|| Get to know BILLY BRANDON who’s TWENTY-TWO years old and works at BENNY SPACE CAMP in town. He is from CORONA and is often times mistaken for RHYS MATTHEW BOND while others say he reminds them of BING BONG from INSIDE OUT. ||
History & Headcanons
Growing up, Billy was the happiest child you would ever meet. He always had a big smile on his face, a loud laugh, and an extremely vivid imagination. The way he saw it life was good and nothing could ever get him down. A big factor in that was Riley, his very best friend from the moment he was born. Since the two of them were old enough to walk and talk they were getting into trouble, dreaming up big adventures and grand schemes that they were determined to one day bring to life.
Billy always had a way of looking at the bright side of things, even when everything wasn’t so happy. He was always a weird kid, marching to the beat of his own drum and expecting everyone else to be as full of life as he was. Growing up he was the subject to a lot of teasing and bullying for being weird, with kids constantly hurling names and insults at him but Billy tried his best to never let it bother him. He had Riley by his side and that’s all that mattered. Sometimes the insults would echo through his mind at night when he was trying to fall asleep but they never got him down for too long.
Learning that his dad got a job in New York and that he would be leaving Corona for good was the worst day of Billy’s life. He was ten years old and it was the first time he ever really knew sadness or despair. He found himself crying for weeks when he got the news, trying to put on a brave face for Riley and the rest of their friends, but he just didn’t know how anything could ever be good again.
The adjustment period when he first moved to New York was a difficult one. He had a hard time fitting in with all the kids and he missed his home, the place where he knew in his heart he belonged. He found himself writing letters to Riley every single day for a whole year detailing every single moment of his day because it almost felt like having his friend here with him. As time passed and with Riley’s encouragement, Billy finally figured out how to make new friends of his own and to his surprise he genuinely liked his friends in New York. They weren’t Riley, and New York wasn’t the island, but Billy had his usual smile on his face again, his optimism back in full force.
He still liked writing letters to Riley as often as he could, but eventually their letters got fewer and farther in between, and he eventually stopped because they were just too hard to read. They were having such a good time without Billy there, their life going on undisturbed without him there, and it was just too hard for him to read.
Something Billy learned about himself the second the plane took off from Corona, leading him to his new life, is that he’s an extremely nostalgic person and can’t let the good times go. He sees everything in his past through rose coloured glasses and can’t ever think of a bad time he had — his vivid imagination is always telling him that everything was perfect, everything was happy, and he wants it back so desperately he can hardly stand it. He’s only twenty two but has done an incredible amount of reminiscing about the good old days, and all his friends back in New York got extremely sick of hearing about Riley and all the adventures they would get into together, particularly their plan to travel to the moon. The way Billy sees it, every moment was extremely important and he can’t figure out how to just let that go.
It surprises a lot of people to learn that after graduating high school, Billy went on to study astrophysics at Yale, of all places. He just doesn’t strike people as being all that smart, because he doesn’t usually flaunt his intelligence and definitely isn’t pretentious in any way. And he’s also been known to make some extremely stupid decisions. He may not have fit in all that well at Yale, but Billy worked extremely hard to get there. Once he has his mind set on something, there’s absolutely no way to deter him, and Billy put everything he had both into getting accepted into the astrophysics program, and to keep his place there. He spent countless hours pored over textbooks and in study groups, and while he loved what he was doing he also wasn’t having very much fun. And that was a big problem for him.
Moving back to Corona, Billy left behind two extremely disappointed parents who had not agreed to pay Billy’s way through an ivy league education just to watch him go work at a year-round space camp. They expected him to work for NASA, doing great things like they knew he was capable of, but Billy just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Grad school and NASA all just seemed so important and serious and Billy just isn’t serious deep down. He wants to live his life having fun, and that’s exactly what he plans to do.
Over the years, Billy has learned that despite his bold and loud personality, people just seem to forget about him. Maybe it’s that he has a forgettable face or a bland, boring name that doesn’t stick out in people’s minds, he’s not too sure what it is. But Billy finds himself being the king of “hey guys. remember me?” and the answer always seems to be no. Whether it’s potential friends, co-workers, classmates, or kids that come to space camp, Billy finds himself having to re-introduce himself to a lot of people. He does it every time with a smile on his face, but he does often find it to be discouraging. He just can’t figure out what it is about himself that people are so eager to forget.
Unlike the way people forget about him so easily, Billy has never forgotten a name or face once he gets to know someone. If you smile at him once on the street, Billy is going to remember you as the guy that was really friendly that time he was walking past the grocery store, even if he doesn’t see you again for another three months. If you introduce yourself to him just once at a party, your name is going to be ingrained in his mind forever and he’ll refer to you by name the next time he sees you, even though you’ll be scrambling to place why you know him. He considers everyone he’s ever met to be a friend, and those friends are ingrained in his memory forever.
Unsurprisingly, Billy is an extremely loyal friend. Once you’ve become friends with him, there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for you. He’ll show up for his friends every single time, without question, and without ever having to be asked. He wants to hype up his friends, be their shoulder to cry on, and would never even question sacrificing his happiness for their own. While he would love to see that energy reciprocated from his friends, he knows by now not to expect it and will do anything for his friends without expecting anything in return.
Billy has always had an extremely bad habit of acting first and thinking later, if he even thinks at all. When he gets a plan in his mind, he simply can’t let it go, ignoring any blatant warning signs flashing before his eyes that what he’s getting himself and his friends into might be a bad idea. He just never sees what could possibly go wrong. Of course, he often leads his friends right into trouble and he’s extremely lucky that despite several close calls, nothing ever got too dangerous. He’s extremely fortunate that he’s so sweet and fun-loving that his friends could never hold it against him for long.
Plans are an extremely serious thing to Billy — as far as he’s concerned all plans, even those made while drunk or joked about it passing, are set in stone and will be carried out. Even if it’s something as simple and noncommittal as grabbing a drink he will follow up until it actually happens, and it’s something more serious then you’re in trouble if you didn’t mean it. Joke about travelling the world with him and he’ll show up the next day with travel brochures to start planning your trip.
Everything BIlly does, he does without a sense of shame or embarrassment. He is who he is, proudly and completely, and he’s never once thought to feel bad about it. While other people judge him, or make fun of him, or simply don’t understand him, Billy doesn’t seem to mind if he even notices at all. A lot of times, people’s judgements of him go completely over his head. He likes who he is, and as long as the people closest to him seem to like him too, then what does it matter what other people think?
While he’s usually extremely happy, upbeat, and positive, it’s also very easy for Billy to get discouraged. Whenever one thing goes wrong he starts to over think it and will completely spiral if he isn’t stopped immediately. When he’s upset he can catastrophize even the smallest things until they’re blown completely out of proportion and Billy’s so in his head that he’s sure it’s the end of the world and nothing will ever look happy ever again. But all it takes is for one of his friends to give him a little pep talk and he bounces back out of that head space just as easily as he got into it and he’s your happy friend Bing Bong again.
He has never once cared or paid any attention to what’s in fashion. He wears only what he thinks is fun, and often has better luck finding clothes he likes at thrift stores than any of the other stores on the island. He likes to wear bright colours and bold patterns, gravitating the most toward various shades of pink. Give him all the weird looks you want, he’s always going to dress in a way that makes him happy.
Astrology is extremely important to him and he needs the people around him to appreciate it and take it as seriously as he does. He check his horoscope every morning to know what the world has in store for him that day, and he texts all his closest friends their horoscope as well, because he thinks they should be prepared.
Wanted Connections
He’s only been in Corona for a few weeks, but either new friends or friends from when he was younger that he’s trying to reconnect with now
The boy is annoying, so there’s likely some people around here that are not fans and try to avoid him. He still thinks y’all are friends though
Crushes, idk. He needs all the things