8. Olivia
ONE DAY BEFORE THE OPENING CEREMONY
Noah, the HR manager, had told Olivia that they needed an “all-rounder” volunteer who could jump into different departments whenever they needed help. So her options were either to go back home knowing she’d wasted hundreds of pounds to get to Athens or to fake gratitude and say yes to yet another summer of fetching coffees, replacing toilet rolls, and packing envelopes, without even being able to call it an internship.
What she’d really wanted to do was tell him that he could take his clearly made-up “all-rounder” role, stuff it between the shaking lips of his insincere smile, and choke on it. But Olivia had spent enough time overhearing conversations in corporate offices to know that everything she said in anger could and would be used against her, especially if her CV were to land back into an Olympic HR inbox for a future job. So, she’d accepted his lackluster offer, followed him out of Olympic prison, and hated herself a little for being so agreeable.
Noah had led her to the other side of the Village and introduced her to one of the volunteer managers, who’d taken her through the most detailed training session of her life. It turned out that the “all-rounder” volunteer gig wasn’t actually a fake role, it was pretty intense. She’d been looped into a training day for new volunteers, and in the last five hours she’d been taught how to administer first aid, how to drive a golf buggy, and how to successfully escort 2,000 people out of a building in the case of a fire. She’d been on an extremely detailed tour of the Village to get familiar with all the different nooks and crannies, and then she’d gone to the volunteer center to be given a bright blue-and-yellow volunteer uniform to wear for the duration of the Games. “Volunteering at the Olympics” didn’t have the same level of prestige as “working at the Olympic Organizing Commission in the International Relations and Diplomacy team” would have. But, by the end of the day, Olivia had accepted her fate. She sat on a bench in the middle of the Village and gave her feet a moment to recover from the hell she’d put them through.
When she looked at her phone, she was greeted by a sea of messages from old friends, colleagues, and distant family members congratulating her on the internship. Her mum’s proud-parent screenshot had traveled across group chats at the speed of light. She grimaced at the realization that eventually they’d all find out that things weren’t going as smoothly as she’d planned. And that her parents would be sad when they found out the daughter they’d told their friends, students, and colleagues about wasn’t the bright success story they thought she was.
But Olivia was nothing if not determined; she would find her way to the top before anybody back home found out. And if she hadn’t picked up her phone to delete the LinkedIn post, maybe she could have shrugged it all off and decided that any opportunity was a good opportunity if she made the most of it. But as she scrolled, her eye caught on a photo of a guy around her age posing in a perfectly tailored suit in front of the Olympic rings. As she read, she began to taste something angry and acidic in her mouth.
“Lars. Lindberg,” she whispered as soon as Aditi answered the phone.
“The whispering is a bit ominous—you’re freaking me out,” Aditi said.
“Lars fucking Lindberg,” Olivia said, her whisper now sounding like a hiss.
“Lars Lindberg as in the guy we went to uni with?”
“Lars Lindberg as in the silver-spoon-fed, winters-in-Aspen, barely-showed-up-to-lectures Lars Lindberg. He stole my job! Well, he was given my job. And if my sources are correct, he’s got VIP tickets to the opening ceremony,” Olivia said, thinking about the photo he’d just shared on his Instagram story.
“And are your sources… Instagram?”
“Maybe,” she said defensively.
Olivia had first encountered Lars Lindberg a couple of weeks into her first term of university. While he’d been on the same law degree as her, she’d almost never seen him at lectures or seminars. But Lars was the biggest name on campus, and the furthest thing away from an underdog. He threw sprawling parties in his family’s house in Chelsea, his mother was a major donor with her own plaque outside of the university library, and the family history section of his father’s Wikipedia page was filled with blue hyperlinks. Lars wasn’t just well-off, he was private-jet, Swiss-private-school, never-lifted-a-finger, crazy, stupid rich.
His Instagram was littered with photographs of him talking to world leaders at fancy black-tie galas, jumping into sunset-framed infinity pools, and eating five-course meals of teeny-tiny Michelin-starred dishes. Then there were the I’m socially progressive and care about people and the planet photos to balance out the No I won’t answer your question about where my family’s money came from or why my dad’s business manager spends so much time in the Cayman Islands photos. Lars collecting plastic from the ocean, Lars helping to build a school in Nepal, and, of course, Lars posing with a group of Black kids he didn’t know outside a village hut in Kenya.
But it wasn’t the old money or performative activism—which he only seemed to do when his family’s business was in the news for something ethically murky—that bothered her. It was the fact that while Olivia had to plot, strategize, and negotiate her way into every room she’d ever stepped into, Lars had breezed through university, getting every internship, award, and opportunity she’d wanted with barely any effort. And now here he was with his family-crested ring and floppy posh-boy hair. Making a fun summer anecdote of the job that Olivia had spent years dreaming about. And unlike Olivia, who’d put herself into financial hell for an unpaid internship that wasn’t happening anymore, Lars was getting paid.
“Olivia? Are you okay?” asked Aditi.
Olivia was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Village breathing heavily and ferociously scrolling through her phone. She definitely wasn’t okay. She could only imagine how strange she looked in a sea of smiley, upbeat volunteers.
“I have to go,” Olivia said, standing up.
“Are you sure? We can talk about it.”
Olivia knew Aditi wouldn’t judge her, but envy was an ugly emotion; there were just some things she kept to herself.
“Yeah, I’ll see you when I get home,” Olivia said, feeling deflated as soon as she ended the call.
At some point in every internship she’d done, the HR department had ushered the girls and the Black and Asian interns aside for some sort of panel that almost always revolved around the topic of impostor syndrome. The speaker would talk about how they, as someone underrepresented in the industry, had felt like an impostor and questioned if they were really smart, talented, or competent enough to be the best at their job. And each time, Olivia had nodded and clapped along because she knew that was what she was supposed to do. But the thing was, Olivia had never felt like an impostor.
In fact, when she’d done her first (unpaid) summer internship at the age of nineteen at a high-powered law firm, she’d looked around at the room of private school boys and kids of law firm partners and thought: If anyone’s an impostor here, it’s them, because at least I know how hard I worked to get here. She would go into the office an hour earlier than she needed to so she could get ahead. Spent the weekends reading up on legal cases so she could always be overprepared. And had almost maxed out her credit card by spending the whole summer paying to commute into the city, buying new outfits to fit in, and going to every after-work drinks and social activity she could to keep up with her colleagues.
So, when she’d looked around to see people who’d done a fraction of the work she had done to get there, working half as hard as her, she’d thought, Why would I think I’m the impostor when I’m clearly outpacing all of them? But it still stung to be reminded that rich boys with well-connected dads would always finish first.
As she watched Lars’s Instagram story, Olivia began to feel a familiar sense of disillusionment. It crept into more and more of her life each year. Yes, it was mostly jealousy—and Olivia hated feeling that way. But there was more to it than that. It was a confirmation of what she had long known but foolishly allowed herself to believe she could defy. That she was always going to have to work three times as hard to get half as far. No matter what new hobbies she picked up, books she read, and anecdotes she rehearsed, she would never be the first choice in a draw between a girl like her and a guy like Lars. And no matter how much money she spent on fancy clothes, the world she wanted to work in wasn’t set up for people like her.
As she walked through the Village, the disappointment she’d felt earlier began to fade away. In its place came a quiet, searing, contained rage. It was the only kind of rage she allowed herself to experience, and it was rising up faster than it ever had before.
She’d spent so much of her life managing her emotions and carefully curating her personality so that nobody could ever throw an “angry Black girl” label at her. But she was angry. Angry she’d worked so hard only to be denied at the very last second. Angry that she’d spent such a huge chunk of her savings to fund a summer that was dissolving right in front of her. And angry that she was going to have to go back to the drawing board and plot out a new way to get to the other side of her five-year plan. So, on that day in Athens, Olivia allowed herself to walk through the Village with blood in her heels and a scowl on her face.