friendship

Section: Voice

I've always had tons of male buddies. So it surprised me to discover how great it is to have a girl friend.

A fluorescent pink banana hair clip. A trial subscription to Sports Illustrated. A strappy tank sized to fit a six-month-old. Ten dollars worth of coupons to Pizza Ring.

That was my birthday haul my freshman year of college. I didn't have long hair or an obsession with the NFL or the diminutive figure of a newborn. It was just that every guest at my birthday dinner shared a certain gift-buying impairment--they were boys.

All my life I've had more guy friends than girl friends. A quick glance at my high school photo album and you'd think I'd gone to a boys academy. Flip through my address book and you'll find enough Michaels, Dares and Alexes to start a baseball team.

My guy-friend thing may have started as an accident of geography. I grew up on a street where the three other kids my age happened to be boys. From the time I was in diapers, my social life (you know: riding a tricycle, throwing grass and dirt around) was totally boycentric.

Even when we started school, my boy friends and I stuck together. In fact, it wasn't until sixth grade that I felt my first jolt of self-consciousness. That was when my homeroom teacher Miss Bishop confronted me. "Francesca," she said in a tone usually reserved for spitball-throwers, "I wish you would try harder to get along with the girls in class. I find it very odd that you have no female friends."

With Miss Bishop's words echoing in my ears, I made a concerted junior-high effort to socially defect to the girls team. But my lack of practice made it hard for me to relate to them. Something about big groups of girls made me shy, not at all like the sassy, outspoken firecracker I was around my guy friends.

Mostly, though, my objection to hanging out with girls was that they were, well, girls. I was scared I would just blend, in, become part of an army of identically dressed and accessorized cadets. With my guy friends I was guaranteed to be different, even if they teased me about the music I listened to and the TV shows I watched.

College was like my childhood all over again: I bonded overnight with the boys in my entryway, and spent most of my evenings chowing on pizza and complaining about how messy their suites were. When the time came to pick rooming groups for sophomore year, I knew plenty of people I wanted to live with, but there was no way the dean of housing would let me room with a bunch of guys. So I had to enter the housing lottery alone as a "floater." I was mortified. Whenever anyone asked me who I planned to live with, I would turn red and mumble some lame excuse about things falling through at the last minute. The fact was that I didn't have a single girl friend close enough to live with. And for the first time in my life, I felt really weird about it.

In the fall I got assigned to a suite with a girl named Karen whose roommate had decided to go abroad at the last minute. She seemed nice, but mostly we stayed out of each other's way. That wasn't hard to do--I had fallen head over heels for an upperclassman named Dan, and I spent ninety-five percent of my time with him. Then for New Year's, Dan made a resolution to take schoolwork more seriously. On his list of casualties were intramural football, week-night television and me. I stayed in bed for an entire week. Whenever my friends came by to cheer me up, they'd bring ice cream and say totally unhelpful boy stuff like, "Don't worry, 'Ces. You'll feel better soon." They would freak out whenever I'd start to cry, and they'd always end up defending Dan, as if his actions made sense to them.

One afternoon Karen knocked on my bedroom door. I was embarrassed by the sea of tissues on the floor and the raggedy pajamas I'd been wearing for six days straight, but I invited her in. She sat down and said, "You look so sad." I burst into tears. She hugged me, and it was the greatest relief I'd felt all week. We spent hours talking in my room, me recounting the unabridged version of the Dan saga and she telling me the story of her most recent boyfriend trauma. We ordered dinner from a Chinese restaurant and ate on the futon in our common room. It was past midnight when we finally fell asleep.

Karen and I hung out tons that year. We became like sisters, and we still are. With Karen, I discovered the benefits of having female friends: real, attentive listening; hard-won advice from similar experiences; and an extra closet to rummage through every morning (OK, maybe that was just us). Since then, I've made lots of close girl friends, and nine times out of ten they're the people I call when I've had a crappy day or a devastating encounter or can't decide what to wear on a date.

I still have the biggest soft spot for my guy friends. When Saturday night rolls around, I often fight for my share of food at a big table full of guys, then beg not to be dragged to Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace for the third time. The secret truth is, I love sci-fi movies. But I let my friends think I've been sweet and accommodating. Then I guilt them into buying me major dessert. When it comes to chocolate, I can win an eating contest against all of them put together.

PHOTO (COLOR): The author and friends.

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By Francesca Delbanco Copyright of Seventeen is the property of Hearst Brand Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.