The Hopeful, The Hardheaded and the Homework

Chapter Twenty-Two : Is Seven a Crowd? : Olive

"Enoch, it's not going to be that bad. It's not torture."

"You don't know that."

"...It's ice skating. Not walking on hot coals."

Olive laughed to herself and idly began to inspect her fingernails where she lay staring at the ceiling with her phone to her ear. Enoch didn't say anything on the other side for several seconds, so long she thought for a moment he'd hung up and the line had gone dead.
"Enoch?"

"I'm not goin'. Ya can stop tryin'a convince me."

"Everyone else is going, you really should come." Olive sighed and sat up, rolling her eyes at Enoch's next response.

"That's exactly why I don't wanna. Too many people."

She could hear the annoyance in his voice. She hadn't expected him to want to come along but she would try anyway.
"Even with me?"

"What's 'at s'posed ta mean?"

"Oh don't be such a grump, Enoch."

"I'm not a-"

"Fine. Don't come if you don't want to. I'd like you to but if you do decide you want to come I'll text you when we were going to meet there."

"...Who's 'we'?"

Olive smiled to herself at Enoch's suddenly suspicious voice. All she would have had to say was that there would be other boys there probably to convince Enoch to come. He was possessive enough for that to work. But she hardly wanted to force him to come to something that he didn't really want to be there for anyway. He could come if he changed his mind.

"Hugh and Fiona, Millard, and Emma and Jacob I think."

"Portman ain't the way ta convince me ta come along, Olive."

"You asked."

xxxXxxx

"It's not that boy again you're going out with tonight is it?"

Olive sighed and stopped in the living room doorway as she'd been hurrying towards the door pulling on a coat. She wrinkled her nose a little and turned to step into the living room where her father had been reading the paper. Her dad had made it perfectly clear since the moment he met Enoch that he didn't like him at all. Olive shouldn't really have been surprised, in the time she'd known Enoch before he actually accepted her as a friend, not many did seem to like him. But she'd thought that if she could see that that wasn't all there was to Enoch, then surely other people could do that too if they tried.
Of course she wanted her parents to like him, and maybe Enoch hadn't made a very likeable first impression but her father's obvious distaste for him quite upset her, whether Enoch himself cared or not.

"There's a group of us going skating, I told Mum about it already. And his name is Enoch."

"Right, alright...and is he going?"

As casual as he probably thought he was being with his questions, it was very obvious he wanted her to tell him that Enoch wasn't. She didn't even know if he was. Olive had messaged Enoch early telling him where they were going and when, as she'd said, but he'd never replied.
"I don't know. He might and he might not. You could give him a chance, Dad..."

"I'd like to, Olive," He sighed and dropped his newspaper, frowning over at his daughter. "But he didn't exactly make a good impression, I just don't like the look of him. I don't see why you had to like this boy of all of them."

"You don't have to like him." Olive huffed, her cheeks turning slightly pink, "But if you just accept the fact that I do then maybe Enoch will surprise you."