32. Olivia
DAY FIVE OF THE 2024 OLYMPICS
Olivia usually hopped onto the first shuttle bus out of the Village when her shift ended. She and Aditi were renting in the center of Athens, and Olivia had slipped into a nightly routine of going home and sitting in bed writing out job applications until Aditi convinced her to leave her room. Because, while she was having a better summer than she’d expected to have when she’d found out about the lost internship, September was just three weeks away and she knew that she needed to have an idea of what came after she caught her flight back home. But that evening, instead of worrying about jobs, Olivia decided to take the long way home.
Athens was still bathed in sunlight. As she wandered through the busy streets, she stopped to listen to the sound of a Greek folk band playing music in the middle of a square of busy restaurants. She wandered down a road lined with lemon trees and followed the sound of cheers that led her past a bar where a whole group of people were gathered to watch an Olympic sailing race. Then she took a left turn, and walked down a quiet street until she reached her destination: Meraki—a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop. It was a legendary art shop that Olivia had read about while planning her trip. It had been open for over a century, and Olivia could feel the history as soon as she walked through the door. She heard the bell tinkle above her and was immediately immersed in a room that smelled like old books, sweet tea, and paint. She greeted the kind older woman at the counter, then filled her bag to bursting with everything that caught her eye. She definitely didn’t have the money, and she knew she should probably be saving for whatever September held, but she’d decided to let herself do one thing that was just for herself. For her present-day self, not some idealized future.
“Olivia, I haven’t seen you painting in years,” said Aditi when she came home to find the kitchen table covered with paper, paintbrushes, and colorful glasses of water.
“I shouldn’t have stopped,” Olivia said as she put the final touch to the postcard-sized portrait she’d been working on and handed it over to Aditi. It was a painting of Aditi drinking coffee outside Café Kalopsia. Aditi stilled for a moment as tears pricked her eyes.
“Liv, you made me look so happy.” She squeezed Olivia’s shoulder. “I almost forgot how talented you are at this,” she said, taking a seat on the other side of the table.
“I was supposed to be doing that,” said Olivia, pointing at the laptop filled with incomplete job applications. “And I should probably get back to it.”
“But it’s summer,” said Aditi knowingly.
“It’s summer,” said Olivia.
“And Summer Olivia has decided to join us this year?” Aditi said, a quick smile appearing on her face.
Olivia knew where the conversation was going. When Olivia had gone home after getting stuck in the lift, Aditi had cornered her at the front door and convinced her to divulge every single detail of the night.
“Your skin is glowing, you’re wearing cute little dresses, you’re painting? I know Summer Olivia when I see her,” said Aditi.
“It has nothing to do with Zeke,” Olivia said, sounding a little more defensive than she’d meant to. “Okay, it has a teeny bit to do with him,” she conceded, throwing her hands up in defeat. “But it’s more about summer.”
“And is summer a code word for hot athletes? Just checking we’re on the same page.” Aditi hadn’t got any less excitable in the almost twenty years they’d known each other.
“No, I mean actual summer. It wasn’t the boy last time and it’s not the boy this time, it’s the way I feel when the sun comes out.” Olivia put her paintbrush down.
Aditi went to the fridge, cut up a bowl of mango, and placed it in the middle of the table. They always got the fruit out when they needed to have a long conversation.
“Do you remember how fearless we were when we were kids?” Olivia asked.
“Like the time I jumped into that pond and broke my leg?” Aditi said. “Or the time you convinced me to go to that abandoned warehouse party when we were fifteen?”
“Yeah, they were dumb decisions, but we didn’t think about the consequences of everything so much back then. We just did what sounded fun and figured out the details later.”
“So—what I’m hearing is that you want to go to a party tonight and jump into a random pool? Because if that’s it, I’m so down,” said Aditi.
While that sounded like fun, Olivia was talking about the fearless way they used to dream when they were teenagers. How the two of them had sat on Olivia’s bedroom floor drafting out big-eyed plans for the women they wanted to become when they grew up. Aditi had written out her dream of owning her own iced coffee business and Olivia had written out her dream of working at the Olympics. But ever since arriving in the Village, she’d been wondering at what point her childhood dream had become such a firmly mapped-out plan. How something she’d excitedly aspired to had become the gauge she measured the success of her whole life against. Her five-year plan had gone from being the goal that woke her up in the morning to a source of rigidity and dread, with no space for distractions.
“That summer in Lisbon…” Olivia started.
“Tiago?” Aditi asked, referring to Olivia’s Portuguese summer fling.
“Kind of. I don’t think I fell in love with Tiago,” she said out loud for the first time. Aditi nodded. “I think I fell in love with the way that summer made me feel.”
“It was the best,” said Aditi. “Remember? We would go swimming every day and dream up our futures at night, walk through the streets with no destination in mind.”
“It was perfect. But because of how it ended, I kind of put the ways I changed when I got home down to heartbreak, but I don’t think that’s what it was,” said Olivia. “I feel like that summer was the last time I actually just enjoyed myself. The last time a part of me still felt like a kid.”
“Well, it was our last year of being teenagers, so it kind of was,” said Aditi, a hint of wistfulness in her voice.
That year Olivia had mistaken falling in love with the summer for falling in love with the boy. For a few brief, heady days she’d thought about staying in Portugal, deferring her final year of university and seeing where the summer could take her. But when she’d found out that Tiago was already in a relationship, she’d realized that her epic summer romance had been nothing more than just a fling to entertain him while his girlfriend was away. The experience crushed her, so she’d panicked and booked the next flight back to the UK.
It had been devastating, and as much as she hated to admit it, she’d gone into every romantic encounter ever since feeling a little bit guarded, a little less quick to trust. But it wasn’t just the discovery that he wasn’t who he’d said he was that left her heartbroken. It had been her last carefree teenage summer, and, after Tiago, she’d gone home and realized she had no choice but to grow up.
Her teenage self could have made careless decisions like moving country for some guy she barely knew. But her adult self had to set out a clear path for what she was going to do after graduation. Her teenage self could ignore signs and take a boy at his word, but her adult self had to be much more discerning than that. Her nineteen-year-old summer self could be reckless and figure things out as she went along. But her nineteen-year-old autumn self had understood that her life wasn’t just her own.
She’d landed in the UK on a random Saturday, and when she’d opened her front door, there was no one at home. It was a rare, perfect summer weekend, but her parents were both at work.
It wasn’t term time, but her mum was at the secondary school she taught at, manning the free summer lunches program. It was her dad’s day off, but he was at the social services office, stepping in to advocate for one of the vulnerable adults he worked with. There were never enough social workers or council budget allowances for her dad to have a real weekend, and there were never enough school resources or government funding increases for her mum to stop thinking about her students. Yet Olivia had just wasted hundreds of pounds and a whole summer… having fun.
She had unpacked her dresses, looked around at the small two-bedroom flat they lived in, and thought about how much money she’d spent on cocktails and fun nights out in Lisbon. She’d thought about how many hours her parents worked every week and shook her head in guilt as she thought about how much time she’d wasted at the beach.
How could she have forgotten that there was more to life than just having a good time? What if she never got to do her dream job? What if she never got to buy her parents the house they’d always wanted? What if she never lived up to her potential?
If she was ever going to achieve her goals, make her parents proud, and build a better life, she was going to have to get a lot more focused. So, she’d written out the plan.
After that summer, she’d become fiercely regimented. She spent every night studying. Every university break doing an internship. Every spare moment trying to build her future. In short—everything in her life became an assignment she was too scared to fail.
The truth was that the only thing that stopped her from reverting to the carefree spontaneity of that summer was guilt. But it was easier to blame it on heartbreak than admit that adulthood had taken a youthfulness from her that she wasn’t sure she could ever get back.
“I obviously still loathe Lars Lindberg,” she said.
“With a burning passion,” Aditi nodded.
“And that internship was mine,” she said.
“You were completely robbed,” Aditi said.
“But I think if I’d got the internship, I probably would have sped through that too, spent all my time trying to make contacts and prove myself… wait, no. I take that back,” she said, remembering who she was. “I would have probably had so much fun doing that. It’s what I’ve wanted my whole life. I’m not going to spin this into some antiambition lesson. And what I’m not going to take away from this summer is that I should be okay with second best,” she added.
“We are not big-city girls who accidentally ended up in one of those summer beach reads, where the takeaway is that you have to sacrifice your career for happiness!” said Aditi, despite the fact that Olivia currently had three of those exact kinds of books on her bedside table.
“Ambition is a brilliant thing! I still want every single thing on that list. And I will get them. But I want success because I love it. Not because the fear of not achieving my goals is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.”
“And while Mai Nkomo and Baba Nkomo are proud of everything you’re doing, it’s not your responsibility to live for them,” Aditi said softly.
Olivia nodded. She knew that, but it didn’t stop her from feeling that way.
“Sometimes I can just do things for me, because I want to,” she said.
“Exactly,” Aditi said, hitting the table to reinforce her agreement.
“And today, I want to just sit at home and paint instead of applying for jobs.”
“Because it’s summer,” said Aditi, repeating her favorite mantra.
“And I’m fun in the summer,” Olivia said, cutting the final mango chunk in half and giving Aditi the bigger piece.
“Liv,” Aditi said, suddenly serious. “You know the Summer Olivia thing is just a nickname, right? Summer Olivia is just who you are when you let yourself be the truest version of yourself. Which comes out all year round.” Aditi went to put her bowl in the kitchen.
Olivia stayed seated at the table for a moment, sending a silent wish to the universe that they’d stay best friends for the rest of their lives.
“Remember the rule?” Aditi said as she picked up her phone and connected it to the kitchen speaker.
“What rule?” said Olivia, but then she heard the song Aditi was playing. “Wait, the rule only applies to random moments, you can’t just put on a Ciara song and insist on the rule.”
“I don’t make the rule, I just reinforce it,” said Aditi. She began to dance around the kitchen. Olivia shimmied across the room to join her. They’d been friends since they were five years old and seen the very best and worst of each other. Their friendship didn’t have any rules. Except that if a Ciara song came on, they had to dance. So, Olivia danced.
Sometimes she forgot who she was. But Aditi was always there to remind her. Maybe that’s what love was, she thought, as she spun around in the early evening light. Maybe it was just the feeling of being around someone who made her remember who she was. Who brought out the parts of her that she’d forgotten. Or the parts she sometimes got too self-conscious to show. She felt it when she was around her parents, even when she was hiding things from them to protect their feelings. She felt it when she was with Aditi, talking about everything and nothing and knowing they’d never get bored. And she realized that she’d been feeling more and more like herself ever since she’d walked across the Village in that green-juice-stained suit.
But that didn’t matter, because in the Hub that afternoon she’d been reminded of something that she’d been doing her best to try to forget. Like everyone else in the world, Olivia knew about Zeke’s on-again, off-again relationship with Valentina Ross-Rodriguez, the star gymnast of Team USA. Yes, she and Zeke had kissed, and she was pretty sure he felt that spark too. But as confident as she was in who she was, Olivia knew that his ex was basically sporting royalty. She rarely got insecure, but when it came to her and Valentina, there wasn’t really any competition. Because Valentina was one of the greatest athletes in the world. She was talented, accomplished, and incredibly beautiful. She was the kind of girl you either wanted to be or you wanted to be with.
Olivia had seen dozens of photos of Zeke and Valentina on red carpets, in stadiums, and at A-list parties. They were the internet’s favorite couple. And she found it hard to truly believe that Zeke, who’d specifically hunted down tickets to watch his ex-girlfriend compete, didn’t still have feelings for her.
But while that summer five years ago had changed her, the one thing she’d resolved not to let it change was her ability to hope.
She didn’t want to go through her life distrusting everyone she met because one boy lied to her. And while she wasn’t the same carefree nineteen-year-old girl she’d been, she could still let her mind wander back to those hot, perfect, sun-fueled kisses, right?
Allow herself to live in the joy and uncertainty of a crush.
Enjoy the quiet thrill of starting something having no idea when, or if, it would end.
Olivia planned and mapped her way through every area of her life. But love was too complicated to try to control. So, she shook her head, resolved to just let the summer unfold, and channeled all her energy into swaying around the kitchen with her best friend as the sun set.