Chapter Text
From the beginning of the 2000s to the first half of the 2010s, Oslo had changed, modernizing in some ways and assimilating, in others, to those architectural trends and aesthetic canons from AirBnb and Instagrammable interiors that had made some neighborhoods in large European cities look very similar. The opera house and the barcode district were a testament to that change, and the youth of Oslo, more cosmopolitan and urban than the young Norwegians in the rest of the country, saw in that shift a nod to the Anglo-Saxon world, which was increasingly becoming part of the cultural products offered to them in their daily lives.
Frida, born in 2000 to two renowned architect parents who had a loft in the hipster district of Grünerløkka, was still at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence. In some ways, she was too young to be truly marked by the shock of the July 22, 2011 attacks. She was a perfect embodiment of the city's young teenagers, their mood, and the expectations and aspirations with which they had grown up.
Moreover, unlike other peers, she had already experienced living abroad. During high school, she had spent two years in London while her parents were working on a project in the British capital. Although her English had shed some typical inflections of her mother tongue, which remained Norwegian, it had become a mixture of accents, sometimes forced, sometimes involuntary, learned by watching TV series, imitating London schoolmates, and later American university peers.
Frida lived in a bubble. She knew she was extremely fortunate compared to her childhood friends, who would probably never leave Norway. She was proud of having traveled, lived abroad since childhood, and having an infinite number of possible lives ahead. But when she stopped to reflect on her way home from university, sitting upstairs on a double-decker bus, head against the window, scarf wrapped around her neck up to her nose, and a pair of large headphones isolating her from the rest of the world, she felt mostly crushed by the weight of expectations.
Wouldn't it have been easier to admit that investing in opening another pub/concert hall in Grünerløkka was the only thing that interested her? She could sponsor some street artist, spend some of her parents' money to open a café/library/recording studio frequented by hipsters, musicians, and cat lovers, and live without pretenses. Alternatively, she could move to the north of the country and work in the tourism sector. First as a guide: she would have accompanied Americans to see the fjords and the northern lights, dressing only in rubber boots and North Face windbreakers. Then she would have invested her parents' money to buy apartments and manage a dozen Airbnb units in Bergen, personally handling only the least strenuous activities, such as responding to online ads and coordinating the schedules of travelers and the cleaning crew, working sitting in a bar with her laptop and spending the rest of the day translating brochures for the tourism office while contemplating the harbor, seagulls, and the comings and goings of cruise ships heading to the fjords. It would have been easier and more straightforward, pouring some of the family's capital into activities that would boost the country's economy, meeting a nice guy, having very blond children with him. But it would have only moderately satisfied her parents, who already had the prodigy child in mind that she felt obligated to be.
Frida's transfer from the state high school in Oslo to the Bloomsbury boarding school at the age of sixteen had coincided with the moment when her parents, after completing the barcode district project, felt ready for new challenges and moved to London, hired for the construction of commercial properties in the Southbank district. Frida's parents felt ready to take flight into a new, more international, vibrant, and ambitious atmosphere, and they wanted the same for their daughter. The Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 had sparked a debate on residential architecture in London, forced broader reflections on ongoing construction projects in the city, and had, for Frida's parents, prompted a sort of awareness that made them feel compelled to reverse course, return to live in the Grünerløkka loft, and allow Frida to attend the last year of high school in the school she had been so sad to leave two years earlier. The adventures and laughs with her friends would warm her heart after two years of loneliness and disorientation, feelings she had carefully avoided sharing with her parents, who were either too absorbed in work or too stubborn to accept the idea that their only daughter might experience some kind of discomfort despite having access to such a cosmopolitan life full of possibilities.
Nevertheless, seeing how Frida felt back in her element was not enough to make her parents accept that she continued her studies in Oslo or did not continue them at all and found a job in the Norwegian capital. They pushed her to study abroad, and in this context, she decided to punish them by going as far as possible and seeking what young people in Northern Europe lacked the most: sun and summer. Surprised and somewhat disappointed that Frida had not chosen destinations closer to Scandinavia, such as their beloved England or Scotland, they could not oppose when she announced that she had been admitted to UCLA. Pretending enthusiasm but actually full of fear, Frida boarded a flight that took her, after two layovers, to find herself projected into the endless Californian summer. Here, she had one of the most unexpected encounters of her life. She had questioned many things, especially during the difficult adolescent years spent in London, but not her own sexuality. However, there was something in the way Casey looked at her, smiled at her, the way that girl from Connecticut managed to make her feel less alone. There was something that made her think that perhaps, in that city full of traffic and contradictions, she had found a part of herself that had always waited for her somewhere, never surfacing. A part of herself that, despite the thousand rainbow flags in Oslo and despite the proverbial openness of Nordic countries regarding family composition and sexuality, she couldn't reveal to her friends, let alone her parents, due to all those discussions about expectations and pre-established life paths that had been so well ingrained in her since childhood.
All discussions with Casey about it had ended in nothing. For Frida, what was happening, given that it was happening far from Oslo, was something that could continue to be perfect and bring her serenity only if it did not affect her family life, and vice versa. Informing her parents and people from her childhood would contaminate both worlds, subjecting the relationship with Casey to their judgment and imposing on them the coexistence with uncomfortable or at least difficult-to-accept news. Even returning to London, since she could do it with Casey, had seemed like a natural and reassuring step, a way to create new memories associated with the city, allowing her to see London as a place to be happy rather than the rainy metropolis where she had wasted two years of her adolescence surrounded by loneliness and anguish.
...
"Casey," Frida yells, flipping an omelet in the pan while the toaster spits out two crispy slices of toast, "It's eleven, do you plan to get out of bed anytime soon?"
Casey pulls her head out from under the duvet. "It's not my fault, I have jet lag!"
"Jet lag? We've been in London for more than ten days now! And tomorrow, you start the competitions!"
"But didn't you have a class?" Casey responds, grumbling.
"Only in the afternoon," Frida lies. She did have a class, theoretically, but she had preferred to stay in bed with Casey until late, and now it was too late to go to the morning classes.
Casey grumbles, staying in bed. As much as she loves the fact that Frida takes care of everything (preparing breakfast and keeping the shopping list up to date, for example), there are split seconds when Frida reminds her of Elsa, and this is not good. But at the same time, she doesn't know how she would have dealt with the whole issue of living three months in London without her. Somehow, Frida had become her anchor. The only person who had managed to stop that whirlwind of superficial and unsatisfying relationships she had devoted herself to since moving to Los Angeles.
There was that skateboard guy who reminded her so much of Evan and who had made her think that maybe it would be better, more reassuring and wiser, to go out with guys rather than girls. At least with a guy, everything would be clearer, more straightforward, simpler. There would be no fears about how to tell others, no anxieties related to a bit of healthy internal competition within the couple, like the ones between her and... she couldn't even say, or even think her name anymore.
That skateboard guy hadn't lasted long because he wasn't the type for a serious relationship, he had told her, "Let's have some fun and then we'll see." But having fun had only made her feel even more alone, just arrived in that big city and on that labyrinthine campus where she didn't know anyone, with the need to fill every moment with something—music, podcasts, calls with Elsa, even long sessions of online gaming with Sam—just not to think about the guilt that still clenched her stomach in a vice for having sent her application to UCLA anyway, knowing that Izzie would have given up, and for having decided to go even though it would have hurt her to death and for having procrastinated so much in telling her about the admission that Izzie had found out from Elsa and bang.
Casey hadn't withdrawn the application out of laziness because she was sure that with her grades, she would never be accepted, and in the end, even in sports results, she had worsened lately. She was already ready to receive a rejection and fallback on an East Coast college, so there wouldn't have been problems: her parents wouldn't have been able to accuse her of not even trying, and Izzie would have said she was sorry but actually would have been glad to have her still at the maximum distance of two hours by bus, but.
Instead, one day, that email had arrived saying that Casey had been accepted, and Izzie had found out from Elsa while she was already packing her bags and organizing her goodbye party, and even though for once Casey had had the opportunity to put her running skills in the service of something, she hadn't rushed to the bus stop to prevent Izzie from going to Rhode Island without a final confrontation, which would probably have resulted in clarification, or at least in a real goodbye with a final kiss, who knows. No, Casey had stayed home, trapped in her fears, while Izzie threw her duffel bag on the window seat, put on her Airpods, and took out her phone to start a playlist of desperate songs and open Instagram by clicking unfollow on her profile.
To forget all these things, after the skateboard guy, Casey had: the girl who worked at the university bar, who had one green eye and one blue, and curly hair, was interested in a serious relationship but that, in the end, Casey didn't care much about. Then, the non-binary assistant from the computer science course, and here Casey had a big crush, but she realized almost immediately that she was not up to expectations. Sasha (that was her name) was a few years older and wanted them to live together, leaving the campus residence and taking a small rented apartment, wanted to introduce her to her parents, expected Casey to be willing to spend money she didn't have on restaurants and day trips. It didn't end well, and Casey changed some exams of her study program to make sure they never crossed paths again, not even by chance. Then, there were some one-night adventures, all people Casey didn't even remember the name of the next day. Boys, girls, none of these people had helped Casey find peace, see a light, stop thinking every damn night about how things would have gone if she hadn't been so stupid as to leave that damn application in "submitted" status, if she had had the courage to speak directly with Izzie, or at least if she had been smart and foresighted enough to tell Elsa to keep quiet.
"Casey!" Frida yells again from the kitchen, "Come eat, come on! I've prepared everything for you!"
Casey can no longer resist the smell of toast, but leaving the warmth of the duvet is equally difficult. She reaches for the bedside table and grabs her phone to prolong the moment before the thermal shock of getting out of bed and placing her bare feet on the floor.
But she doesn't have time to open Instagram when suddenly
the world
falls down.