So here we see Vicki just hanging out with her best friend Valerie Robard.
Val is another one of the bad girls of Belford High. Sort of. She likes a lot of the same things that Vicki does, certainly – she likes to party, she likes to drink, she likes to smoke a few nugs now and then, and she’s very easy to talk out of her knickers. Especially when she’s been partying and drinking and smoking a few nugs.
The difference is that she’s not magnificent in her bad girl-ness like Vicki is. Where Vicki is angry and defiant, Val is timid and submissive. Or rather, as Natasha VanDyne and the other snobs would put it, Vicki is a bitch and Val is just a dumb trailer trash ho. The teachers and other adult authority figures of Belford mostly agree with that assessment, though they’re more likely to use words like “troublemaker” and “underachiever”.
Val has big boobs. Huge. If I have one critique of this picture, it’s that it doesn’t quite capture the mammoth proportions of Valerie Robard’s chest. She’s very proud of them, but they do bring some unwanted attention along with the wanted. They’ve been groped and grabbed and pinched and ogled, and not just by guys her own age, which is particularly creepy since they sprouted when she was about ten. Her bra gets snapped and unhooked. Assholes – including Rodney Dupre, the guy Vicki just can’t get rid of – call her “Turbo” (which actually sounds cool until you learn it’s short for “turbines”).
Like Vicki, Valerie is a resident of the trailer park (though not the same trailer park), and like Vicki, she’s due to turn eighteen sometime during the 1994-1995 school year where Hometown is set. I suspect she’s a bit younger than Vicki, though.
Val’s family life is much better than Vicki’s, but still not great. Her parents are together, but they’re blue collar workers who work themselves half to death without ever seeming to gain any ground on the bills (and God help them, in twenty years they’ll look back on this as the good old days), and are often short-tempered as a result. Her big brother is pretty cool, though. He even lets her and Vicki borrow his porn. Vicki actually considers their beat up trailer, with its Seventies décor and cigarette smoke saturated into the walls to be a haven.
And of course there’s Rex. Rex is just a big old dumb German Shepherd who barks at everything, but that’s just because he loves his humans so much and wants to protect them. Isn’t that right, Rex? Who’s a good dog?
(Shuffles Rex’s neck fur)
The real scourge of the family is Val’s Grandma Fran. From the time Val was very young, Grandma Fran made sure that she knew she was fat and stupid and worthless. When Val hit puberty – which is to say, when her breasts sprouted at age ten – Grandma Fran also made sure that Val knew she was a dumb slut who would never leave Belford because she was guaranteed to get pregnant by the time she was fifteen. Val called her to gloat on her sixteenth birthday, only to have Grandma Fran say it was just a matter of time, because Val was no good, just like her mother.
You can’t hear that kind of thing your whole life without it having an effect. Val is terribly afraid that Grandma Fran is right. For one thing, she’s already had a few pregnancy scares. Indeed, she’s just gotten over one when the story begins. A lot of the guys she hangs with – the ones who talk her out of her knickers – are the kind of guys who don’t think much about the future, hers or theirs.
And even if she escapes that, Val is convinced that she will not escape Belford. She deeply envies Vicki’s brilliant plan to run off to Broadway immediately upon graduation, but has no such plan herself. She has resigned herself to a life doing shit work for some business owned by Natasha VanDyne’s family, or one of the other local aristocracy.
For the record, Val’s resentment of Natasha VanDyne and the other snobs doesn’t apply to Angelina and her friends. Most of them she doesn’t really notice; she knows who they are, as you do in a small town, but they aren’t friends or bullies or even acquaintances to wave to in the hall. She is rather impressed by Angelina’s friend Kara, though. Kara is the only out-of-the-closet lesbian in Belford in Fall of 1994, and Val thinks that Kara is just the most brave and awesome…and pretty…
Vicki and Val’s friendship is deep and true, and it’s easy to tell that they’ve been friends since they were small children. They drink and dance and fool around and party and get in trouble together like a couple of teenage bad girls…but they also watch Disney movies together and sing along with the characters. Their current favorite is Aladdin. They engage in insult contests that Vicki always wins because she’s familiar with Shakespeare and his vast library of insult. But Vicki is the only one allowed to even pretend to say anything mean to Val.
And that’s the heart of their friendship right there. Val isn’t so good at standing up for herself, so Vicki stands up for her (even more than she stands up for the other picked-on of Belford), and always has since the day she punched Jeffrey Coogan in the nose in nursery school for pulling Val’s hair and gotten punished for it. This has earned Vicki Val’s undying loyalty.
That is why fat, timid Valerie Robard is going to follow Vicki Powers into the heart of the horror that is Belford in the Fall of 1994, so she can perform her life’s one great act of courage.
To read all of Valerie’s story, pick up a copy of Hometown at Amazon.