The next day had passed uneventfully, the only marring yet to come. Beverly yawned slightly during the lecture ending of her last class, letting her thoughts stray for a moment. Perhaps her new roommate wouldn't be so bad after all. It was, after all, possible that she was just nervous about their first meeting, and was venting that feeling in an ebbing of frustration.

At last the bell rang and Beverly slid from her seat quickly, her booted feet touching the carpeted stairs before she realized what was gong on. The Superintendent's office was down the corridor and through a maze of offices and other Starfleet stations. Finding it would be quite difficult, considering that she had never done so alone before.

Not bothering to pay attention, as usual, to her surroundings, Beverly bumped straight into Keel again, though this time he didn't appear to have dropped anything. A brief apology was all that was necessary, albeit all she had time for. "I'm sorry, Cadet Keel."

"Walker," he said.

"Walker, she repeated, feeling quite like a parrot she had once seen. She started to hurry off, her feet thudding loudly down the corridor.

"Beverly," he called out, "Wait, I have this friend I'd like you to meet. If you could just hold on about one minute…"

She covered his request with a blunt statement. "Sorry, Walker, I have got to get to a meeting, and see my new roommate."

"Oh. Tough break." He sounded genuinely sympathetic.

"Yeah. About your friend…maybe, I can catch up with you later. I have got to get out of here." That said, she tore off down the hall, and, after a few wrong turns, found the office she was looking for, entered upon approval, and beheld her new roommate.

She was a human, Beverly supposed, or something of nearly indifferent physiology, with a beautiful face and long, fine blond hair, accented by wide-set blue eyes that perfectly matched Beverly's own, she though, a bit jealously, recognizing that she felt as though a portion of her individuality had been taken away. The other girl's voice was beneath sincere, her demeanor of high-handed, radiating arrogance vibrating through it with surprising clarity, although the superintendent seemed not to notice, or simply not to frown upon it. "Mina Coldwell, and you would be?"

"Beverly Howard," she mumbled, feeling inferior, and childish next to the rather tall girl, and thinking she couldn't have felt worse if she had tried, or picked a person to stand next to who would make her feel any more awkward. They were rather opposite, she noted, as her and Claire had been, although they had equaled each other fairly well. Mina was tall and exhaustingly thin, though not to the point of looking sickly. Her face was gorgeous, her features exotic in a nice, fashionable was, her hair highlighted, assumed naturally with golden blond, instead of the pale, near white the rest cascaded downward with. Beverly was, by contrast, of average height, though still quite thin, however, not to this extent. Her hair reached well below her somewhat broad shoulders, and her face was pretty, though rather bland, next to Mina's. She already disliked her, immensely.

Superintendent Parsons, hopefully sensing the almost palpable tension that littered the room, most of it emanating from Beverly, cleared his throat softly. "Cadet Howard, would you please show Cadet Coldwell to your quarters?"

Beverly drew a stiff breath, shuddering at the finality of the word your, momentarily righted herself, though the effect was somewhat measurable, and starkly stated, "Of course, Admiral Parsons." She had, wisely, kept all the comments she would have liked to have made inside, hoping that, by some miracle, the Admiral would have, by now, acknowledged her disconcertion.

"Is there a problem, Cadets?" Parsons looked daggers at Beverly, who swallowed the irreversible lump in her throat.

"No, sir." She stammered, meekly.

"Good." The Admiral's smile was bordering in what Beverly wanted to call sarcasm. "Then this assignment will be permanent, by the semester."

That, thought Beverly, was a problem. A definite problem. She merely nodded at the Admiral, motioned to Mina, and walked, almost marching, out the door, head held high.

Once outside, she lowered her face a little, gazing across the way at the rows of colorful flowers that the groundskeeper, an old man, a presumption made by most of the Cadets, Beverly not excluded, who thought him to be rather ancient, named Boothby, was caring for at the moment Somehow, the view of natural plants against the artificial buildings always brought her down to Earth, so to speak, no matter how mad she might be. Mina seemed not to care about the plants, just about Boothby. "Who is that strange little old man."

"That," said Beverly, fury radiating through her argumentative tone, "Is Boothby, the groundskeeper. And you had better learn not to ask such rotten questions if you want to last long around here." She finished with a tone that said further discussion was not advised, although it didn't matter, due to the fact that the subject matter was closed to begin with. In truth, she had asked the question once herself, but found that that need not be stated, as if in some silent arrangement to further her ammo against Mina.

The blond girl merely grunted, her face hard and inflexible, a mirror image of Beverly's own prominent stubbornness that echoed through her face at all times, and danced ferociously behind her blue eyes. In some odd way, that infuriated her beyond belief, and she marched off quickly, Mina easily keeping pace with her long strides.

At last, after what seemed to be an eternity, they reached their quarters, a fact that Beverly admitted grudgingly, and she tapped the access panel, entering in a wake of tumultuous fury, and pointed out everything in the room to Mina, who had seated herself onto Beverly's coverless bed, and was beginning to open her drawers.

"Cadet Coldwell," began Beverly in a heated, furious voice, "Your things should be stored on the opposite side of the room. This is my bed, and my storage areas." Had she not been afraid of expulsion, she would have decked the blond with her vicious fighting kick, as it was, she began to seriously contemplate it.

"Oh." Mina began, her face a mask of childish innocence, "I thought I could have this bed. I just love to look out the window."

"So do I." Beverly countered. "Besides, that has been my bed since the first day of this year, which you missed, and I have not the slightest intention of giving it up now." She truthfully didn't and, for some odd reason, would have fought with every once of herself to keep her bed, just that, her bed. Strange, she mused, it had never been all that important before. If anything, it would have been dubbed a triviality. However, that was then, and this was now.

"There aren't any bedclothes on it, though, it's just a bare mattress." Mina's voice was pointed, matter of fact, stark. Beverly had found another thing to add to her list of grudges, which she almost felt a need to write down, it was growing so long.

"I am washing them." She stated in the same apathetic, uncaring voice.

"How do I know you aren't lying?" Mina asked.

"Trust me, I'm not." Said Beverly.

They stared at each other, unrelenting, for uncountable minutes, and, at last, Mina ceded to taking the opposite bed, jammed against a wall that was devoid of anything, save glistening whit paint.

"I'm going to make you miserable, Howard. If there is anything I believe in, it's revenge is sweet." Said Mina.

"Only to lemons." Countered Beverly, in a sickly sugar coated voice.

"You're going to pay for this, Howard." Mina threatened evilly.

Beverly smiled in the impish way she sometimes had, and spoke her last words before leaving the room to get her forgotten laundry in an angelic voice. "Not in this lifetime."

The door shut on Mina's parting shots, leaving Beverly's most prominent source of displeasure locked behind it.