I was hiding behind a tree by the side of the road, in front of my parent's house, throwing a rubber hunting knife at passing cars. She came out onto her porch and started to smash her mother's flower boxes with a small wooden hammer. We both noticed each other's activities and instantly found a strong but silent bond.

We were the best of friends for about two years, until my family moved away and took me with them. Throughout the period of our friendship we never exchanged a word. But there was never any doubt that our connection was as deep as if we had been born siamese twins.

I was sneaking out of my parent's house early one saturday, before my favorite show came on, with a present to leave on her doorstep. And I saw that she had already left a present on mine. My gift for her was a plastic baby doll I had found a few weeks earlier in the creek that ran behind our houses. It was naked except for a few loose scraps of soiled fabric. It had obviously been set alight, and most of the top of her head was missing. A few remaining strands of plastic hair clung in little sizzly bubbles to the charred and bubbled vinyl of her scalp. Only one eye remained, barely, peeking out through the blackened and melted and softly mutated face. Her lips, sculpted somewhere between a pout and a smile, were unaffected. She was beautiful. Her limbs had been subjected to the same melting away, flame on plastic simulating the effects of thalidomide on flesh, although I was too young at the time to make such comparisons.

Her gift for me was a large glass jar, lid screwed on tightly, full of frogs. The jar was terribly overstuffed, and looking through the glass one only saw an obscene collage of eyes and mouths and hands and bellies pressed hard against the glass. I could see that a few of the frogs were still alive, but just barely.

I left my offering on her front porch, and kept my own new treasure in the most secret hiding place I had, taking it out only late at night to look at the rotting bodies, always wanting to unscrew the lid and see what the frogdeath smelled like, but never quite getting to that point. I would now.

For the next two years we were inseparable, even though we never spent any time together. I had never before noticed that our second-storey bedroom windows faced each other perfectly, separated only by the fifteen feet or so that was between our houses. A nightly ritual soon began, long after our families had gone to bed. The shows we put on for each other through our windows went late into the night, leaving us both exhausted in school the next day. We were both in the same class, but never spoke or approached each other there. We would exchange sly smiles and secret and sideways glances at any opportunity, but nothing else.

Perhaps I will write the rest of this story later. I think i'd like to have some time with my memories before they fade even further, before I try to capture and share them. Before I admit that she has come back into my life after all these years.
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