Brains and sex fight each other to control your life, and thank God brains get a head start before sex comes along. Sex is when you're the most vulnerable you'll ever be. Brains is when you're least. Brains have to win out, that's all, so they can make a safe time for sex to happen. Remember that.
Now, don't mistake: it's not bad to be vulnerable sometimes, but it's stupid to walk around that way: there are too many people just waiting for that chance. It's stupid to miss sex altogether for fear someone will take advantage of you—use the brain, sweet, and find somebody and some place and some time safe. Brains are nature's way of making sure you live long enough to spawn—if you were a frog. But you're better than a frog. So plan to live longer.
And for God's sake, don't ever use sex to get your own way where brains won't work. That's the dumbest thing in the world to do, because then you're operating without brains at all, aren't you? That's as plain as I can make it.
I want you to come back to this more than once, till you've understood what I'm saying.
If I could have learned this one thing early enough, I'd have been happier.
Good luck, Ari. I hope to hell you learn this part.
She thought about that a long time into the night, into a very lonely night, because Nelly was gone and Florian and Catlin were away; and she felt awful the next morning.
Then she found out why she felt awful and why her gut hurt, and mostly she just wanted to kill something. But she found the stuff in the bathroom, all right, read the instructions and got it all figured out: Dr. Wojkowski had given her a booklet with the package, which was very plain and echoed a lot of things the tape had said.
It was more biology than she wanted in one week, dammit. And she was embarrassed and mad when the Minder said uncle Denys was waiting breakfast.
"I'll get there when I can," she yelled at it.
And took her pill and got herself in order and went out to breakfast.
"Are you all right?" Denys asked.
She glared at him, figuring he damn well knew, everybody else did. "I'm just fine," she said, and ate without another word while he read his morning reports.
Florian and Catlin came home late, sore and tired and with bandages on Catlin's hand; and full of stories, what the Exercise had been, how Catlin had gotten her hand cut getting a piece of metal fixed for a trap, but it had worked, and they had survived all the way through the course. Which youngers didn't do.
She wished she had something better than losing Nelly to tell them. And she wasn't about to tell them why she was sulking in her bedroom and feeling rotten.
Certainly not Florian, anyhow. But she got Catlin apart from Florian and told Catlin what the trouble was. Catlin listened and made a face and said well, it happened: if you were on an Operation you could take stuff so it came early or later.
Never take azi-pills, maman had said, but it sure sounded attractive.
It was worth asking Dr. Wojkowski about. Damned if she was going to ask Dr. Ivanov.
It was also a damned nasty come-down from all the interestingstuff about sex. Not fair, she thought. Not fair.
Just when her friends were getting home.
And one of them was a boy, and azi, and she was his Super, which meant she had to be responsible.
Dammit.
Maman had had Ollie. She thought about Ollie a lot, when she thought about boys. Ollie was administrator of RESEUNESPACE, doing maman's job. But Ollie never wrote. And she figured he would if he wanted to. Or maman had never gotten the letters. Or never wanted them.
That hurt too much to think about. She knew what she thought: maman had never gotten them. Giraud had stopped them. And Giraud would stop any letters from getting to Ollie.
So she tried not to think about that part. Just Ollie, how nice he had been, how he had always been so patient and understood maman; and how maman could be down, and Ollie would come up and put his hand on her shoulder, and maman felt better, that was all.
There was Sam. Sam was going to be big and strong as Ollie. But Sam was one of those people Ari senior was talking about that liked you without you liking them that way.
She felt good about having figured that out before she ever heard it from Ari senior, like it proved her predecessor was giving her good advice.
She felt about the same about Tommy: Tommy was all right to work with, but he was stubborn, he was all right being Amy's cousin, and number two behind Amy; and that meant doing anything with Tommy was going to mess up things with Amy. That part of the first Ari's advice made that make sense, too: complications.
There were older boys—Mika Carnath-Edwards, Will Morley, Stef Dietrich, who were worth thinking about. But Mika was a lot older, that was no good; Will was just dull; and Stef was Yvgenia Wojkowski's, who was his age.
She sighed, and kept circling back to the same thought, and watching Florian when Florian wasn't watching her.
Florian was smarter and more fun than any of them. Even Sam.
Florian was so damned nice-looking, not baby-faced like Tommy: not clumsy like Sam. She found herself just watching him move, just staring at the way his jaw was, or his arms or—
Whatever.
He had a figure the others didn't, that was what, because he worked so hard. He could move the way they couldn't, because he had muscle Tommy didn't and he was Limber like Sam wasn't. And he had long lashes and dark eyes and a nice mouth and a jawline with nothing of baby about it.
He was also Catlin's partner. He was part of two, and they had been together forever, and they depended on each other in ways that had to do with things that could get you killed, if that partnership got messed up.
That was more serious than any hurt feelings. And they trusted her and depended on her in ways nobody else ever would, as long as she lived.
So she played Ari senior's advice over and over when she was alone in her room, silent, because of the Security monitoring, and told herself there had to be somebody safe, somewhere, somebody she couldn't hurt or who wouldn't mess things up.
Sex wasn't fun, she decided, it was a damned complicated mess, it gave you cramps and it tangled things up and made grown-ups not trust each other. And if you really fouled up you got pregnant or you got your best friends mad at each other.