Author's Note: This story is close to my heart, and rapidly becoming very precious to me. Not because I think that Faith--or Angel, for that matter--resembles me in any way, but because of a bear, a little white bear, that was given to me a long time ago by a friend I love very much. Please be kind, and enjoy I Wished for an Angel.

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Prologue: Angel

When I think back and try to remember, I always find that I can never quite recall when I started wishing. I know that it was when I was very small, because the reasons for the wish had always been there, even before I started grade school.

Because I'd always been teased, always been harassed by other children.

Because my family had always been poor.

We were better off than some, I guess. It wasn't as though we were living on the streets, or even anything near that. But we lived in a small house, in what some suburban parental figures might call a Bad Neighbourhood. The paint—what was left of it—peeled, the ceilings leaked (though I didn't mind that so much, because it was kind of nice to hear the familiar dripping sound on rainy nights, and especially on stormy nights, when I was so terrified I couldn't move). Sometimes as I tried to fall asleep I heard my parents downstairs, arguing in quiet voices that they thought I couldn't hear. Even when I was only two or three, I think I always understood what they were arguing about. It frightened me a little, the creeping, worrying kind of fear that leaves a blank, sore spot on the inside of your mind when you wake up in the morning. But whenever they found out I'd been listening to them fighting, my mother could always make it up with one soft, warm kiss and one soft, warm smile.

I'd never thought my clothes looked that terrible, either. Sometimes they seemed a little worn, but my father could sew patches in the most wonderful way—he could make them look like a part of the cloth, or make them so they stood out and looked nice anyways. It was from him that I learned to sew, at the age of four. My hands had always been long and thin, and in my father's humorous eyes this obviously meant that I'd be fantastic at sewing. I think, though, that it was partly because of his constant encouragement and implicit faith in my abilities that I did turn out to be a natural stitch-witch (my mother called me, smiling). My father and I always had fun 'repairing' our clothes, and even before I knew how to sew I loved to watch him do it.

I'd never though much about it, either, about the way my clothes looked, until the day—the first day, one of many—that I was laughed at because of them. I was only three at the time—I couldn't understand it. I had no idea why this little boy, a year older than me and therefore due respect (as far as he was concerned, at least), was laughing at me. He was wearing clothes that I could barely at the time understand to be fashionable, and he was laughing with a derisiveness that cut deep into my fragile three-year-old heart.

It always seemed the same, after that. Out of the shallowness that comes sometimes with being young emerged the fact that no one would let me close enough to them to make friends. I was always being teased, always being harassed by other children.

Because my family was poor.

Every time someone said harsh words, every time someone laughed, the cut would open a little wider. I was lonely. Incredibly so, for someone of my age. It never crossed my mind to blame my parents, either. From the very beginning it was just so obvious that they were both working as hard as they could, for each other and me. I did wish they were home more of the time, though—it was a little lonely sometimes.

So, partly because it took me so long to understand why the other kids acted that way, there came a time when something in me broke, something I desperately wanted to repair.

And I started to wish.

I didn't know at first what or who I was wishing for—all I knew was that I didn't want to be alone anymore. The ache had gotten to be too much. So I knelt on my bed at night, with the sheets pulled over my head in a tiny, draping tent, and whispered, "I wish I wasn't alone."

For a long time I couldn't think of anything else to say that might help the wish come true. Then one rainy day my mother let me come along when she went to buy groceries, and on the way to the store we passed a man sitting on the corner listening to a radio that had been tuned to a religious station. I heard barely one sentence:

"—od's angels are always with us."

I'd never been to church. I knew next to nothing about God—my three-year-old mind probably wasn't ready to deal with much beyond 1+1 at that moment—but something about that simple phrase caught my attention, and I stared at it over my shoulder long after we'd passed the church.

I'm afraid that, on that shopping trip at least, I wasn't much help to my mother, because my thoughts were occupied with something that was very serious, so serious I couldn't voice it aloud, even if I'd had the means to do so.

I'd never seen a painting of an angel before, and so I had no idea what angels were supposed to look like. I knew nothing about them, except that they were always with us. This fact, that I'd heard in passing on a radio station I'd never known the name of, rang somehow true to me, and I was silent for almost the entire day, thinking about angles. Those three words—"always with us"—enfolded me like a warm blanket, comforting and soft, and that night as I knelt under my thin sheet, for the first time since I'd started wishing, my wish changed, though I knew somehow it was the same.

That night, and every night without fail for a year after that, I wished for an angel.

-

Because of our—well, our situation (money, or lack thereof), my parents and I went to garage sales a lot. It was fun, actually, especially when I was little. My mom would walk to the coffee store around the corner and look for ads in the paper, and then if it was a nice day we'd wander around our neighbourhood looking at other people junk. Everything was a treasure (how could it not be, to an almost-four-year-old girl?), and I'd spend five minutes just staring at an old china dog or flipping through a comic book, pretending I could read.

It always made me sad to see things that had been pushed to the back or knocked on the ground like they weren't important. I'd always make a big point of setting them back up—I wanted everything get sold, because the only thing sadder than seeing the china dog knocked to the ground was walking by a few days later and seeing it poking out of a garbage bag. I'd wanted to cry when I saw it, but I knew my mother wouldn't have wanted me to take it, so I waited until she was talking with a neighbour, and then I grabbed the little dog, scampered across the yard, and set it in among the tulips.

That was how I found the bear, actually.

It was almost the end of the day, and the garage sale was shutting down; the boxes of leftover assorted junk were being packed away, and I was wandering among the mismatched card tables, wondering when my mother was going to find me and tell me it was time to go home. Every now and then I'd think I saw her ankles under a table, and duck down so she wouldn't find me. One times this happened I stayed down, and crawled along the ground for a few paces.

I almost stepped on it, but stopped at the last moment and sat back, picking it up off the ground to look at it more closely.

It was a teddy bear, its short white fur worn down in places, its limbs long and floppy. It held a little red velvet heart between its two paws, and a little pair of white silk wings sprouted from the place where its shoulder blades would have been (had it been real). One wing had been torn, and was almost falling off. I stroked the fur on its forehead with my hand that was almost as small as one of its—his, I decided—paws, sadness filling me as I looked at his face. Because above his small black nose, right where a pair of beautiful glass eyes should have been, was nothing but two hanging, frayed pieces of thread where the eyes had been ripped out.

What a sad thing, I thought. I hugged the bear to my chest and felt that he was warm, if not from the sunlight than from a lonely sort of love I felt somewhere beneath his fur.

I suddenly realized my mother was calling me. Jumping to my feet I ran to find her, carrying the bear like he was a bird with a broken wing.

I never asked for much, not toys or books or candy. I simply wasn't a materialistic person—even as a child, it never occurred to me to be any different. My parents understood this, so when I asked my mother if I could have the bear, she didn't ask about his torn wing, or his missing eyes. She asked the lady organising the garage sale how much it was.

The lady looked at the bear, and I saw her eyes take in his worn fur, ripped wing and missing eyes, and then she looked at my mother, her gaze finding each and every patch and repair in her skirt. Then she glanced at me, and I didn't understand the look in her eyes, though in grade four I would learn the definitions of the words pity and condescension from my English teacher.

She turned back to my mother, and said that we could have 'it' for free. My mother smiled at me, saying wasn't that nice of the lady, but she didn't look back as she took my hand and we walked away.

On the way home she leaned down and played gently with one of his ears, asking me quietly what I'd name him.

For her benefit, I considered for a moment, but I'd known the first time I saw him. I suppose when I said it my mother thought it hadn't required much imagination, but imagination wasn't the point, because he, his name, was something for which I'd been wishing for over a year now.

"Angel," I said. "His name's Angel."

-

For a long time I never wished for anything else. It wasn't that the reasons were gone—I was still teased, and my parents were still out of the house a lot of the time. The difference was, I wasn't lonely anymore.

I talked to Angel—our conversations would go on for hours. That first afternoon when I'd taken him home the first thing I'd done was take out the little sewing kit my father had given me, and repaired his wing. Then I'd gone and found the jar of buttons that sat on a shelf in my parents' bedroom, and found the two button's I'd always admired—a pearly blue one with two holes and a polished wooden one with four. Very carefully, so carefully I might have been performing surgery, I pulled out the two little pieces of thread and sewed the buttons on.

"There," I whispered, tying the last thread off. "Now you can see."

He didn't talk back to me, of course—but sometimes I did fancy I heard him whisper next to my ear at night. It was probably just the rustling sheet's, I'd think later, but it didn't matter, because Angel was the best, and only, friend I'd ever had. I could tell him anything, even things I couldn't tell other people. Like how a boy at school had stepped on a butterfly with a broken winged and killed it, and I'd wanted so bad to punch him but the teacher had been looking.

And whenever I hugged him, I always felt that same warmth, even if he hadn't been sitting in the sun all day. I fell asleep at night with my head pillowed against his shoulder, and even thunderstorms didn't scare me so much anymore.

As I got older, and entered Grade 1, the scariest place known to a six-year-old, the teasing got worse, even though it had to be done when the teacher's back was turned. Despite having Angel always, always by my side, always there for me, I began to be lonely again, a biting ache that began to become unbearable again. I fell asleep curled into a ball around Angel, clutching his warmth to my chest, whispering angrily and sometimes sadly against his soft white wings.

Slowly, haltingly, ashamed of myself, I began to wish again. Every night I'd drape the sheets over my head like I'd used to do, and, hugging Angel tightly to myself, I'd wish that he were real.

-

"Honey, you're going to be late!" my mother called from downstairs.

"I know, Mom!" I called back, grabbing the strap of my backpack and hoisting it over my shoulder. The backpack was old, and the strap had been repaired and re-repaired many times. "I'll be out the door in a sec."

On the way out my bedroom door, I paused to glance in the smudged mirror that sat on the table by my bed. Sixteen tomorrow, I thought with a sigh. Why did my birthday have to be the day after the first day of school? Brushing a stray strand of dark brown hair from my face, I turned away from the mirror and stepped towards the bed. Leaning down, I brushed a hand against the soft, white wing of the bear sitting beside my pillow, and planted a kiss above Angel's blue eye, where the fur had all but disappeared from all the previous times I'd done the same.

Drawing back, I smiled at him. "Wish me luck," I whispered. Flicking the light off, I turned back at the door, and looked back at Angel. "I wish you were real," I said quietly, repeating the words I'd said last night, and every night.

"Faith!" my mother called again.

"Coming!" I yelled, shutting the door behind me.