Page 39 of Let the Games Begin
“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. Butit 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’mnotgoing to take away from this summer is that I should be okay with second best,” she added.
“We arenotbig-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 Iwillget 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.
