The Ghost of Iwatobi High (Free! iwatobi swim club variousxOC)

Kappa in the Pool

Four girls walked down one of the many corridors of Iwatobi High School on their way to class. It was the first week of a new school year, so this group of first-years was still adjusting to high school life and the ways of Iwatobi. They were in the middle of a very heated discussion.

"The Ghost of Itwatobi High? What's that?" One girl asked, the question carrying down the hall to my ears. I didn't know her personally, so her name was a mystery to me. But she was cute, at least that's the word I thought best described her, with a petite and slender frame and her hair, dyed a pale blonde, and layered into a chin-length bob.

Her friend, a tall broad-shouldered girl with long brown hair, replied. "It's a legend here on campus. Akamatsu, Sadako is the ghost of Iwatobi High School. She haunts the classroom of 2-C and it's said that if you look into her eyes for more than three seconds, you'll be cursed with misfortune..."

"Yeah, I heard some stories about it," a third girl with short black hair and red glasses added. "It was during the entrance ceremony last year that a student from class 3-A saw her and he immediately had to be hospitalized."

The blonde looked horrified as she looked between her two friends. "Kowai. That's so scary!"

"–And there's been a dozen or so reported sightings since!" The second girl said excitedly. "You know Yuki-chan, well, she saw the ghost on the way to the cafeteria and came down with a cold three days later. They say she's the spirit of a girl from class 2-C that hung herself twenty years ago and now is stuck wandering the halls; forced to live out her school days over and over again. How cool is that?"

"No way that can be real," The last girl, a burnet with a ponytail, interrupted. "If it were, we'd be hearing these stories for more than just a year. And I'm pretty sure that Akamatsu, Sadako is just a second-year in class C. I saw her name on the class lists when they were first up. If she were a ghost, then why would the teachers put her name on the list?" She asked.

I agreed wholeheartedly with the last girl. Nothing about that ghost story made any lick of sense. And I should know, considering that I am Akamatsu, Sadako. Well, actually my name isn't Sadako; it's Sawako. There was a misprint during my first-year and the name just sort of stuck before it could be corrected. I wasn't sure how the whole ghost rumor got started. But if I had to take a guess, it probably started on the first day of my first year with that misprinted name.

From that day on, I was labeled the ghost girl –Sadako –the girl from the Ring trilogy. That thought made me sigh. I used to love those books, but I haven't been able to enjoy them since I got stuck with that nickname. The four girls continued to discuss the possibility of the school being haunted, totally unaware of my presence. One of them, the burnet with the ponytail, started fiddling with her bag and in the process dropping her red mechanical pencil on the floor. It rolled a couple of times toward my feet and I stopped walking to retrieve it.

"Umm... excuse me," I said my voice wavering as I called out to the girl. The girls stopped and turned to look at me. I tried to shape my face into what I felt was a friendly expression and held out the pencil, "I think you dropped this."

Apparently, my expression wasn't as friendly as I thought it was because no sooner were those words out of my mouth and the girls in question were hightailing it away from me. The owner of the pencil calling out over her shoulder, "Sumimasen! You can keep it!" Then all four of them disappeared down the hall, leaving me to stand there like an idiot watching them go.

Well, that just happened. Again.

I looked down at the pencil in my hand. "But I guess, I got a free pencil now." So there's a bright side.