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When Isabelle Flores was eight, she got a doll for her birthday. It was an MI action figure, from the kids show Mobile Infantry To The Attack!, which she loved, and based on Sergeant Anna Morales, who was her favourite character. Isabelle was so happy when her uncle gave it to her that she cried, which she hadn't done even when she'd fallen out of the the tree and broken her leg earlier that year. She kept the doll with her every waking moment, and slept with it at night.
A week after she got the doll, two bigger girls from the neighbourhood knocked her down and kicked her and took it from her, and they said she didn't deserve to have Sergeant Morales anyway. Isabelle didn't cry, and she didn't tell anyone what happened. Her brothers found out that it was missing, but she wouldn't tell them who took it. Her littlest brother gave her a picture of Sergeant Morales that he tore out of a real-paper magazine, and Isabelle put it under her pillow where she couldn't see it looking at her and she couldn't forget about it, and spent the rest of the summer helping her Papa at work.
Her Papa built real stone walls and walkways for rich houses, and she helped to choose and carry rocks, and mix mortar. At the end of the summer Isabelle was strong and had hard hands, and her Papa was proud that she had worked so hard and paid her real money. It wasn't much, but it was the first money that had ever been hers. She went to the store and bought another Sergeant Morales doll, and this one was new and even better, because it had the new body-armour and heavy-weapons rig, and because Isabelle had bought it herself. The same two girls from before saw her with it the next day, and when they came to take it from her they left crying and bruised and Isabelle still had her doll.
By the time Isabelle Flores went to the private rich-kid high school on scholarship, she was called Dizzy, because she refused to be called Bella and her littlest brother had mispronounced "Izzy". She didn't mind. Dizzy was a harder name than Isabelle, and it was hers and no one else's. She worked hard, body as well as mind, and gained a place on the contact-sports team despite being smaller than any other player because she was tough and aggressive and smart.
The first time she saw Johnny Rico, in the first practice after they joined the team, she wanted him so much it made her ache. He was beautiful and arrogant and innocent and he should be hers. It didn't matter that he was hung up on some milky rich girl just like him, soft and delicate - any fool could tell that Carmen didn't love him back. She had no fire in her, no will, she didn't want, not the way Dizzy wanted. Carmen was with Johnny because Johnny wanted her, nothing else. Dizzy tried not to hate her, but she couldn't help feeling a little sick every time she saw the lost-puppy look in Johnny's eyes answered by the slight reserve in Carmen's.
Rasczak's Citizenship class in senior year was the best. She looked up his file, or as much of it as a civilian could see, then talked to a sympathetic former-MI clerk about how much she admired Rasczak and learned even more from her. The man was a legend. He was only teaching Citizenship while he waited for his prosthetic hand to be fitted and programmed. She listened when he spoke, and listened hard, even when she pretended to fuck around like all the pampered rich kids she sat with. Everything Rasczak said lined up with what she already knew; if you deserved something, you had to stand up and take it. Nothing was free. Everything had a price. If it wasn't worth fighting for, it wasn't worth having. If you couldn't keep it, you didn't deserve to have it. Something was crystallizing in Dizzy Flores' head, and after one class she went home and took down the little action doll of Sergeant Anna Morales and looked at it, blowing to get rid of a little dust.
She fudged her Math scores on purpose. Fleet put you where it wanted to, and pilots were too valuable - and died too quickly - to waste someone with a ninetieth-percentile score on MI. She deliberately scored low forties instead - high enough to get some choice, low enough to stay clear of administrative or technical streams. The sympathetic clerk, whom she'd been sleeping with off and on for a couple years, knew someone who worked in recruiting. She'd told Dizzy what they'd said about how to get what she wanted.
As soon as she got in, she requested the transfer from Fort Cronkite to Fort Worth because she'd heard it was the best from everyone who ought to know. Once in the transfer system, she almost lost it all because of a sergeant who took a good look at her file and saw the grades from before she flubbed the Math final. He'd yanked her into his office, and she'd thought it was all gone to hell. But when Dizzy said the only thing she wanted was to be MI, was to kill bugs, boots-on-the-ground, right at the pointy end, he'd passed her off to Fort Worth and put her in Drill Sergeant Zim's training squad. He'd even told her that if she wanted in, she'd better impress him right off.
When she saw Johnny Rico standing in the front rank behind Zim, soft face trying on a stern expression, she couldn't quite hide a smile. It was fate, fucking fate. The rewards of the deserving came to those who stood up and took what they wanted.
Zim beat her. Dizzy expected him to. But he didn't hurt her and she woke up assigned to his squad, so she guessed it had worked. The world was hers. When Johnny assumed she'd joined because of him, Dizzy didn't know whether to punch him in the face or laugh out loud. Oh, that was Johnny. Perceptive enough to figure out why she disliked Carmen right from the start, but so arrogant and entitled that it'd never occur to him that she might want to serve for a real reason. Unlike him, as a matter of fact. She wondered if he'd even make it through boot - Carmen would hit the rarefied air at Fleet and fit right in, at least until she had a ship blow apart around her. No way she'd be coming back. Dizzy hoped Johnny stayed long enough to figure out what was right in front of him.
When he did try to leave, it made her angry that he could be so weak. Had he really never had to face the consequences of fucking up before? She wanted to spit at him when he sulked at her and Ace, wanted to grab him by the ears and shake him. What was he going to do? Go home, go to Harvard, be a civilian attorney, marry some girl who wanted babies and would marry money to get them? But then the bugs hit Buenos Aires and none of it mattered, nothing mattered but vengeance, but destroying the fucking bugs who'd killed her Papa and her brothers and her uncle and everyone else the bugs had left her from the last generation of her family that had gone to war. Dizzy would go to war, and she would kill the fucking bugs until there were no bugs left.
After Big K, Dizzy winds up in the Roughnecks, of course, and only Johnny could be surprised to see Lieutenant Rasczak walking in. He really didn't think he needed to know a goddamned thing beyond the end of his own nose, did he? But there was something inherently likeable about him. She didn't even mind him getting the promotions, as long as he kept promoting her right behind him - he'd fucking better. Dizzy didn't have his charisma, but Johnny didn't think in strategy. As a team, they were unbeatable. Her life was perfect, or would be if he'd only pull his head out of his ass and see what he was missing out on.
Rasczak saved them from Johnny's stupidity. Thank hell. She'd been just about on the point of taking Watkins to bed - he was good looking and a decent guy and, well, a girl had needs. Unfulfilled needs, for a long fucking time now, and they'd almost all died when the fire-spitter came out of the ground. Dizzy'd been wet since the fear had gone and the adrenaline had stayed. She'd been almost ready to give up on Johnny, let go of something she wanted. She should've known better. He wasn't the best kisser she'd ever met and he wasn't the most experienced lover - sheltered rich kids, waiting for true love like an old-timer religious extremist or something. She laughed, and told him it was because of the way things had worked out. Dizzy told him she loved him. He didn't say it back, and she didn't care. She could wait for that. Now, she had what she wanted.
Lying in the evac ship, as everything stopped hurting, she knew she was done. Johnny, the beautiful fool, was trying to tell her she'd be okay. She'd laugh if it didn't hurt so much. She was dead, fucking dead, if the trauma didn't kill her then the bug-juice in her system would. Her body just hadn't quite caught on yet. It was alright though, it was alright, and she tried to tell him that before she went. Dizzy Flores had got everything she'd ever wanted before she died; every fucking thing. That was something. That had to be something.