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

Sawako Not Sadako

The rest of Saturday passed by without incident. I spent the afternoon reading the first three chapters of Fires on the Plain by Ooka Shohei for my Japanese literature class. Then Sunday morning, I said goodbye to Dad as he headed back to Tokyo for the next two weeks and I spent the day cleaning, doing laundry, and watching Netflix while folding. I received a few texts from the swim club over that time where we debated the validity of pineapple pizza and whether or not people who liked it (a.k.a me and Haru) could be trusted with important decisions. It was eventually decided that a person's taste in pizza wasn't a good indicator of whether or not someone was rational enough to make decisions, but it was unanimously agreed upon that gluten-free crust was no better than cardboard. When Monday morning arrived, I met up with Nagisa and Ryugazaki in homeroom and we spent those first ten minutes before rollcall catching up in person.

"Are you ready for the quiz today?" Ryugazaki asked me.

"I think so. I just barely finished the required reading," I said.

Nagisa expression blanched. "Wait there's a quiz? When? Which subject?"

"First period," I said.

"Japanese literature. You remember Amakata-sensei said we were having a quiz on the first three chapters of Fires on the Plain," The other boy told him.

The blond let out a horrified sound, halfway between a gasp and a silent scream and threw himself dramatically over his desk. "I didn't read any of it. What am I gonna do?"

Ryugazaki's reply was rather cold-hearted. "You should've studied instead of sending all those memes in the group chat."

"Rei-chan," Nagisa scowled up at him under his mop of wavy blond hair, "that's not helpful. I need real advice here."

"That is real advice," he argued back.

I felt sympathetic toward my blond classmate. I knew what it was like to be unprepared for a test. That inevitability of failure was one of the worst feelings ever. Quietly, I reached into my school bag and pulled out a binder that I kept my Japanese Lit notes in, thumbed through the pages until I came upon a couple pages that I had recorded a sort of overview of the reading, and placed them on Nagisa's desk. "Here," I said, "I took some notes on the reading. They aren't as detailed, but it's better than nothing."

Nagisa sat up and grasped the papers like a lifeline, looking up at me with almost misty eyes. "Sadako-chan..." He breathed that name in such a way that it sent a shiver up my spine and I felt my cheeks warming at that look of reverence on his face. "You're an angel."

"N-No I'm not," I sputtered. "J-Just hurry up and read the notes. You only got about seven minutes."

I turned away from him and sat at my desk, taking out my sketchbook and a 0.5-millimeter black gel pen and began to finish inking over the lines of a rough sketch that I had been doodling in the library that morning. The picture was of a woman or it was in the shape of a woman, more or less. Only the woman's eyes were actually visible to the viewer. The rest of her face was obscured, taken over, by a cluster of cameras. Cameras of all different kinds; polaroids and disposables and DSLRs and film cameras and even a couple old Hollywood film rolls. Her clothes were almost Elizabethan with very detailed cross-hatch design and a high ruffled collar that I could never remember the name of but had seen countless times in portraits from the middle ages. Above her hovered two dragonflies that I already inked in before class and they stood out starkly against the white page.

Behind me, I was vaguely aware of Nagisa and Ryugazaki exchanging a few more hurried quips before the blond shooed the other boy away saying that "You're distracting me, Rei-chan." Ryugazaki settled into the seat behind me and I felt his gaze on me, burning into the back of my head.