A Company of Heroes Book Five: The Space Cadet by Ron Miller

exception the girls shunned her entirely. Those who had grown up in the streets as Judikha had done looked upon her as an apostate, a renegade who thought she was better than she ought to be. The girls who considered themselves respectable—however baselessly—looked upon Judikha with ill-concealed contempt.
    She had always accepted this; she gave it little thought. She was at heart a misanthrope and, while she did not want to do entirely without human company, companionship or friends, neither she did want these forced upon her. Neither did she accept overtures of friendship nor did she solicit them. Her only friend within the school was, strangely enough given all this, another girl.
    Bettina Henlopen possessed that same plump, round-eyed cheeriness usually reserved for the plastic dolls won by knocking over milk bottles in a carnival. She was the only one of all the girls who seemed to genuinely enjoy Judikha’s company, with neither condescension nor any understanding of what Judikha thought or said. Bettina was truly sweet, generous and almost entirely brainless. She was very popular with the boys, as one might imagine, whom she favored equally, showing neither prejudice nor discrimination. She was, outwardly, a seemingly unlikely choice for a friend, but Judikha found her naïvete, honesty, trust and simplicity comforting. She could tell Bettina anything, however intimate, and know it would be received with honest compassion, empathy and genuine interest—yet would be forgotten by the next day, possibly even within the hour, as though Judikha had emptied her heart into a leaky barrel; there was never any need to swear Bettina to secrecy: her brain, as smooth as a billiard ball, precluded any need for oaths. And more than anything else Judikha appreciated more than even she realized that her friend accepted her wholeheartedly, with neither prejudice or preconception.
    Judikha was by and large satisfied with herself and her life until Rhys arrived. Afterward, she was confused, distressed and not a little annoyed to find herself under the control of internal forces whose lurking existence she had never suspected and over which she evidently had no power. Her coldly rational, practical, pragmatic self abdicated entirely when Rhys happened to be in the same room, as though an experienced bus driver decided to turn over the wheel of his speeding vehicle to an irresponsible eight-year-old. Her will was abandoned to mindless chemical processes designed ten million years earlier for rutting reptiles and lemurs. Thanks to her biology classes she was aware of the existence and function of the various glands, of primal urges and instincts—but only as abstracts. She never thought that the slippery little chemical factories that bubbled and percolated inside the neat, opaque envelope of her skin had any real existence. Who, after all, really enjoys admitting to all of the slimy, gelatinous, rubbery, shapeless bags, bulbs, tubes and lumps with which his or her body is filled? Certainly no one is willing to admit that the temporal distance that separates them from their instinct-driven animal ancestors—let alone from the blue-green algae from which we have all descended, for that matter—is not even measurable on a geologic scale. Judikha felt like the puzzled man lying crumpled under the wheels of the careless delivery van: something had just occurred with blinding suddenness that was only supposed to happen to other, less careful people. The sanguine, calculating operator that had smoothly controlled her thoughts and actions for more than fifteen years was appalled to find itself usurped, shouldered aside in a kind of biological mutiny. A primeval reptile, the existence of which she had been entirely, blissfully and ignorantly unaware, had wrested away the controls. She was unquestionably that high-powered steam omnibus, its boiler supercharged, its safety valve tied down, whose wheel was now in the irresponsible grasp of a