In 1998, you wanted Valentina Rossi on your side. And you still do today. She had your back when she weighed 42 lbs soaking wet and wore pigtails with multicolored plastic balls on the ends. She was six years old when she punched Michael Allegro in the stomach for teasing Billy Chester for getting headgear from the orthodontist. She was seven when she tied Petey Spokes’ shoelaces together because he stole Candy Gresso’s lunch money, and she was eight when she stood up to the entire third-grade class for harassing the new girl, Antonia. Yes, the other third-graders were being assholes. But, also, well, in their mind, it was probably justified.
Antonia seemed normal. She was petite, brunette, with the untamable eyebrows of her ancestors. She wore the same pleated, acid-washed jeans and highly flammable hair-sprayed blowouts as everyone else. But then, then she opened her mouth. That’s when it got bad.
Her voice was less Human and more like Wild Animal Giving Birth. You couldn’t tell if Antonia was crying, whining, or had swallowed a baby hyena who was trying to escape through her mouth. She got older but this never changed. Antonia’s voice maintained its same piercing horror-movie decibel for the rest of her schooling years. Instructed to only “move her lips” during the school’s choir performance, unable to be taken seriously on the phone, and instructed not to talk while making out with Gino Antonelli, Antonia’s vocal situation was a constant thorn in her side. She was so lucky that she got to call badass Valentina her best friend—most of the time. You see, Valentina liked trouble. Or, maybe, trouble liked her. It was hard to tell.
In Seventh grade, it was Valentina who stole the climbing rope from the school gym, paid the high school point guard to drive it to her house by doing his chemistry homework, all in order to facilitate a route to sneak out of her second-floor room to get to the senior party. It was Valentina who first stole a pack of her Aunt’s Virginia Slims (Yeah, you’ve come a long way, baby) and Valentina who forged letters of recommendation to get both girls into Penn State. (It worked.) So, of course, Sophomore year of college, it was Valentina who had the idea to plan the most epic tailgate ever. As so many great stories do, the night started with a tray of Jell-O shots.
It was an unusually mild Friday night in November of ‘99 and the two best friends were taking full advantage of the 60-degree night. Their low-rise jeans with two-inch zippers hugged snuggly on their butts. Their babydoll T-shirts, purchased ironically or not from the D*elia’s catalog were just short enough to show off the dangling crystals trailing from their belly button piercings. Lately, Antonia had been feeling insecure and second-guessing herself. For years, she tried to ignore the nagging voice in her head trolling her, telling her that she was holding back Valentina. Everyone gravitated towards her best friend. And everyone recoiled from Antonia the second she opened her mouth. It was like they were opposite sides of a magnate when it came to socializing.
Maybe she should have just said something, spoken up, and relieved her worry from her Wonder Bra-ed chest. But when you’re young, it can feel like saying something out loud solidifies it as truth and Antonia wasn’t ready to take that leap. Valentina had been more than a good friend. She’d given her a life. Antonia had learned to control her voice just the tiniest bit since college started. The intensity and the octave of her natural speaking tone had evened out a little. That being said, give her an emotion- any emotion, and two drinks and she’d be right back to the mating call of an injured bull elk. Mother Nature compensated by giving her some Elizabeth Taylor eyes and a rockin’ ass. Antonia often felt like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, relegated to communicating without opening her mouth.
Let’s go back to the Jell-O shots.
The party started early at their friend Bodie’s apartment. Bodie and four of his equally good-looking friends lived in one of those developments originally intended to house young couples and small families but had been involuntarily commandeered by undergrads a decade ago. Meadow Acres was now exclusively home to party kids in their early 20s. You could bet on a keg party at more than three of the units on any and every day of the week. It was a fun place. And that’s where Antonia and Valentina found themselves earlier in the night. Antonia was busy batting her eyelashes over by the pool table. Bodie was so cute. His roommate, Curtis, wasn’t exactly hard to look at, either. So when the boys off-handedly mentioned their plans to tailgate before the football game the next day, our two heroines took it as an explicit invitation.
“It’s going to be awesome,” Brodie said with the intensity of a prosecutor’s closing arguments of a murder trial. Curtis shook his head as if just noticing a hole in his case.
“Except that we don’t have a grill. Grills rock. Would be so cool to have a grill.”
And that’s when Valentina popped up, almost spilling her Bud Lite out of her red Solo cup.
“We have a grill!” Antonia whipped around, looking at her very buzzed and very eager best friend.
“We do?” she whispered. Bodie still hadn’t seemed to notice her voice and she wasn’t about to let him in on it now.
“Yep.” Valentina grabbed her mute friend’s hand, “We’ll see you guys tomorrow. And we’ll bring the grill.”
Bodie and Curtis shared a look and then smiled at these two wild, fun, born-and-raised Philly Italian girls who shared an inexhaustible energy that was pretty fun to be around. This was especially true of the bouncy, curly-haired one with the devil twinkling in her eyes. And on this particular night, Valentina’s eyes were certainly twinkling.
Valentina picked the last six Jell-o shots off of the Formica counter, passing three to her ride-or-die. The girls downed what was most likely enough vodka to kill a raccoon and popped out into the night.
“It’s 11 pm and I have nineteen dollars in my checking account,” Antonia squawked/squeaked/screamed to her bestie. Valentina had concocted some idiotic ideas throughout their decade of friendship but procuring a burger-cooking device in the middle of the night seemed like one of the dumber ones. Luckily, or, hey, maybe unluckily, the Popovs kicked in. There’s something about booze in a plastic bottle that just hits differently. Ask your liver.
The streets were empty and the moon was full. The fall breeze was laced with winter while the daytime heat pulsed off the concrete. It was one of those nights that tasted like freedom. And trouble.
Antonia trailed behind Valentina, following her friend who had now pulled her curls up into a ponytail on the top of her head, making her shadow resemble the Simpson’s character, Sideshow Bob. Or a total psychopath. From the back, it was hard to tell. They’d left Meadow Acres and had wandered further from the quad. The houses and lawns grew in size as the student housing diminished. The beat-up SUVs with GO LIONS stickers were replaced by minivans and Playskool plastic cars in the driveways. The two young women stumbled through the picture-perfect suburban neighborhood on a relatively serious mission. It was slightly more difficult than they’d anticipated.
Now, it wasn’t that no one had a grill. It’s that those grills were on porches and behind latched gates. And now is a good time to note that neither of these fiery girls weighed much more than 100 lbs. So, yeah, they needed an easily accessible appliance that was also on wheels. They weaved up one side street, around a cul-de-sac, and down another. A Golden Doodle barked at them through a living room window. Valentina lost a black Steve Madden platform slide. It was fine. She’d actually lost the other side of a different pair in the beginning of the summer. So now she was back to two. Her footwear thoughts were interrupted when she saw it:
Next to a faded yellow house with black shutters, a screened-in porch, and a blue Dodge Caravan parked in the cracked driveway, there it was: a grill, right out in the open with obvious wheels on the legs. It was slightly rusted and the top looked like no one had bothered to cover it over a many Pennsylvania winter. Valentina’s Jell-O-soaked brain made a note of this. Her conscience popped its head through the gelatinous booze coating her thoughts.
It’s not like it's a brand-new grill. Besides, she thought, we could return it after the tailgate.
Reinvigorated by this new game plan, Valentina grabbed Antonia by the end of her giant belt. Comprised of large, studded, leather circles and held together by a very large buckle, it provided no assistance whatsoever in actually holding up her pants but it did give her a real boost of sartorial confidence. When you have a voice like Antonia’s, you need to find help elsewhere. Being friends with Valentina had given her that help for years. And even though she knew that their present situation was most likely a terrible idea, she owed it to her curly-haired life guide to stick with the grill caper.
Actually stealing the thing wasn’t a big deal. They sprinted up to the top of the hill, entered the short driveway, and pushed it out to the street. It was loud. Really, really loud. The metal clanged against the splintered pavement in a deafening clamor. Antonia saw an upstairs light flicker on in the home next to the yellow one. She grabbed the right side of the grill, using all of her arm strength to help push the deteriorating appliance up the hill.
“Come on!” she shouted to her friend, “push harder. We’re almost there!” But Antonia found herself a bit distracted. Because, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the last thing that she wanted to see in the middle of the night with a stolen grill:
The unmistakable flash of blue and red lights. Yeah, the cops were there.
Because of the girl’s present relationship with sobriety and how out of breath they were, they didn’t have the time or the headspace to determine whether or not these were campus police or real cops. It didn’t matter. Because they were best, best friends and didn’t have to articulate these kinds of things to each other, they let go of the grill at the same time and ran. They heard it rattle and clang, getting louder, picking up speed, until their ears let them know that the thing had clearly crashed into a parked car. The alarm vibrated through the sleeping neighborhood.
They bolted through the corner house yard, sprinting to the right, then the left, dashing through someone’s lawn, momentarily getting tangled in a swing set that they somehow didn’t see coming even though it was very large and stationary. And like they had so many times, Valentina took the lead and Antonia followed, diving underneath somebody’s Volkswagen Passat.
Flat on their stomachs with their large and useless belts digging into their hips, the girls tried to catch their breath.
“Well that was close,” Valentina whispered between gasps. She was so sure of herself. Antonia swore she could hear footsteps approaching.
“But don’t you hear that?” She hissed back to her friend. What she wouldn’t give to have an ounce of that confidence. But it was misplaced. Valentina was very, very wrong. Because that's when they felt the unmistakable grasp of hands around their ankles and found themselves swiftly removed from underneath the popular vehicle. It wasn’t the campus police. It was the real cops. And they were not happy. Two burly officers picked them up by their (now actually useful) belts and threw them against the side of somebody's fence.
“You idiots. Out here committing the world’s loudest crime in the world’s quietest neighborhood? You’re under arrest.”
Now, Valentina didn’t seem fazed. She was used to both getting into trouble and getting out of it. But her best friend Antonia’s brain didn’t work that way. She couldn’t get arrested! She couldn’t spend the night in jail. First, her parents would kill her. She might lose her scholarship. What if it ended up on her permanent record? As her chest began to heave and tears filled her eyes, her emotions took over her body like a wave knocking her over on the Jersey shore. She couldn’t control the wail escaping her lips. The sound didn’t bother Valentina one bit. She’d been used to Antonia’s voice for a decade. But, well, for someone who had never heard it before? It was terrifying.
“No, no, noooooooo,” she wailed. Her cries sounded like an injured toddler, painful, furious, childlike, and loud. So, SO loud. More lights in the neighborhood flickered on.
“Don’t do this! Don’t do this to us!” The noise made the hair on the back of your neck want to stick straight up and then run away.
“Stop that! Stop it right now!” Demanded the officer. But his instruction only made the sobs more intense.
“No, no, NO!” cried Antonia uncontrollably. “Don’t hurt me!” Anyone who couldn’t see the source of the voice would have immediately assumed that the Pittsburg cops were arresting and torturing a baby goat, having its tongue surgically removed while attached to a megaphone. That’s how it sounded to the officer himself.
“Shut up! Shut it! This is horrible!”
Valentina looked over at her friend and momentarily flashed to the third-grader whom she’d threatened the entire class over not treating well. She thought of all of the times that she’d saved Antonia’s ass.
Antonia’s wails reached a decibel that was now making the neighborhood dogs bark as if UPS trucks were having a parade. The police were getting flustered. More lights came on. Someone stuck their head out the window,
“What the hell is going on down there?”
The officers looked at each other, letting go of the girls to cover their ears amid the painful screeching.
“Help! Help! Help me, I’m scared!” Antonia wailed, the nails-on-a-blackboard screech of her baby voice vibrating off the old homes.
“It’s ok sweetheart!” Valentina yelled to her friend, only eight inches away. She was a calculated, albeit drunk undergraduate, and knew exactly how to play this Get Out Of Jail For Free card.
For the officers, the sound was intolerable. Cringing from it, he finally threw his arms up.
“Fine, go. Just GO! If we hear of any other vandalism tonight, we will FIND YOU. And you WILL regret it.” Antonia let out a piercing wail of relief.
“I SAID STOP IT.”
With that, the girls turned and looked at each other and RAN. The second they were out of the police officer’s sight, they huddled under a pine tree. Valentina grabbed her best friend by the shoulders.
“You did it. You saved us!”
Valentina’s eyes somehow doubled in size. “My god, do I owe you.” There was something about those words, something about the way that her best friend looked at her. That, coupled with the way she’d mastered control over the situation with the cops, and Antonia would look back on that moment and swear she grew two inches that November midnight.
They ran through the suburban neighborhood, realized they were going the wrong way, turned around, and headed back to Meadow Acres. Okay, it took a while.
Huffing and puffing, letting themselves back into Bodie’s apartment where the party was still going strong, they returned without the promised grill but with something better – a story from Antonia. Bodie and Curtis were genuinely impressed.
“You made that voice your superpower,” said Curtis, a look of true astonishment spreading across his chiseled face. Antonia felt her cheeks grow hot.
They did tailgate the next day. But not with burgers. Or Jell-O shots. After a night of vomiting, it was Gatorade and bagels for these girls.
Sweet Dreams
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