Flying Angels Hattie's new boots were red. They came from a real store and they were brand new. I remember she cried when she touched them because they were so shiny and they had no buckles or laces. They were exactly what she wanted. It seemed like all her life my sister had wished for those red boots. Seven years is a long time to wish for something but I guess it pays off in the end. Not for me, though. I've been sitting here for about a hundred years wishing this bench was not so hard but it's not working for me. There's a hump in the wood pushing on my back so I have to sit all hunched up. I can see the big freckle on my knee through these old blue leggings. The lint balls line up like a mouth right across it. Push and the freckle frowns. Pull and it smiles. I lean down and smell my knees. In the summer my knees smell like crayons. Today they smell like mothballs. Hattie's red boots could leave numbers in the snow. There was a circle on the bottoms with the number one inside it and if she stepped just right where the snow was smooth she could print our ages. First she put seven ones in a row for her own self and then had to jump out of the way so it wouldn't look like eight. She hopped five times sideways on one foot to make mine but I didn't like the way the ones went crooked so I made a snow angel and wiped them out. We built a snowman but not a whole one. The bottom got so big and heavy we couldn't roll it anymore. Then we made a middle part but it turned out that we couldn't lift it onto the bottom. It was a laying-down snowman with no head. Hattie said we could climb from the middle part onto the bottom part and be up high enough to see China. When we stood on top of the big ball we couldn't see China but we could see over the fence and all the way to MacFarland's pond where some boys were playing hockey. And that's when we decided to go skating. My mom bought our skates at the second-hand store where she buys most of our stuff. They weren't brand new like Hattie's red boots but they still worked. The pair she got for Hattie are just normal but the ones she bought me are skin-colored. Painted. Painted with a brush that was losing its hair because there are black hairs dried stiff in the paint on both of my skates. Hattie calls them cooties. That's why she won't hang her skates anywhere near mine. But you can't see the hairs unless you look really close and if you've got nothing else to do you can pick at them with your fingernails. It took us a long time to get to the MacFarland place. We couldn't run very fast with skates hanging around our necks because the pointy ends kept stabbing us in the ribs. The boys were still playing hockey so we went around to the far end of the pond. Last year Ralphie Sims hit me on my ankle with a slapshot and it hurt more than the dentist. I sure didn't want that to happen again. Hattie tied my skates for me with her gloves on because of the cooties. She did hers up with bare hands. There was snow on the pond but it was easy to skate through once you got going. I got going but Hattie was still sitting in the snow next to her red boots. Then she stood up, turned around and shoved her arms down inside each boot. When she turned back she was wearing them like long vinyl evening gloves and I laughed till I fell down. Hattie is a good skater even with boots on her hands. She took lessons at the arena and can do flying angels, spins and jumps. She was doing a backwards flying angel when she disappeared through the ice so her red boots were the last thing I saw. Happy freckle. Sad freckle. I look up at Hattie's coffin again and wonder if angels really fly.