Re: Train tracks: Oliver & Gwen
"I didn't say it the way you said it," he told her without bothering to argue that he didn't have data. Oliver didn't even really know what that word meant, but he'd heard it on medical television shows and even some of those nova specials about Saturn's rings that he used to watch when nobody was looking. But data? That was like rules, wasn't it? Lines and dots on paper, findings. Oliver didn't have any of that. He didn't care enough about other people to decipher the whys and hows of their goals, achieved or not.
She asked about where he experienced the garden, and Oliver was honest. "In a dream." The house where he'd grown up? There'd been no garden, and there wa sno garden now at the house in the woods. There could be one, if Jude would plant it, but maybe it was for the best that Jude didn't. Oliver was too careless for living things, and it seemed cruel to plant a garden when they weren't going to be here forever. Would the flowers feel abandoned in their beds? Oliver imagined so.
"Its not creation," he recited bitterly, and Oliver dropped the yellow chalk into the dead grass in order for him to look at the unfamiliar girl. "And I don't want anybody to thank me. I don't want anybody to talk to me," he hinted at with emphasis before his thumb smudged a softer edge to some green stems.