1: Angel

I've never actually been in Heaven, but I grew up next door.

"You'd better not be smoking up there," Betts warned from the stalls below me.

"Jesus! Isn't there anyplace I can go and be alone?"

"You swore! You took the name of the Lord in vain. I'm telling Mom and you will be alone in your room for the next twenty years."

"Good! Tell her. Then you won't be able to bug me anymore." Betts stormed out of the barn. I'm sure she told Mom she was going to go take care of the horses just to spy on me. She never even let them in the barn. If Dad knew how she really treated her precious Arabians, he'd sell them. And I'd get blamed for not cleaning out the stall. Nine years old and I was no more than a f-ing stableboy for my sister. At least I liked the horses.

I saw the light come through the barn door when it opened and just knew it wasn't over yet.

"All right. I'm coming down. I wish you'd just leave me alone," I complained.

"You don't have to come down, Brian. I'll come up." That voice was music. Joanne Barnes, my next door neighbor. Everything my sister wasn't, Joanne was. She was nice and kind. She talked to me, not at me. She never told me what to do. Well, not exactly. Somehow, I always ended up doing whatever she wanted, but I didn't mind. And it's not like she was my best friend like Geoff or anything but she'd been a special friend for as long as I could remember. She was two years ahead of me in school and got along with her brother Drew about as well as I got along with Betts. He was less than a year younger than her. Mom called them Irish twins.

"Hi, Joanne. Sorry. Betts was in here making a racket."

"I heard. She's such a bitch." I giggled. I'd never dare call Betts a bitch.

"Yeah," I admitted. "Wish she'd just leave me alone. Did she see you come in here?"

"I waited till I heard the door slam and then ran over. I could hear her yelling at you in the back yard."

"That's probably why the horses are back in the woods. They don't like her either." We laughed quietly. I can just imagine what would happen if Betts or Drew found Joanne and me in the hayloft. I'd get teased for the rest of my life. I liked when Joanne and I got to spend time together, though, and I didn't want to send her away. I wished she was my sister and Betts and Drew lived together.

Joanne wore a blue dress. I just remember blue and that Joanne often wore dresses. For some reason the image of Joanne in that blue dress with the buttons up the front is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of her. Betts and I usually wore jeans or Carhartts working around the barn. Grandpa reminded me often that I was farm stock and I learned to drive the John Deere when I was still sitting on his lap. I still couldn't reach the pedals if I sat on the seat, but he let me drive it to the field standing up. You didn't really need the brake pedals. The gas was a lever on the side of the column and if you shut the gas supply down, the tractor came to a stop. You had to use the clutch, though, or it would stall. I plowed a whole furrow this summer. I couldn't see over the engine, but all I had to do was watch the front wheel and keep it in the furrow next to me.

Oh. Yeah. I'm short. Fourth grade and I'm the smallest kid in class. And I'm not likely to grow very big, the doctor says. It started back when Dad insulated the house when I was four. I was being really helpful until I couldn't breathe anymore and they had to take me to the hospital. I guess it was fortunate because they discovered a growth on my pituitary gland. It was treated and shrank but I'm not growing much. Maybe someday I'll be more than a pudgy little kid.

Anyway, back to Joanne's dress. She had dresses she wore to school and dresses she wore to play. In the summer, she had shorts and pedal-pushers, but otherwise, she mostly wore dresses. Her school dresses were cute. Her play dresses had mostly been cute school dresses the year before. They were always a little tight and short and kind of faded from washing and ... well, dirt. Just because she wore a dress didn't mean that she didn't get right out and play in the dirt with the rest of the kids. This dress had been a school dress last year, but Joanne had grown and it only came about halfway to her knees.

"How come you always wear dresses?" I asked. I realized I'd been staring at her legs and it kind of made me shiver.

"Where'd you get that shirt?" she asked in return. That was a sore spot.

"It's one your brother wore a couple years ago," I growled.

"Right. A hand-me-down. Don't get mad, Brian. Nobody's got money to go out and buy a lot of new clothes every time one of us grows. You wear hand-me-downs from Drew. I wear hand-me-downs from my cousin Amanda. I get a couple new dresses in the fall for school, but mostly I wear her old dresses. Betts hands her clothes over to your cousins. It just happens we don't have any other boys in our family, so you get Drew's. Amanda lives in town and she wears dresses. Therefore, I wear dresses. I don't care. I guess now that I've worn them for so long, I'd probably choose one unless it was summer. Even then it's sometimes cooler to wear a dress."

"Wow. I never thought about that."

"How's school?"

"Boring. I got a book about chemistry from the library, though, and that's pretty cool. I'm getting a chemistry set for my birthday."

"You sound awfully sure of that."

"Well, Mom always asks me what I want and that's usually what I get. I circled it in the catalog and showed her. I know there's a Sears package that came a couple days ago."

"Cool. How are kids treating you?"

"You know," I said. "I just try not to get anybody mad at me."

"Has Drew tried anything?"

"Um..."

"He did, didn't he, that rat bastard."

"It was just kind of teasing."

"Try to stay away from him. He's really going with the wrong crowd. Those Kowalski brothers are no good."

"I try."

"I gotta go. I'll watch for you when you come here. Maybe we'll talk again soon."

"Sure."

School was worse than what I let on. The Kowalski brothers were in Drew's fifth grade class a year ahead of me. I'd heard Mr. Boyer complaining about them to Mrs. Fites. Mr. Boyer came into our fourth grade class to teach math for an hour in the afternoon while Mrs. Fites taught English in his fifth grade classroom. I liked Mr. Boyer. He didn't mind me standing near him during recess. Not like I was right next to him. I was just, like always in his line of sight when we were out after lunch. I still got knocked down a lot. It was always something like a long football pass that I was in the way of.

I saw one coming on Thursday. There was no way I could get out of the way. Andy Kaminski was headed my way and one of the Kowalski brothers—I could never tell them apart—had the ball and kept waving him toward me. I turned to run, but there were some third graders shooting marbles like right beside me and if I took off, Andy would run right over them. It was bad enough that he was going to cream me. Those kids didn't need to be in the way. I just closed my eyes and tightened up, waiting for the inevitable.

I heard the hit. I didn't feel it. I heard the 'oompf' and a body hit the ground. I opened my eyes. Andy was lying on the ground crying. Bill Fisher had the ball and was running toward the Kowalskis. Both of them. He plowed through them, knocking them both on their asses. Drew was the only other one between Bill and the line on the ground that marked the end zone. He got out of the way.

"You guys should watch where you're throwing the ball," Bill laughed. "You threw an interception. And you could have hurt some little kids who weren't even on the field." His voice got a lot lower. "Don't ever do that again."