Jaime Hebel | Head of Illustration

A Beyoncé bit, a marathon, an empty seat — the ways in which best friends meet and cement their friendship status can appear just about anywhere. While friendships are sometimes surface-level, routine, or circumstantial, best friendships are a separate tier, reserved for mutual number-one status. Maybe they’re the first person you invite to lunch, or the one you always call with news (good or bad), or the person you just miss the most when you’re separated. Regardless, that person is special in a way understandable only to the two people involved. Before a friendship enters this sacred territory, it starts with an ordinary moment.

Wyatt & Vance

“This’ll work,” then-first-year Wyatt Fox thought when he plopped his gallon-sized water bottle on the desk and sat down next to fellow first-year Vance Yanney on the first day of College Writing last spring. Quickly, the two hit it off, chatting easily and leading the class’s “fun, bubbly” dynamic.

“There was something special in that classroom,” Fox said. “What you hear about College Writing is that those classrooms can be so sterile. But we got a good community out of that classroom, and that set the tone for our friendship.”

Fox credits their shared outgoing nature and enthusiasm for talking to strangers as reasons for their initial friendship. They like to “beep bop off each other,” while doing shared activities, like exercising together. Yanney points to their mutual athleticism as another major cornerstone of their friendship.

Last year, Fox called Yanney on a Wednesday with an extraordinary request: asking to run the St. Louis Marathon together that very Saturday after WILD. Yanney said yes.

They did a two-mile “shakeout run” at the gym a few nights before. Yanney gave Fox a blue Adidas shirt and a pair of racing shoes (a few sizes too small for Fox), which he still has. During the race, Yanney, a competitive runner, ran the first few miles with Fox before moving ahead. He then napped on the grass by the finish line and waited for Fox. Fox finished the marathon and upheld their shared promise. Yanney looks at the race as their “defining moment.”

“He’s the only person that I could possibly think of in my entire life that I know that you could call three days before the marathon, ask if they want to run the marathon no training, [and] they would say yes, and follow through,” Fox said. “We did it.”

The race represents their shared commitment to “finishing what you start” and upholding promises, per Yanney. From the race to now and everything in between, Fox looks at Yanney as an exemplar of being respectful, passionate, and hard working. The two call themselves “serial hacky sackers” and “pool sharks” (a meme-inspired term for their dedication to playing pool). When there’s a day they spend without each other, they right their wrong before the day ends.

“It gets to the point where if I haven’t seen him all day, at 8 or 9 p.m. at night, I’ll call him or he’ll call me,” Yanney said. “We’ll just talk for 30 minutes to an hour about the day or if anything crazy happened.”

The funny thing is that even with all their shared values — communication, focus on family, spirituality, work ethic — they have almost no overlap in media consumption. They have a joke that if one of them has seen a movie, the other certainly has not. They even have a playlist, called “Cultural Overlap,” with songs that they both like and know. The seemingly random playlist ranges from the Spanish version of “Hotel California” to Nelly’s “Just a Dream.” The playlist’s length? Six songs.

“We have built our cultural overlap brick by brick,” Fox said. “We eventually made a very little village, one house, no church. No Irish Pub.”

Yanney chimed in: “A tiny two-shelf library!”

Candice & Hailey

Sophomores Candice Baek and Hailey Kim met each other early on during orientation week their first year — so early, in fact, that the other grades had yet to arrive on campus. During move-in, they both heard about a party on the South 40’s central field (known as the Swamp), where many first-years were getting to know each other. 

By that point, Baek had grown tired of the generic name introduction. To her, it felt like every conversation started with an endless round of names, hometowns, and planned majors. So, to make things interesting, she vowed to her new acquaintances that she would choose a different name for every introduction she did that night. When she met Kim, she waved and said, “Beyoncé Baek.”

“You were so adamant about it, I just went along with it,” Kim said to Baek between laughs. “There was no point in arguing with her.”

During their second semester, the two began to get closer. Their first semester was marked with shared meals in BD, spontaneous hugs, and a growing sense of trust leading into their second semester. By the spring of their first year, they had reached best friend status. After a night of gossiping over ramen post-fraternity party, each saw the other as their best friend. It helps that the two share a dedication to spontaneity. They do everything from eating at Waffle House to crossing off their bucket list items, like watching “Single’s Inferno,” making a TikTok compilation of their friendship with clips from every year of college, and playing the “Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza” card game. Oftentimes, it’s just the two of them, doing these random activities and catching up.

“We have different sets of friends, but we always end up coming back to each other to hang out and tell each other everything,” Baek said. “We don’t have to see each other every day to maintain our friendship.”

And yes, Kim still has Baek’s contact in her phone as “Beyoncé.”