Faking it || Lando Norris LN

11

Charles Leclerc

Olivia Reyes. Where to start?

The media described Olivia as an open book, someone approachable who you could sit down and listen to as she spoke the story of her life and her path to Formula 1. People who knew her could describe her as a closed book instead, someone who you could talk to for hours and leave the conversation realizing that she hadn't revealed anything of herself, that she was still a mystery.

I wouldn't describe her as either.

Olivia Reyes was an open book, but she wasn't an ordinary one. She was an open book with ripped pages, chapters glued together and coffee stains so dark you couldn't read some parts of it even if your life depended on it. If she were a book, she'd have entire chapters written in foreign languages and scribbles on top.

The book could be there laying on the front desk of the library with a shiny ribbon and a best-seller sticker, but you would open it and notice the author had done everything for it to be illegible, unreadable.

It didn't take me long to realize that that was precisely what Olivia had done with her life. She'd made it indecipherable.

It was odd. Her heart was huge, and it seemed as if she wore it on her sleeve all the time. When she smiled and laughed, it was almost as if you could reach out your hand and touch it. It was there. However, you could try and reach out your hand to feel it when she was sad, only to realize it had fluttered away and out of sight.

I'd seen her walls and how high they were. I'd seen her run for her life in the morning, her cheeks flushed in a dark shade of red and going so fast I could sometimes feel she was about to take flight and disappear into the sky.

Still, it wasn't until I heard a knock on my wall that she allowed me to see her cry.

It was the French GP last year. It took me a couple of seconds to understand what was going on. For a second I thought I had imagined it.

It must've been an accident, I had thought, she'd knock on my door if she needed anything. That was until I heard another knock on my wall, messier, frantic. I got up from my bed like lightning and stepped into her room.

Knocking on the other's wall became our secret code ever since.

I held her as she cried to let it all out while I talked her down from the anxiety attack that was rushing through her. As I laid there with her in a corner of her room and our shirts drowning in her tears, I thought to myself that maybe she'd knocked on my wall that time because she was scared someone would see her red face and eyes full of tears standing on the hallway before I opened the door, but that wasn't the case.

A knock on the wall was more than embarrassment, it was defeat. It was a secret language needed for the times you were such a mess you couldn't even get up and knock on the other's door.

She knocked on my wall a couple of times during the season and I knocked on hers a couple of other times. The times I'd done it had mostly been because of the struggles of my past relationship. As soon as I met Lena, my current girlfriend, my knocking ceased. As soon as Olivia had gained confidence in her driving and Gianna had worked her public image, her knocking on my wall ceased too, just like the images of her running for her life in the mornings.

Olivia's anxiety wasn't easy on her. Formula 1 was a high-pressure sport, but little did people know, the pressure wasn't something you could leave on track. It wasn't something you could leave inside your race suit and go back home at peace without thinking about it until you put it back on. It didn't work like that. It followed you wherever you went.