Olive Elephanta tied her fiery red hair back into a ponytail and sighed at her reflection in the long mirror over the sinks in the girl's bathroom. Her fringe had fallen loose of the pins that pinned it back to the side and she chose instead to simply remove them and let it fall as it may. She tugged on the hem of her blue jumper which covered the first inch of her grey pleated skirt and fixed the collar of her shirt. Just as she was about to step through the door, it swung open as a gaggle of three giggling girls, all so heavily caked in makeup it was difficult to tell what their faces really looked like. Olive obligingly stepped to the side to let them pass and squeezed out as quickly as she could.

The bell had just rung to signal lunch period and Olive slipped quickly into the torrent of students milling around lockers and flowing towards the cafeteria. The room was large and long, with circular and rectangular blue and white tables filling the seating area and crowded with sixth formers. At one end the lunch line snaked between a few metal bars that served to separate the lines towards the lunch ladies. Olive joined the line and took a plastic tray from the trolley at the end. As she waited she cast an eye through the room and caught Emma's eye across the room. She was waving from a rectangular, picnic style table with a few other students and Olive waved her hand back to show she had seen.

No sooner had she turned back than she was greeted with the back of a boy who had certainly not been standing in front of her before.

"Excuse me. Do you mind?"

The boy turned around and raised a blonde eyebrow. He had a thin face and hooked nose and wore an uppity sneer as he rolled his eyes at her. "Not at all, love. You'll get over it."

"Well I don't think that's very nice at all!" Olive huffed, pursing her pink lips together where they stood out brightly against her pale skin.

The boy, who Olive now recognised from her Biology and English classes, just scoffed and turned his back, making it perfectly clear he wasn't going to move.

Sometimes Olive wished she had more guts in her than she did. Emma wouldn't have stood for that, and she never did stand for it. She would have said exactly what she thought of him but Olive wasn't like that. She told herself it wasn't worth it, and frankly, losing one spot in a lunch line really wasn't worth it, and bit her tongue against arguing more often than not.

Six minutes later she made her way over to the table and sunk into a spot on the bench between Emma and the auburn haired Fiona Frauenfeld, an Irish girl who barely spoke a word during classes but was a thoroughly friendly person to be around.

"This is getting rather sad, really." Emma tossed her hair over one shoulder and prodded her baked potato with a plastic fork. "And the texture of the beans is getting more rubbery by the day, I'm sure of it."

"I'll say. You could almost use these potatoes in shop class."

The girls looked up at the new voice and the sound of a tray being placed across from them.

"Mind if I join you?" Hugh, his cap ever present and sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, asked. Seemingly addressing them all though his brown eyes were ever fixed on Fiona who simply nodded and smiled down at the plate.

"Of course, please-" Olive trailed off as another tray was placed on the table at the other end of the bench Hugh was settling himself on.

She glanced to the side and exchanged a raised eyebrow with Emma who laughed to herself.

"Wow, you're not sitting by yourself, Enoch? How awfully social of you."

For all intents and purposes, Enoch O'Connor was quite the opposite of Hugh. Where Hugh was an outgoing, very active and thoroughly likeable fellow to be in the company of, Enoch was none of those things. He was sarcastic, brooding, a characteristic only added to by the dark rings around his eyes that contrasted the paleness of his skin, and seemed to bring a cloud of cynicism with him wherever he went. It was a small wonder he usually kept to himself.

Yet, despite all the things about Enoch that deterred the general public, and Olive highly suspected that's exactly how he liked it, he intrigued her far more than deterred her. Unlike some obnoxiously loud and disruptive twelfth grade boys who made a habit of shoving smaller kids into lockers and toilet cubicles for pure enjoyment, Enoch, though he certainly gave his share of shoves and kicks when he was visibly annoyed, was more tolerable to be around to her.

She had come to the Sixth Form school from a different High School to Enoch, who had attended the same school as Emma, Hugh and some of the others Olive had gotten to know during the first term. While they had been perfectly pleasant and easy to get along with, Enoch was unsurprisingly elusive.

"So I felt like it, big deal." Enoch said, lifting his eyes to Emma, and arching a dark eyebrow, his Cockney accent thick and prominent when he spoke.

"How are you, Enoch?" Olive chimed in hopefully and was quite conscious of Hugh and Fiona both turning their faces to look at her in amusement. Eternally optimistic Olive, she knew they were thinking.

Enoch cut his eyes away from Emma and onto her and Olive felt blood rush to her cheeks at his stare. He had such an empty, yet oddly intense, way of looking at Olive that made her feel he could see right through her. He said nothing at first, just stared at her the same way he'd looked at her on the bus, like she was irritating him just by speaking.

"Ya know..." He sighed after a moment and tore his intense gaze from her as he stood up. "I fink I will eat outside after all."

Olive's smile drooped and her eyes widened as he stood up and picked up his lunch tray. "But it's raining-" But Enoch was already walking away from their table.

"Sometimes I think that boy is part machine." Emma muttered through gritted teeth and glared at Enoch's retreating figure before looking over at Olive.

Olive's face had fallen and she prodded her potato around her plate forlornly. What had she possibly done? All she tried to do was be nice to him. She clenched her jaw and let out a slow breath as she tried to stop her eyes filling with tears against her will.

"Don't take whatever Enoch says personally." Hugh said kindly, shaking his head and leaning over the table to prod Olive's arm. "He's always been like that. It's entirely his problem, I promise."

Olive took a deep breath and sat up straighter in her spot again. Her ponytail swung from side to side as she held her head up and flashed a small smile. "I don't." She lied. "He barely knows me; it doesn't matter if he doesn't like me."

xxxXxxx

Olive didn't try to make conversation with Enoch again for the rest of the day, though she shared a lab bench with him in A Level Biology and sat only a few seats along from him in History. He had made it perfectly clear that he wasn't interested in a conversation with her and didn't so much as look over at her. Instead Enoch kept his head down, scribbling notes and sketches in the margins of his notebook a few seats over.

Olive looked away, pushing a strand of red hair that had fallen loose of her ponytail back behind her ear as Miss Wren, an aging woman with grey hair and horn rimmed glasses who nobody found particularly interesting, continued to expound on the weaponry used in the history of the British Army and its years of use.

"Bet ya five quid ya too chicken." A hissed voice behind her made Olive turn her head just slightly curiously to the two giggling girls at the desk behind her.

They were hardly whispering and occasionally laughed so loudly that Miss Wren would pause her monotonous lecturing to shush them and fix them with an expression that should have been warning but only made them laugh harder.

"I'm not chicken." The second girl hissed.

"Do it then or ya owe me five quid. 'e's not gonna do nofin'."

"No way!"

"I'll do it if you're scared of 'im. Worth a laugh. Oi, Enoch!"

Olive's eyebrows shot up and she exchanged a glance with Fiona beside her who rolled her eyes and jerked her head back at the two girls before nodding for Olive to look over at Enoch along the row.

"Enoch!" One of the girls hissed again and Olive watched the boy's fingers tighten on his pen as he clearly pretended he couldn't hear them.

Enoch's head was down, a few curls of dark brown hair falling over his forehead as he bent over his notebook. His fingers moved nimbly across the paper, writing quick notes for one of the few topics he actually seemed genuinely interested in.

He was stone faced but Olive caught his head turn just the slightest amount as the girls continued to hiss his name and try to get his attention. Then as suddenly as he'd turned his face back, a paper ball whizzed by Olive and hit Enoch in the side of the head.

She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and turned around in her seat to glare at the girls at the same moment Enoch did.

Seeing they had got his attention at last, the two paid no heed at all to a disapproving Olive whose wide eyes flicked between them and Enoch rapidly.

"Oi, my friend 'ere thinks you're 'ot, O'Connor." The first girl, a brunette with her hair in an untidy bun on the top of her head sneered while beside her, her raven haired friend with glasses and her hair tied back in a braid snickered.

"She's 'avin a party this weekend, wants ya ta come. Honest."

Olive's eyes went back to Enoch whose face was twisted into a thoroughly annoyed, and clearly unconvinced, glare. Why people had to be so mean, she'd never understand. It was a small wonder sometimes that Enoch liked people as little as he did.

"Might come as a shock, but I wasn' born yesterday. Don't ya 'ave a class to fail?" Enoch retorted which only made both girls laugh harder and pathetically try again.

"Nah, honest, she does. Don't ya, Jess?"

"Totally." The darker haired girl cackled and Olive's hand tightened on the back of her chair.

She wanted to turn around and tell them where they could go for being mean but even if she'd had the words on her tongue, Enoch beat her to it.

"Ya done? Piss off." He scoffed, throwing the crumpled ball of paper over his shoulder onto the floor and turning back to his book while the two girls just laughed harder.

The red head's eyes drifted back to Enoch and remained on him for a few seconds. He seemed to feel her eyes on him and, without so much as moving a centimetre, cut his eyes over to her. For just a moment he held eye contact and Olive's heart went out to him. She didn't know him well, at all, and she was sure he barely knew her name but there was something under the darkness that shrouded his every movement and word that she wished she did know. If he was used to being treated the way he was by people who thought themselves a bigger person for belittling others, Olive couldn't entirely blame him for being so sour.

Enoch looked away and Olive was snapped from her thoughts by Fiona elbowing her arm gently. She was still twisted in her seat and quickly sat straight again, colour flooding her cheeks. It didn't matter a jot if she wanted to be his friend if he clearly had no interest in being hers.

The bell rang to signal the end of the day fifteen minutes later and students milled less than orderly into the corridors, clambering in the crowd to get to their lockers and out the doors. Olive hung back in the classroom, letting the rows behind and in front of hers empty as she gathered her things. Fiona, who had waited for her by the door smiled and shifted her books into the crook of her left arm.

"Just a minute girls." The turned as they went to leave, Miss Wren busying wiping off the rest of the whiteboard at the front of the class.

"Yes, Miss Wren?"

"Someone seems to have left their book behind, would you quickly see if you could catch them with it?"

Olive followed the teacher's gaze across the room to the fourth row of desks where they'd been sitting. Sure enough, a notebook had been left behind. It was Enoch's seat.

"Of course." Olive smiled a little and ran to pick it up. She could give it back to him on the bus. As she picked up the book, her heart skipped a little beat. It wasn't his notebook at all. It was the blank paged sketch book Enoch carried around and, when he was more bored, frequently drew in. She'd seen him once in biology but he had closed it quickly before she had seen what he drew.

She really shouldn't look. It was Enoch's, after all, not her own property. So she quickly tucked it into her pile of books and hurried out to join Fiona.

The school lockers were in long banks of two rows and Olive's was on the bottom row close by Emma's a few to the right. It proved much more difficult to have a lower locker when one wanted to get to it in a hurry and outside in time to catch the first bus.

Maybe she could catch Enoch in a better mood if she was the one to give his book back. She smiled to herself, holding the sketchbook in the crook of her arm and wriggled herself free of the tangle of legs to wait for Emma, who caught her bus too.

The blonde girl tilted her head curiously and laughed at her friend as they headed towards the front doors.

"You're awfully happy again, Olive."

"I always try to be happy, is that so strange?"

"It is when Enoch hurt your feelings like that a few hours ago, you looked awfully sad. What happened?"

"I got over it." Olive couldn't help beaming, trying to avoid Emma's questions, who clearly wasn't buying it at all as they walked.

"What's that?"

"What's what?"

"That's Enoch's book isn't it?" Emma stopped in the middle of the courtyard and Olive sighed and wrinkled her nose slightly as Emma raised a knowing eyebrow.

"Okay fine, he left it in class, I was just going to bring it back to him-"

"And you think he'll warm up a little if you're the one to return it."

"It's always nice to get something back that you lost. And yes, I think he will."

Emma laughed and tossed her blonde waves over her shoulder as they headed towards the bus stop, Olive occasionally raising up on her toes and craning her neck to look for a familiar dark head of hair.

"You might get a thank you grunt from Tin Man if you're lucky. What's in it? I've never seen it."

Olive widened her eyes and looked at Emma in shock. "I didn't look. It's not mine to look at-I don't see him, do you?"

"If it doesn't say it's private, I might have looked but...alright fine." Emma shook her head in amusement and lifted herself onto her toes to look for Enoch.

"Maybe he's not taking the bus home today."