Friendship is an important theme of the story, the narrator, Buddy, often telling stories about “my friend.” He asks her earlier in the story, “When you're grown up, will we still be friends?" And friends they remain, if only through letters, although through his relationship with her he realizes that the experience of childhood, that innocence and delight, exists only in memory. When Buddy was a child, they made each other kites, and these objects, like many in the story, become symbolic of their friendship. At the end of the story Buddy hears that she has died, and this news, he says "sever[s] from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.” The kites again remind him of their friendship, each a heart—symbolic of love—which he will preserve in his memory.
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