Olivia Jensen is on her way to ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ғᴀsᴛ (sprinted) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-09-01 20:22:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | # 2018 [08] august, nadia costa, olivia jensen |
Who: Olivia Jensen & Nadia Costa
Where: The LBJ Library Resource department's very small collection of books
When: Backdated to a long time ago in a Library far far away -- the Thursday before Gray Wolfe's death (August 6!)
What: Olivia's curious about Nadia's Freenet interview. The girls get to know each other a little better. Yay friendships!
In Olivia's two years in Austin post-zombie, she thought she'd seen everything posted on the Freenet. There'd been drama between people she didn't know, news and status updates, full-on fights that dragged on for days. But she hadn't seen anything quite like the interview Nadia had given to that documentary wannabe.
Following it had seemed like some sort of invasion of privacy, but she hadn't been able to look away. And in the end, she was glad she hadn't, even if she wondered if now she knew things Nadia hadn't wanted her to actually know.
The Library was big, but it was surprisingly easy to stumble across people you knew. Funny how that happened when you were confined to a place. "Funny seeing you around here, movie star." But there was a smile on her face that belied the teasing words.
Nadia jolted slightly, jarring almost guiltily out of the stacks where she’d been buried, rooting through piles that smelled of dust and old paper. She’d been poring through them for so long— with all of the books moved to the general lending library to make room for living quarters, it was a daunting, sprawling thing—that she’d almost forgotten about other people.
Almost forgotten about her interview, too.
This was one of the first acknowledgments that someone she knew, actually knew in-person, had watched it. Part of her had selfishly hoped for it to go buried and unnoticed, remaining something shared between her and Nate alone, something that hadn’t passed the walls of that recording room.
But she had to learn to open up.
So Nadia flashed a fleeting smile, a small stack of agriculture books clutched to her chest. “I looked so tired in the video,” she gave a fake sigh. “Without mirrors and makeup, I can forget that there are these huge bags under my eyes.” She raked her fingers dramatically down her face, illustrating raccoon eyes and blinking owlishly.
It was easier to be playful with Olivia; being roommates over the past couple months had gone a great deal towards relaxing Nadia’s habitual wariness.
"Maybe you need to get your eyes checked," Olivia replied with an amiable grin, sidestepping the self-deprecation as she moved closer to sort through the books Nadia had been looking through. "You looked just like you, which I happen to think is a pretty good thing, don'tcha know."
Nadia was by far her favorite of her eight roommates, which made her concern and interest only grow. But how to bring up the subject now that they were face to face? Would such a thing even be welcome? "I thought your interview went really well," she added with a smile. Subtlety, subtlety -- she could be subtle. "Although I guess now I can stop wondering about your journey up here to Texas." Subtle as a hammer, apparently.
For a moment, it seemed like Nadia’s face didn’t know what to do with itself, her expression cycling through a flurry: apprehension, warmth, caution, self-consciousness, before eventually settling on something like gratitude.
“It seemed a better process than doing it slowly, and telling people in little bits and pieces, like a leaking faucet. This way, if people were interested, they could listen. Maybe sort of like how people used to do Facebook announcements for life events, you know? Get it all done with at once. Rip off the band-aid.”
She’d been thinking of that imagery a lot, over the last couple weeks: ripping off the band-aid, letting the wound air out and breathe and heal. It couldn’t heal if it was stifled. If Nadia was to permanently commit herself to Austin and stay here long-term, she needed to trust people. So when she glanced over at her roommate, her expression softened further. Olivia didn’t had the feel of a goggle-eyed gawker drawn to disaster; she was genuinely interested, yet obviously respectful of privacy for all that she hadn’t pried over the past few weeks.
“You were wondering?” Nadia echoed. Her grip on her books loosened, and she set them down beside the ones Liv was fussing with. Most were irrelevant—too technical and specific, or not specific enough—but she’d managed to find a few that might help with the building of a garden.
(How she missed Google.)
Olivia put on a bright smile, hoping to cover up the way her own face had fallen as she waited for Nadia's response. She'd always been terrible at this kind of thing, had never quite known how much to push or the right things to say. It'd been a forced expression at first, of course, but then as Nadia began to speak she made it clear that the intrusion was welcome.
Good. She hadn't been entirely off-base here.
"Of course I was wondering." The novelty of Nadia's entire being was something Olivia wondered about on a regular basis. It was a miracle she hadn't pried sooner, really; she was sure her eagerness showed plainly. And there was so much she wanted to ask. But she'd learned certain ways to cope with her curiosity.
It was intentional, the way her fingers skimmed the titles of the books before her before she plucked a fiction book to read, making herself wait before she spoke up again. "And here I thought being from Minnesota was foreign enough. I have to admit, though, I totally thought you had walked all the way here." Hotwiring cars made so much more sense.
“Almost,” Nadia admitted, unable to hide the small smile that curled on her face. “I mean, the worst of it was on foot. Cars could not go through the jungle. And sometimes we ran out of gas, or they broke down and we couldn’t just stop for repairs… but yes, whenever there was road and vehicles, we drove. There’s so many abandoned cars out there.” They’d littered the streets like so much refuse, scattered in locked grids and with their doors half-open, as if their owners intended to come back any moment. And never would.
After a thought, Nadia ploughed on, neatly trying to turn the tables on the girl. “Also, admittedly, your own continent is very big. Isn’t Minnesota almost by Canada? That’s a long way. Did you come down from Minnesota, or were you in Texas before?”
There wasn’t a need to specify before what: people always said it with a capital letter, Before, and there was an implicit understanding, the event that overturned everyone’s lives. Less a line in the sand, more an impassable wall bricking off the past and their present.
"Wow." The jungle. Olivia had only seen such a thing in her geography books -- when she'd actually paid attention or did her homework, at least -- and she couldn't help but conjure them up in her mind just then. "You must have been really determined to make it up here." As soon as she said it, though, she wondered if it was an insensitive thing to say; Nadia had lost her mother on the way, and her friend as well. Would those words make it sound as though she thought her traveling companions hadn't had the resolve that Nadia apparently had?
The worry likely showed on her face, lessening only when Nadia segued into another topic. "Yes, it's just south of Canada," she said, smiling wryly. Thinking of home usually brought mixed feelings. She was unsure how she'd fare during today's mention. "I was going to school here, at the University of Texas. I had a scholarship for running -- cross country and track -- and I'd just done my first year when it happened."
That was usually as much as Olivia told people. But she felt as though she needed to even the playing field a bit; she knew so much more about Nadia now, after all. "It seems like a dumb kind of dream, now, but I wanted to go to the Olympics."
“That’s not dumb,” Nadia said firmly, without hesitation. Both of them being varying levels of curfewed, she hadn’t seen Olivia run properly yet, apart from generally jogging around the library. But the girl was built all slim lines, and Nadia had spotted the cherished pair of sneakers that her roommate didn’t always wear, only slipping them on like a soldier suiting up for war.
“If you got a scholarship, that means you must have been good, that you are skilled. You had a goal, a dream, something to aim yourself towards. That’s not a bad thing.”
What had her own life been, after all? A textile factory, wearing her hands down to the bone, day in and day out, parties and watching her mother grow older. She hadn’t even thought Alejo or Juan would ever start writing again. There had been no particular future, just the day-to-day drag—nowadays, there’s still no future, but at least there’s something to propel them along.
Olivia nodded, eyes lighting up. She was smiling without realizing it, the one that always threatened to appear whenever she let herself think about how much promise there'd been back then. "That's exactly what it means." Present tense only; her dreams may have died, but her talent was still there.
"I guess it just feels sometimes like --" She cut herself off automatically, just as she always did. But they were both working on opening up, weren't they? Olivia gave a bit of a grimace, forcing the rest of that out: "The world doesn't run on athletic prowess anymore. No pun intended. And now that I can't even do what I can do right now? It's." She gave a pathetic little shrug. "Frustrating."
“Well. In some ways,” Nadia said slowly, chewing over the thought forming in her head, “the world is now dependent on athletic prowess, actually. Running brings necessary food and supplies to this shelter and helps keep these more than a thousand people alive, no? You just do not get a medal for it.” Her mouth fluttered into something almost a smile. “But I understand the frustration—I am not even a professional runner, but feel like I am going crazy with being grounded. Thus doing things like that interview. Trying to keep busy, you know?”
Olivia was inclined to see this as lip service, Nadia trying to ease her insecurities the best way she could, but it did make sense. And it was what she'd told herself -- and Gray -- when she'd started running for supplies. She allowed a small smile to appear briefly on her face. "I know. And it's almost more fun this way, honestly. You'll see once they let us out again."
“Whenever that is. Whenever they finally catch that man.” Nadia’s gaze drifted towards the door, and though there weren’t any windows in this reference room, she found herself considering the wide world out there. Which led to her adding: “And also, you might think Brazil exotic,” Nadia added, “but to me, the north is something exotic and strange and new. What is Minnesota like?”
(Or was. But Nadia wasn’t going to refer to any of their homes in the past tense; there were some lines she refused to cross.)
"Minnesota is…" Olivia trailed off, her mind briefly transporting her to that small town she'd grown up in, the one she'd tried so hard to run away from. "There's a giant red horse next to a gas station, I think, in my home town," she said, shaking her head. "I don't know. It's dumb."
God, what she wouldn't give to see that stupid horse again.
"It's next to a Swedish flag, too, which is like the most Minnesotan thing I can even think of. There were a lot of Scandinavian people who immigrated there back in the day, like centuries ago. We have a lot of pride about that. Like my last name, 'Jensen' -- super Scandinavian." The book got tucked under her arm as Olivia grew more animated, her hands moving in that rapid way she had. "It's cold as hell during the winter and three times as hot during the summer. They don't cancel school unless it's -22 below zero. There's forests and lakes and the Mississippi River and we have hamburgers stuffed with cheese."
She was homesick suddenly, fiercely and without reason, for a place she'd tried so hard to leave.
The girl was opening up like a box creaking open, that perpetual buzz of energy now turning into talking and sharing, for once. Nadia watched the way Liv seemed to finally turn her mind back home, and was riveted; she drank in all the details of a place she’d never seen (and possibly never would)—until she hit a certain detail, a particular snag.
“Twenty two below zero?” Nadia exclaimed, breaking the reverie and exploding into her own burst of energy. “Nossa senhora, are you serious? Our biggest record low ever was…” She squinted, casting her mind back and trying to remember. “The lowest I can ever remember it getting in our winter is around 10 degrees, but normally it is around 18. God, I cannot even imagine.”
She’d grown up around dusty streets, sweltering sheet metal, muggy jungle. She wasn’t made for the cold. A sympathetic shiver ran through Nadia at the thought of it, which started in her narrow shoulders and rippled down her spine, to the soles of her feet.
"Yes," Olivia said, that ghost of a smile from earlier appearing now as a full grin as she caught sight of Nadia's full-body shiver. "I don't even know if I can put into words how freaking cold it gets, there. I guess that's one thing Austin does better." And that was saying a lot, too, considering how often Olivia griped about the endless heat. "Did it ever snow there? I do miss that. I wonder if they have like, blob snow up there."
“Never. I mean, I think it snowed in Rio maybe back in the 80s, but I was not even born then.”
This was nice, her and Nadia talking like this. Olivia was no stranger to chatter, but so much of it was about the present, sometimes the future, all of it about the other person and rarely -- if ever -- about her. It felt good to know that she could still make this kind of connection. And then a thought occurred to her: "I don't think I ever explained that, did I? The gas and the blobs." Olivia waved her hand vaguely, trying and failing to create a demonstrative gesture.
Nadia blinked, backtracking in the conversation to realise the phrase that had sounded so strange and alien when Olivia had said it: blob snow. “I have heard a little bit about the blistered gas,” she kept getting that term wrong, “but I don’t know very much, admittedly, since I was not here for it. And… blobs?”
In the past couple months of her time in the city, Nadia had been lucky: she still hadn’t encountered that particular meteorological gremlin of life in Austin yet.
Olivia successfully managed to hide the smile that threatened to appear at the term 'blistered gas.' Such an expression seemed inappropriate, after all, given the topic. "They dropped it on us... um, August or September 2016? A little while after the zombies first came. The gas, I mean, not the blobs. They thought it'd take out all the zombies, but it just pretty much destroyed all the plants and burned things up. That's why so many of the buildings nowadays look the way they do." Zombies alone couldn't have caused that kind of destruction. "So if you ever smell marshmallow, run the other way."
"The blobs are like... Rain, almost, but blobby?" She made another gesture, using both hands this time to approximate the average size of one. "I think it's a side effect of the gas, but either way I'm pretty sure you can get infected from one."
Nadia’s eyebrows climbed into her hairline. “Infected from rain?”
That realisation suddenly put everything into perspective: the additional difficulties in gardening, the extra reasons she had to scavenge sheets of glass to insulate her little fledgling project, protect it with a greenhouse. She was mentally scribbling notes, reminding herself of what to watch out for: marshmallows. blobby rain.
"Yes," Olivia confirmed, a grim smile on her face. "It's like something out of a movie or a book, isn't it?" The zombies she could deal with; they were nearly normal by now, in fact. But the blob rain was some kind of sci-fi business brought to life, the kind of thing dreamed up by some writer with an overactive imagination. "Fortunately, it's pretty easy to figure out when they're out. Since you can see them."
“I wonder if they tried the gas elsewhere.” There was a wistful note in Nadia’s voice. “I saw nothing like it outside of the United States, but… those countries were also overrun, far more than here. I would not hope to try rebuilding and replanting there either.”
She was still trying to hang onto the glimmers of Olivia’s home, the bright-red horse and sub-zero temperatures—anything to push the memories of the Amazon jungle a little further at bay today.
Olivia allowed her mind to return back to the home she'd dwelled on recently, wondering what it was like now. "I wish we knew. There's like, no way to get in touch with anywhere else, I think? So I don't know if they tried it on any other cities in the US." Certainly Nadia would've been able to tell if the same thing had happened in South America. "Maybe one day we'll find a way to know."
Nadia’s hand drifted across one of the agriculture books she’d collected, a smile flickering across her face—less wary and warming the more time she spent with Liv.
“One day,” she echoed.