Page 4 of Let the Games Begin
“Olivia, baby girl, you look incredible,” her mum, Mai Nkomo, said, gently wiping her eyes with a tissue from her seat outside the changing rooms. Olivia could’ve come out wearing a dressmade of rags, and her parents would still have said she looked like a supermodel.
But as she looked at herself in the mirror, she realized that she did look really good. She was wearing a majestic emerald-green suit, tailored to perfection. She’d seen the price tag while she was getting dressed and had grimaced at the total. She knew her parents couldn’t afford it. She’d planned to take it off and lie to them, saying that it didn’t fit right to give herself a chance to grab something cheaper, but they’d called her out before she could come up with a reasonable excuse.
“My beautiful, intelligent, successful girl. Give us a twirl!” her dad, Baba Nkomo, said.
Olivia did a little twirl and tried not to feel too embarrassed as she watched the shop assistants on the other side of the changing rooms smile. She was twenty-three years old.
“I can already see it,” her mum said, standing up in excitement. “You walking into those offices, looking like a smart, sophisticated professional and wowing them all.”
“Shaking hands with highfliers, impressing them with your brilliance… my daughter the Olympic lawyer.”
“Dad, I’m not a lawyer yet.” Olivia had done a three-year law degree and a master’s, but she hadn’t started her legal practice course yet. “And it’s not a job, it’s just an internship,” she said, trying to manage the narrative before she became the number-one topic of the WhatsApp groups her parents and their friends filled with messages about how well their kids were doing.
“But I can already see the finish line,” her mum said, walking over to hug her as they looked in the mirror together. Olivia hugged her back, smiling at their reflection.
She tried to convince her parents out of buying the suit; said that she already had the perfect outfit at home. But they were stubborn. She knew they were too proud to admit they couldn’t afford it and would be deeply offended if she offered to pay for it. So, she hugged her mum again and resolved to pay them back by buying their groceries for the month. They would never accept money from her, but they wouldn’t say no to a kitchen full of food.
Olivia’s parents had taken her to buy a new school uniform for the first day of school every single year since she was four years old. Even when money was tight and they would have been better off buying something secondhand. When she’d started getting internships and new jobs, they’d continued the tradition, taking her to department store clearance racks and high street sale days instead of school-mandated uniform shops. Her dad always reminded her to dress the part, and her mum told her that the right outfit was the key to walking into any room feeling like she belonged there. So, when she’d seen the gorgeous emerald-green suit displayed in the shop window, she’d immediately known that she’d found the perfect outfit to kick-start the most important job of her life. And to achieve the goals her parents had been working toward for most oftheirlives too.
When Olivia’s parents had left Zimbabwe for the UK in the ’90s, they’d been young, hopeful twenty-somethings. Following the dream that so many before and after them had spent their lives chasing: a better life in the UK. They’d met at law school in Harare, got married less than a year later, and arrived in England fresh-faced and ready to make a life for themselves.
But they’d quickly become disillusioned. First-class degreesfrom third-world countries didn’t mean anything in their cold, gray new home. The years they’d spent studying had come to nothing. Fancy law firms didn’t want to hire an immigrant with a thick accent from a country they only knew about in terms of dictators and poverty. So, they’d both retrained, promising themselves they’d find their way back to becoming lawyers one day. But that day had never come. Her mum had become a law teacher. The secondary school students she taught made fun of her accent and pretended not to understand what she was saying. But she stayed up late to make wellness checks and ran a summer lunch club for kids who likely wouldn’t get a good hot meal if they weren’t at school. And her dad had got a job as a social worker—he spent his days and nights trying to help vulnerable adults in the face of a council whose budget shrank every week.
The better life they’d dreamed of amounted to working long hours to barely make ends meet, and living on the other side of the world in a city that would never feel like home. But then they looked at her, and Oliviaknewthat, in their eyes, all their hard work had been worth it. She would be the one to achieve everything they hadn’t been able to. Their daughter, their only child, was a product of their wildest dreams.
3Olivia
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE OPENING CEREMONY
“Are you ready to fall in love with a hot Greek boy, become a sun-kissed goddess, and have the best summer of your life?” said a familiar voice. A moment later, Olivia was pulled into an espresso-scented hug by her favorite person in the world: Aditi Sharma.
“Uh, I’m ready to ace this internship, be offered a full-time job at the OOC,andhave the best summer of our lives,” Olivia said as Aditi hugged her even tighter.
Aditi Sharma was the type of girl you could tell all your secrets to without suspecting for a moment that they would leave the room. Her long, wavy, black hair, golden-brown skin, and curves looked good in everything. They’d met on the playground at the age of five and had been inseparable ever since. She was the human personification of sunshine.
“I’m so proud of you, Liv!” Aditi said, putting her hands on either side of Olivia’s face. They’d been talking about her Olympic dream for years. As soon as Olivia had secured the internship,her best friend had begged to come along for the ride. Aditi was a full-time iced coffee influencer with a side gig doing graphic design for a tech company. She could basically work anywhere, so they’d found an apartment in Athens for the summer. To nobody’s surprise, Olivia’s internship was unpaid, so she went into debt to pay for the flight, used an even bigger chunk of her credit card to pay for the Airbnb, and ignored the financial hell she could feel herself falling into. Because it was the Olympics! She’d deal with all of that once she secured her graduate job.
They walked through the airport together, passed security, and browsed the bookshop as they waited for their gate to be announced. They tried on fancy perfumes in the duty-free section and imagined what the weeks that lay ahead of them would be like once they landed in Greece.
“So, willSummer Oliviabe joining us this year?”
Olivia paused what she was doing and turned to face Aditi.
She and Aditi had spent years saving for the summer after their nineteenth birthdays. Neither of them had ever been on a holiday abroad, so they’d planned and plotted a girls’ trip straight out of their dreams. They read travel blogs, watched holiday vlogs, and searched “safe, not-too-racist cities for young women” before settling on Portugal. At first they’d been having a great time. But then, on their fourth day of exploring Lisbon, Olivia met Tiago: a tall, devastatingly handsome Portuguese boy who worked at the hostel where they were staying. He took them to his favorite bakery to try deliciouspastéis de nata, showed them gorgeous views of the skyline from all around the city, and then kissed Olivia while they walked on the beach at sunset. Olivia fell for him—fast. At one point she’d turned to Aditi and said, “I thinkthe sun is going to my head; summer makes me reckless,” and thus the nickname was born. But this year she was determined to keep her head on straight.
“Summer Olivia is permanently retired,” said Olivia adamantly.
“But she’s so much fun,” Aditi said with a mischievous smile.
“She’s fun until she gets distracted and starts making bad decisions and lets the sun get to her head and almost turns my life upside down,” Olivia said, recalling the last time her summer self had taken the reins. She’d wound up using her credit card to book a last-minute flight and had cried on the plane for her whole journey home.
“But remember how much fun we had?”
“And remember how I almost didn’t come home?”
“Would that have been so bad?” Aditi smiled.
“You only say that because if I’d uprooted my life forthat boy, visiting me would have given you a reason to spend every August on a Portuguese beach,” Olivia said, raising her eyebrow. She laughed as the expression on Aditi’s face changed. “This time,the plancomes first,” she said, tapping the top of her suitcase to emphasize each word.
