Jay Bee

Jay Bee has been on my mind lately, time to let go.

I have been looking for him in close references, far friendships.
He disappeared, he is gone like his memory that suddenly returned in the departure lobby on the way to Phu Quoc, accompanied by the metallic, monotonous rythm of the escalator leading to the door.

Why his memory caught me that moment? And why when I thought of him I thought of a faded-green frog carefully kept in alluminium foil? Me attending mass with a huge toad on my lap, our crazy ideas that only made sense for us?

We were mates. We spent days on trees and chasing bugs.
He stole things and told me on lunchtime, when everybody was silent and the theft was uncovered, when no silence broke, his eyes searched mine to confess by making funny faces.

He had hair of hay. And a pointy nose. And always smelled like soil and rocks. Others feared him, not me. We'd meet anywhere unannounced, just casually, climbing on trees, or chasing reptiles.

Summer ended and back home I dedicated the end of it to swimming morning to evening in my parents' swimming pool, on the good side of the barrio, until my skin turned soft and wrinkly and I had to dry for supper time.
I didn't know he was on the other side of the fence, observing me.
Do you know when you do something and imagine how you'd look if somebody was watching you? Someone watched my very moves. There, protective. My loyal friend. The same one who was there by my side when I stood up for my sister when the priest went way too far.
After the spying, paper notes rained wrapped in a rock to the bottom of the blue tiles of the swimming pool. The paper would come out in bits, so I read them inside the water, head down with goggles on.

Jay Bee and I were... like Bonny and Clyde. Accomplices. For a while I thought that with his strange silence and his elaborated trouble making he was getting the darker side of me. But in fact, those holidays I got the light in him. I helped him stay out of trouble by building tree houses, chasing dragon flies and observing frogs develop from toad to young froggy in their habitat.
After the notes, the phone calls from a booth in the outskirts of the city arrived, from the bad side of town, with a background sound of street fights and drug dealers shouting around. Peep... peep... Silly conversations that surrounded him of a halo, hard to define, that kept me wondering of this kid's life and the reasons to be eligible to become a delinquent one day.

During summer camp he gave me the most beautiful present a girl could ever have.
A plastic cup, with a frog in it.

"I caught it and named it after you" he said.

I carefully covered the cup with aluminium foil and made some holes. I slept next to it, hid it in the dorm and checked on it every time I could.
Selva-the-frog aftermath was a decoloured agonizing froggy. I didn't dare tell him.
I woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed a torch, sneaked out of the dorm, went to the pond, unnoticed I climbed the fence of the pond and let the froggy free in the shallow end. I don't think it moved anymore.

Many years after the froggy episode it hit me, overlooking the China sea:
Jay Bee and I were in love, it took me a decade to process.

Whatever he might be doing now I thought of him on a lonely island. I got to hum a song thinking of the times that made us so unpopular amidst other kids.

I didn't kiss a frog. It got it already packed up in a plastic cup.
Thank you for the best present a girl could ever have.
He vanished from my life.
Anyone knows what has become of him?
Why can't i find him?Is that so hard?