The first memory I have of Jade is her sticking her tongue to a pole in January when we were in the second grade. She knew that her tongue would get stuck, but she did it anyway because she wanted to make me laugh. I had been anxious and crying. That's how kind Jade was.

I had just transferred over to Montfort, the French Catholic school down the street from my grandmother's house. It was a small school in a rough neighborhood, mostly children of new immigrants and white trash. Jade and I were white trash, and we hung out together like the white trash usually did.

Jade's piercing scream erupted in the schoolyard. Her tongue was stuck to the pole, and it hurt more than she expected to try and pull it off. Teachers ran toward us. Kids ran toward us. Soon, we were surrounded, everyone watching Jade's little tongue on the pole of the chain link fence.

After a few minutes of panic, a teacher came out with a couple cups of hot water to pour onto Jade's situation. Jade cried as the hot water scorched her tongue, but the teacher continued pouring. Eventually the tongue came unstuck. As soon as she broke free, she looked at me and we laughed.

The school called her parents that day and Jade got in lots of trouble for pulling her little stunt. When she came to school the next day, she was unusually quiet. She didn't talk about her parents much, other than to say that they would get violently angry.

Jade lived down the street from me in a project of townhouses. She would wait for me in my parents’ driveway every morning.

One morning, Jade brought a basketball with her to my parents’ house. She bounced the ball up and down our driveway at the early hours of 7 am. The sound woke my dad, and he got upset.

"Who raised that kid to be making so much noise so early in the morning?"

"It's Jade, Dad."

"Yeah, well, I don't want you hanging around with her anymore anyway. She's always getting in trouble, and I don't want you to get dragged into it, too."

He was right. Jade was always getting in trouble. But I thought she was mostly harmless. Most of the time she got in trouble it was because she was trying to make someone laugh. She had a big heart.

I knew better than to go against my dad's wishes, so I stopped hanging around Jade after that morning. We'd talk at school, but she didn't wait outside my parents’ house in the morning anymore. Eventually, we lost touch.

Jade and I were in different classes because she got held back a grade. When I moved to middle school, I didn't hear anything from her. I almost forgot about Jade until the next year when I heard that a seventh grader had been expelled for trying to make DIY bombs in the girl's room. I knew immediately that it was her. She had always had a passion for blowing stuff up.

That was the last I heard of Jade for a long time. She was transferred to a technical school for teens with difficulties. This was before social media, so I didn't really have any way of contacting her other than the landline, and I knew my dad would give me hell if he caught me talking to her. Sometimes I wanted to go knock on her front door, but I didn't want my dad to catch me.

Eventually I went off to college and didn't think so much about Jade, except when I'd see her driving her red Mazda 3 hatchback around the neighborhood. I'd wonder how she was doing.

I was kind of an adult by that point, and I could go by her place if I wanted to, but it had been so long. I felt guilty about ditching her. I'd heard that she had gotten into lots of trouble, drugs and abusive partners and the whole lot. I messaged her on Facebook, just a simple hello. She said hi back and we had a dry conversation. I was too embarrassed to say all the things I had to say.

After that conversation on Facebook, we never talked again. Eventually, I started to see her little brother drive her car around the neighborhood. When I ran into a mutual high school friend at a bar, he told me that she had cut her wrists in the bathtub and died. He said her mother found her.

I still see her little brother driving the car around the neighborhood, five years later. He's got a kid now that rides in a car seat in the back. We nod at each other when he drives by my house. I wonder if he knows who I am, but he probably doesn't.

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