Jake called me weak, so I swallowed the bucket of pond water. I didn’t know it contained frog eggs. Tadpoles hatched and swam in my stomach, fed off my nutrition like parasites. They gorged on my sandwiches from the bodega. I lost weight and ran a fever. When my lips turned blue and my skin dewy, Dad and Jake thought I would be dead the next morning. But by then the tadpoles became frogs, and they hopped up my oesophagus and leapt out of my mouth. It was like giving birth.
I continued to birth frogs this way. At a coffee shop I vomited up a stream of frogs. One hopped into Dad’s cup. I woke at odd hours of the night with my bed sheets covered in frogs watching me sleep. Some frogs must have thought I was their mother because they followed me. How nice, to have an army of green soldiers that trailed in my wake. They croaked at me. I croaked back. But I quickly grew bored of this—and learned that if I pinched their legs they would hop away.
Jake loved the frogs. He said they were the only reason we were still friends. We biked in the mountains, and he asked me to stop whenever I felt a frog in my throat, and to aim my mouth over his head so that it plopped onto him. On the way up the mountain, I birthed two frogs on his head, and seven on the way down. The physics of descent must have coaxed more of them out. They bounced in his hair, then dashed into the brush. ‘Froggies,’ he said.
I never questioned his obsession with my frogs because I wanted his friendship. In the shower, I practised holding my breath so one day I could trap many frogs in my mouth and splat them onto him all at once, just like he wanted.
One day, the frogs stopped. Dad smiled for the first time since I drank the pond water because he no longer had to sweep frogs out of the house. Jake invited me to ice skate. We laced our skates and headed out onto the rink. Jake’s cheeks were puffed from a molar extraction the day before. He complained that the surgeon forbade him to keep the tooth as a souvenir. He landed an axel and looked at me as if I should award him, medallion him. ‘Cough up a froggie right here,’ he said. ‘I want it to swirl on the ice.’ I confessed there were no more frogs, and he said we could no longer be friends, but he would visit me in case I birthed frogs again. I wanted to fall through the ice so he could save me.
My behaviour changed when the frogs stopped. I compulsively sipped water and sometimes it dribbled down my chin. Plastic bags littered the carpet from the food I binged. I ran the taps for hours because the sound soothed me. Dad feared the water bill. I sleepwalked to the pond and woke with grass grown over my feet, roots twined between my toes, my muscles jellied.
Most days, I sat by the pond. My skin filmed with slime and tinged green, my fingertips budded like peas. When Jake visited me, he said it was my body’s preparation to birth more frogs. He noosed a cattail leaf around my neck. A lucky charm. Not for my health, but ‘for the froggies.’ He said goodbye and imitated a frog as a token of our parting. He squatted in the grass and croaked, then left. He would never care about me.
I waded out into the pond and floated in starfish position, haloed by duckweed. A dragonfly skimmed the surface and reeds coiled my limbs. Fish nipped my sides. My clothes soaked and melted away—my hair swam off my head. The water tasted sugary.
The next day, Jake visited the pond. I watched him search for me, watched him pocket a mushroom and a tooth-shaped pebble. He spotted me on a lilypad. ‘Hey, there, Froggie.’ He offered his palm. ‘Come nest in my hair.’
He didn’t have to pinch my legs. I just hopped away.