A Florida State University freshman from Jacksonville is enjoying a moment of viral internet fame after her quest for love on Snapchat was picked up by national and international media this week.
The digital romance is known the world over as the story of "Beyonce Girl” and “Beyonce Boy.”
Madeline Bryant graduated from Paxon High School last year. Bryant was on the FSU campus Monday scrolling through other students’ Snapchat stories when she saw him.
“And I thought he was so cute,” she said.
His hair was blowing in the selfie video, captioned “Feeling like Beyonce in this wind.” After she expressed interest in him, he responded with a new video, saying, “Come find me.”
But being a freshman unfamiliar with the campus, Bryant had a hard time pinning him down.
In one of several videos she posted chronicling her quest, she said, “Update: I think we’re at the wrong place. Beyonce Boy, are you at the Union?”
He wasn’t.
“The whole time, this is blowing up on our campus story, with other students’ commenting and saying how invested they were in the story,” she said.
The moral of the story is that if you ever see an attractive person on your campus story, do a reply snap because you might make a new friend pic.twitter.com/knkprNvXPj — Madeline “Beyoncé Girl” Bryant (@madelineisrad) January 30, 2018
Within hours, the journey paid off with a meeting, which almost didn’t happen because her phone had died by the time she located the mystery man in the school’s DeVoe Moore Center.
“And I hear above me, ‘Are you Beyonce Girl?’” she recalled.
Their hug-filled meeting was also captured on camera for the people who were following along online.
“But it turned out that he was gay,” Bryant said.
But their story didn’t end there because she posted the journey to Twitter, where it’s been viewed nearly 2-and-a-half million times.
“Jacksonville was one of the first places where it started getting really big because a lot of people from my high school started sending me, ‘I can see it at UNF,’ ‘I can see it at JU,’ ‘I’m in class and I just saw this,’” she said.
Millions more would see it throughout the week as the story was shared on ABC News, Good Morning America, Yahoo and others.
“Right now it’s overwhelming because I keep getting stopped on my campus by people who are like, ‘Oh my goodness, are you ‘Beyonce Girl’?” she said.
She says she’s looking forward to the viralness’ dying down. And she’s happy to report she and “Beyonce Boy”— who’s actually an FSU diving team star named Aidan Faminoff —are now good friends.
Contact Jessica Palombo at 904-358-6315, jpalombo@wjct.org or on Twitter at @JessicaPubRadio.
