24. Olivia
DAY FOUR OF THE 2024 OLYMPICS
“Olivia, I am in distress,” Arlo said from the other side of the call.
“Arlo, why are you in distress?” Olivia asked. She was now well accustomed to the dramatic start to all of Arlo’s walkie-talkie calls.
“My art class is falling apart,” he said.
The athletes were all so busy with practice and competitions that sometimes it was hard for them to get out of their heads enough to relax at the end of the day. So, the Village hosted a series of mindfulness activities in the Culture Hub every evening. One of the activities Arlo had helped organize was a life art class. He’d spent that afternoon working meticulously to create a beautiful set filled with fresh fruit and ornate jugs, and then formed a circle of canvases and chairs. But at the very last minute, just an hour before the workshop, the model Arlo had booked had called him up in tears saying that he’d been infected with a pretty explosive stomach bug and could no longer make it to the art class that night.
“I think I’m going to have to do it.”
“Can’t you book another model?” Olivia asked.
“Nobody. They’d have to go through the whole weeks-long Village screening and security process to even step through the gates,” said Arlo, defeated.
“I can do it for you,” said Olivia, trying to bring the kind of enthusiasm to the situation that Arlo usually brought. “I’d just have to stand there while they draw me, right?”
Arlo groaned. “It’s a traditional life drawing class,” he said.
Olivia tilted her head to the side, not fully understanding what he meant by that.
“Traditional life… in the nude—well, mostly in the nude,” he said nervously.
So, instead, Olivia drove a buggy to the other side of the Village and went along with Arlo to the art class for moral support. She spent the entire walk to the Culture Hub trying to hype him up.
“Arlo, you’re an objectively handsome man,” she said as they power walked.
“In a village of men that look like literal Greek gods,” Arlo said, trying not to panic as he opened the door.
“You’re an incredibly fit surfer, even your hair looks sea-swept,” she said. They ran up the stairs.
“That’s true, but I’m not used to having thirty people staring at it,” he said, rushing into the shower as Olivia searched the staff cupboards for a spare towel.
“Think of it as a character-building moment, and a really good story to tell at parties.”
“Well, my boyfriend is going to get a good kick out of this when I tell him why I missed dinner.”
“Exactly, and I’m going to go home with a one-of-a-kind drawing of you,” Olivia said as he walked out of the shower and tightened the belt around his robe. “But you don’t have to do this, Arlo, not if you don’t want to,” she reminded him. “They can just draw the water jugs and fruits, and you can keep the robe on.”
“I promised the full life-drawing-class experience,” said Arlo dramatically as he walked into the room filled with athletes sitting patiently in front of their canvases, “and that’s what I’m going to deliver.”
Which is how Olivia ended up in a room with thirty of the world’s best athletes, listening to traditional Greek music and painting a nude portrait of a coworker she’d only met three days before.
When Olivia was a child, she’d spent the whole school week excitedly anticipating art class. Back then, all that really mattered on Thursday afternoons was her paints and paper and the way they made the rest of the world melt away. Painting hadn’t felt like an escape for her, it was a way of seeing the world more vividly than she saw it with her own eyes. Art made her more aware of the curves and contours that made someone’s face beautiful and more alert to the way the streets reflected sunlight in the moments after rainfall. But she hadn’t painted in years.
“You’re really good at this,” came a voice from behind her. Olivia turned around to find its source.
“Hey!” she said, pleasantly surprised to see that Haruki was painting at one of the easels behind her. Haruki had one of those kind faces that instantly made Olivia feel at ease.
“The Village is huge, but we keep bumping into each other. It’s got to be fate, right?” He seemed genuinely happy to see her too.
“Right? I feel like the universe is trying to tell us something,” she said.
“Yeah, actually, I was thinking about you the other day. The Village has an outdoor cinema that screens sports movies every night, and I was wondering if you wanted to come and watch one with me sometime,” he said. He sounded kind of nervous, and for a split second Olivia wondered if he was asking her out on a date. But it was Haruki Endō. She had seen the celeb gossip account stories about him, and his dating history consisted almost entirely of supermodels and gold-medal-winning athletes. She was pretty confident in herself, but it felt incredibly unlikely that Haruki was asking her out, so she brushed the thought aside.
“They’re screening Bend It Like Beckham on Sunday?” he continued.
“As in Bend It Like Beckham, the singular best British sports film of the twenty-first century?” she grinned, delighted that she and Haruki shared another favorite film in common. She knew they were going to become fast friends.
“Yeah, it would be fun, right?” he said cheerfully. If he was asking her on a date, he would have attempted to flirt, but he just looked really excited to watch the film, so Olivia nodded her head in agreement and said yes.
“Oh, and my best friend, Aditi, loves that film. I promised I’d spend the weekend with her, so I’ll bring her along,” Olivia said enthusiastically. The outdoor cinema was on the spectator side of the Village, open to anyone in the public who’d bought a ticket, so she was thrilled to have a reason to finally get Aditi on Village grounds.
“That would be great,” Haruki said.
She saw his smile falter for a second and then reappear so she didn’t think anything of it. She got him to phone her so that she had his number and said that she would text him to set a time for the three of them to meet up. Then she went back to her canvas.
“What paint are you using? The colors look so vibrant,” Haruki said, coming closer.
“It’s gouache paint,” she said as a she made another brush-stroke. Her painting of Arlo was turning out much better than she’d thought it would. But when she stepped back to look at Haruki’s canvas, she saw that his drawing was truly mesmerizing.
While Olivia was painting a bright portrait that blurred colors and light, Haruki was working on an incredibly detailed, almost photorealistic pencil drawing that looked like it should have taken days to create.
“I used to take art classes when I was younger, but then I got distracted by swimming and put it to the side,” Haruki said.
Olivia nodded. She wondered how often pursuing greatness got in the way of pursuing the other things you loved.
“I’ll let you get back to your painting,” Haruki said, nodding before he returned to his easel and she went back to hers.
As Olivia had approached her late teen years, painting wasn’t the only thing that she’d found herself gradually letting go of. Slowly, whole parts of her life had begun to fade away. She’d told herself that if she didn’t intend to become great at something, it wasn’t worth wasting time or money on. But as she looked at her canvas, she couldn’t help but feel a certain kind of loss for the time in her life when just enjoying something was a good enough reason to do it.
She’d spent years trying to avoid slipping back into Summer Olivia, but the summer that birthed the name had been a carefree one. She’d gone out to the beach in the mornings and soaked in the sun, taken her sketchbook out and drawn the landscape. As distracting and unfocused as that summer was, it had felt like coming home to herself. Maybe this summer could feel that way too. She just needed to decide how much she was willing to let go.