42. Olivia
DAY SIX OF THE 2024 OLYMPICS
“You’re different today,” said Arlo, looking over at Olivia.
“What do you mean?” Olivia asked as she took a sip of her coffee. She and Zeke had left the house at the crack of dawn that morning so that Zeke could sneak back into GB House and Olivia could get to the Village for her seven a.m. start. She and Arlo were scheduled to help the volunteers at the registration desk hand out press passes to the photojournalists covering that day’s competitions.
“I don’t know, you seem more peaceful than usual,” Arlo said, looking at her. Arlo knew what she looked like after her busiest days on the walkie-talkies. So, there was no doubt this was probably the first time he’d ever seen her look relaxed.
“I’m like a sleeping newborn before eight a.m.,” she said truthfully. Olivia was at her most peaceful in the morning before the day clouded her clarity. But there was something else on her face and Arlo could see it.
“Did you really end up spending last night filling in job applications?” Arlo asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Well… I got distracted.”
“Distracted?” he asked curiously.
“Yeah, you know how it is,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“Olivia, you’re doing a bad job of trying to sound casual,” Arlo said, scanning her face to try to figure her out, but she turned away so he wouldn’t see the story in her eyes.
“Has it got anything to do with why you keep looking at your phone?” he asked.
“I’m not looking at my phone,” she said indignantly. But she was definitely looking at her phone. She and Zeke had been texting back and forth ever since they’d left the apartment. About last night, about his semifinal win, about when they would get to see each other again.
“Has it got anything to do with that tall, gorgeous hunk of an athlete who’s clearly obsessed with you?” Arlo said, teasing her.
Olivia hadn’t told him about the elevator kiss, or all of the overwhelming thoughts and feelings that had been bubbling ever since. About how last night she’d felt like her body had been set alight. She was pretty sure the image of Zeke kissing her inner thigh would be seared into her memory for the rest of her life. And that when she’d woken up this morning in Zeke’s arms, to the tender sensation of him gently running his fingers through her hair… she’d realized with complete, unflinching certainty that she was in way over her head. And that it was unlikely she’d be able to shake the feeling off.
But Arlo was good at reading people.
“Did you even go to sleep last night?” he asked, tilting his head to the side in amusement.
She opened and then shut her mouth.
“Olivia!” he shrieked, excitedly peppering her with questions as they began their shift.
It quickly became her busiest day yet. Her walkie-talkie went off nonstop. She spent the whole morning and afternoon on her feet, going back and forth across the Village. She went to South Korea House to deliver a stack of VIP tickets for that afternoon’s archery contest, then rushed off to the equestrian field to help a truck of delivery men figure out where to drop off thirty-eight boxes of hay. After hours of running around, she finally got the chance to sit down for a few moments and drink a glass of water, but then her walkie-talkie buzzed again.
“On a scale of one to ten, how busy are you right now?” asked Arlo. “Because there’s another evening reception that forgot to…” She already knew how Arlo’s sentence was going to end.
The Olympics was all about sports, but the sheer scale and scope of it meant that there were always at least a dozen different nonsporting events happening in the Village on any given day. Receptions for international diplomats, tours for kids from local schools, and huge marquee events for big-money sponsors. Each event required catering, risk assessments, and security checks. But everybody always forgot to order goodie bags until the very last minute. Which is when Arlo or Olivia stepped in.
The office at the back of the Hub was essentially a Santa’s workshop–grade goodie-bag-packing room. There were boxes and boxes of official Olympic merchandise: shirts, pens, notebooks, sweets, water bottles, and basically anything you could print a logo onto. So, Olivia grabbed 150 paper bags and began to fill them up. And as she did, she thought about Zeke. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t once stopped thinking about him. While running errands, she’d replayed all of their conversations. Each time she saw a Team GB uniform, she hoped it was him. She even found herself smiling at elevators.
Olivia wasn’t naive; she’d heard rumors about the love lives of Olympic athletes. How they treated the athletes’ quarters of the Village like a dorm in one of those raunchy aughts’ university movies. She knew that, despite what he’d told her last night, to Zeke this was probably just a summer fling. A casual situation-ship. She knew better than to fall for the blind hope of a sun-soaked romance. Even though she really wanted to. So, despite how tempting it was to imagine that things would last beyond their time in Athens, she brought herself back down to earth. August wouldn’t last forever, and, when it ended, she’d hopefully be too busy with a new job in a new city to be heartbroken. She shook her head, packed the last of the goodie bags, and drove to the fancy restaurant on the other side of the Village.
It was a lot more glamorous than she’d expected it to be. There were fresh flowers and flickering candles on every table. Hand-calligraphed name cards and relaxed jazz music playing as she walked in. It all looked so elegant and put together that Olivia instantly felt out of place with her bright blue-and-yellow uniform and multicolored goodie bags. It was her last callout of the day, though, so she was too tired to be self-conscious. When Arlo had called her about the event, he’d only told her where it was and how many bags to bring. So, it wasn’t until she looked up at the screen that she realized what she’d just walked into. The screen read 2024 OLYMPICS DIPLOMATS DINNER. Olivia’s heart sank.
She looked to the other side of the room where two men in suits were talking, and, after a second glance, she recognized them as OOC officials. She read the name cards on the tables and saw they were for the national ambassadors she’d dreamed of working with.
Olivia could feel the dull ache of sadness starting to settle in. Imagining how things could have turned out was one thing, but there was something uniquely cruel about walking in on an alternative version of what her summer, and future, could have looked like. She should have been standing over there with the officials, wearing one of the many formal dresses she’d packed for occasions just like this. She would have arrived early and spent the whole night impressing them with how much she knew about international relations. She’d fantasized about excelling at the job and being offered her dream full-time job at the Olympics. Instead, she was standing at the door in her now-creased volunteer uniform, looking like a delivery lady. She was ready to quickly drop off the bags, buggy back to the Hub, and catch the next shuttle home. But then she heard a voice from behind her.
“Are those the goodie bags? Thank God, I was going to get into so much shit if I didn’t get them.”
Olivia knew that voice. Her mood curdled.
It was Lars Fucking Lindberg.
And, all of a sudden, she was back at university again. Olivia hadn’t had many interactions with Lars back then. He’d barely spent any time on campus that didn’t revolve around partying or schmoozing with the visiting speakers that his parents always got him a meeting with. Their paths rarely crossed, so she had no reason to think about the big name on campus whose wealthy, influential family’s generous donations funded the library refurbishment. Except for that one night during her second year.
Olivia had been in fierce “get a good summer internship” mode. She’d spent the start of the year going to open days, setting up coffee meetings, and making sure that hers were the highest grades not just in her class but in the whole faculty. On paper, she’d had everything going for her, so one of her favorite lecturers invited her to the fancy annual reception the university held for its most influential alumni. She’d run to the high street and used her credit card to buy an outfit to make herself feel like she fit in. And then she’d put her braids in a ponytail and headed to the reception. The room had been filled with CEOs, company founders, law firm partners, politicians, and tech entrepreneurs. And, while Olivia was only twenty and still felt out of her depth whenever she was surrounded by such successful people, she’d given it her best shot. She’d walked around introducing herself to the kinds of people who could change the trajectory of her career. She’d done her very best to act like she belonged there. And then one of her lecturers had introduced her to Christian Millar, head of Millar and Partners, the top law firm in London.
Her lecturer sang her praises and then left her to hold her own in a conversation with Christian about a big legal case in the city that she’d spent weeks reading about. But then Christian had looked past her. She was familiar with those moments—when the person she was speaking to absentmindedly glanced away, looking for someone else that they’d rather talk to. She was used to it, especially at events like this. But rather than going to speak to another founder or businessperson or successful peer, Christian Millar had turned away from Olivia while she was in the middle of a sentence to speak to… Lars Lindberg. The son of one of his most important clients.
Olivia quickly became the invisible third wheel in a conversation above her tax bracket. She’d listened with her glass in her hand as they talked about skiing season and the Lindbergs’ golf club. Then she’d watched in silence as they scheduled in a dinner at Lars’s favorite restaurant in the city and the two of them walked away from her, too caught up in their conversation to say goodbye. Olivia’s lecturer had cast her a sympathetic look from the other side of the room, but they both knew this was just the way it was. Boys like Lars, who’d grown up in rooms like this, were always going to have an easier time getting to where they wanted to go.
The logical part of Olivia knew that if she’d grown up with Lars’s wealth, access, and opportunities, she would have made the most of them too. And she knew that Lars probably had no recollection of that night or any knowledge of the fact that he always seemed to be the perfect fit for the places Olivia couldn’t get a seat in. But seeing him here, in the Village, doing the internship she’d wanted, felt pretty brutal. So as soon as she saw him, she began to pick him apart.
She hated his expensive tailored suit. Hated the watch on his wrist, which definitely cost more than her parents’ annual salary. But more than anything, she hated the way he spoke to her.
“Lifesaver, you really got me out of a sticky situation,” he said, before looking back down at his phone and beginning to walk away.
“You’re welcome. I do need to take this trolley back with me, though,” she said.
“That’s fine, you can take it away when you’ve placed all the goodie bags,” Lars said, still on his phone. Usually, when she arrived at events with last-minute goodie bags, the interns and assistants who’d ordered them quickly thanked her and hurried to collect the bags and place them on the tables, ready for their guests. But as she watched Lars scrolling through his phone, she realized that he expected her to pick up each of the 150 bags and go around the venue placing them on the guests’ chairs for the event he was clearly supposed to be coordinating.
She usually helped the other interns and assistants. In her quest to be more like Arlo, she’d met a bunch of people her age working in the Village and enjoyed the walkie-talkie calls that let her hang out with someone new for more than fifteen minutes. But Lars was just standing there on his phone, waiting for her to unload the goodie bags.
“I only pack and deliver the bags,” she said curtly. He looked up at her. She refused to break eye contact. It was a standoff, but it was completely one-sided. Lars wore a blank expression.
“It would be such a help if you could just put the bags on each seat with a name card—it shouldn’t take too long,” he said with a nod before turning away again.
Then he turned back around and said, “Thank you,” as if it was an extra special gesture, not just the bare minimum. He winked and then walked away to talk to the other men in suits.
Olivia felt the quiet, searing rage begin slowly. It started in her fingers, traveled up her arms, and then created tension in her shoulders and neck. She gritted her teeth and swallowed. She knew the voice he’d just used with her like a second language. Knew the contortions in the appearance of politeness, the facade of familiarity that coated the truth of professionalism. It was polished, and it was practiced. She knew that he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. It was the voice that rich, well-raised people used when they were talking to the help. She could already imagine the way Lars’s mother used it. She was probably an elegant woman in her late fifties whose hair was always freshly blow-dried and who wore Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses like a uniform. Lars’s mother probably thought that the people who cooked her food, mowed her lawn, and cleaned her toilets considered her a friend. Olivia imagined that Lars’s mother came from a long line of ladies who hired people like her to clean up the messes they made, but then felt good about themselves for giving them Boxing Day off. Because, of course, they needed all the help they could get on Christmas Day.
What Lars said wasn’t that bad. But in his voice, Olivia heard all the blue hyperlinks to other wealthy heirs in his family’s Wikipedia page. She’d imagined all the years he’d spent being pampered by the servants who’d waited on him in one of his family’s eight (she’d checked) houses around the world. She knew that another person might just call her bitter. But that didn’t do anything to stunt the growth of the resentment she felt toward Lars. So instead of picking the goodie bags up and placing them on the seats one by one like he’d asked—no, told her to—she picked them up in bunches, placed them on the ground, and turned to leave. As she did so, she heard Lars call out to her.
“Hey, I thought you were going to help me—” he was saying, but she cut him off. She looked back at him and smiled politely.
“I only pack and deliver the bags… but it shouldn’t take too long,” she said, echoing his words with a shrug as she turned around and rolled her empty trolley out of the restaurant.
But like most things, that small act of defiance didn’t feel the way she’d wanted it to feel. She thought that leaving the bags on the ground and echoing his words back to him would make her feel badass. But it didn’t.
Yeah, Lars would have to lift a finger for once in his life. But he was still the guy in the expensive suit talking to other powerful men in suits at the fancy diplomatic dinner. He was already in a position that would fast-track him to wherever he wanted to go. He had a billion-dollar safety net and the kind of big-name family connections to raise him up before he could ever fall. Meanwhile, Olivia was just another anonymous face to people like him, working for free in her slightly-too-big blue-and-yellow uniform. There was no victory in that.