ to her and, by that time, she’d pretty much gotten the idea and, lucky for me, felt the same. 

            After high school, we went away to separate colleges and on her 20^th birthday I surprised her by taking a bus up to visit. I had to skip three days of classes to make the trip but I didn’t care. I had told her I would be calling her on her birthday around four o’clock and once I landed in town I waited in a McDonald’s gazing up at the clock above the counter. Finally, I walked out and found a phone booth outside a store right next to where she lived in the dorms. When she answered the phone, she sounded sad.

            “I miss you,” she said. “I wish you were here.”

             “And, on your birthday, you should get what you wish for. I’m standing in a phone booth outside of Sugarman’s.”

            “Well, what are you doing over there?” she asked. “Get over here.”

            We hadn’t seen each other in months and it was so wonderful to hold her again as we hugged in the parking lot.

            She asked me, “But aren’t you missing too many classes being here?”

            “Twenty years from now,” I said. “When we’re married, I doubt we’ll remember what we learned in class this week. But we’ll always remember when I took the bus to surprise you on your twentieth birthday.”

            We got married after college in 1987 and, all these years later, I was right. I remember the bus ride, the phone call, and the beginning of it all the night I almost fainted in Kira’s living room. And I remember the thousand things we’ve done together since that night and the thousand smiles she’s given me and I am forever grateful for each phone call and for every moment I’ve been able to spend being in love with my best friend, the pretty blonde girl with bright blue eyes. 

• Joshua J. Mark, c. 2010