Freak the Mighty (12 page)

They won’t let me visit him the first day, and Gram says I’ll just have to be patient
and let the doctors do their business, but I can’t stand just sitting around so I
decide to walk over to the hospital, which Grim says is miles and miles, but suit
myself.

I know how to get there because Freak and I went yonder that way once so he could
show me the medical research building. It’s not the same, though, without Freak along
to turn the houses into castles and the swimming pools into moats.

All I keep thinking is, what a gyp it is to have to go into the hospital on your birthday.

Finally I get there and I see the Fair Gwen’s car in the visitor parking lot, but
Grim says I should leave her alone and let her tend to her son, so what I do is go
around back to the medical research building and find this stupid little tree I can
sit under.

I have the old ornithopter bird with me and I’m winding it up and flying it around.
Figuring maybe Freak will get a chance to look out the window and see it flittering
by, that’s my plan, and I’m under that puny little tree messing with the bird until
this guy mowing the lawn makes me move. So I wander around to the front of the hospital
and that’s when the Fair Gwen finds me.

“Maxwell!” she says, and she gives me this great big hug. A wet hug, because she’s
been crying. “Max, we’ve been looking all over for you. Kevin wants to see you. He’s
making quite a fuss about it and Dr. Spivak says it’s okay, but just for a few minutes.”

So the Fair Gwen takes me inside, and I figure we’re heading for the medical research
building, but instead we go into the regular hospital.

“He’s in the ICU,” she says.

“So they’re taking really good care of him?”

“They’re doing their best, Max,” she says.

The intensive care unit is this place where there are so many nurses, you can’t hardly
turn around without bumping into one, which I do as soon as we get there. Every patient
gets a room alone, and there’s all this electronic gear the Fair Gwen says is called
“telemetry,” which means when Freak sneezes, the nurses know about it before he can
wipe his nose.

I’m not scared at all until I actually go into his room and see how small he looks
on the bed.
They’ve got him sitting up with all these tubes going into his arms and up his nose
and Dr. Spivak is guarding him, she won’t let me come too close.

“I thought no visitors was the best policy for now,” Dr. Spivak says. “But what Kevin
wants, Kevin gets.”

Dr. Spivak is this small woman with short red hair and a real stern face, and it’s
like she’s mad because Freak wants to see me, or because I’ll break some of her precious
equipment.

“That will be all,” Freak says to her. “You are dismissed.”

The thing is, his voice sounds funny. Not just faint and weak, but kind of whistley.
Only when I get closer do I see he’s got this weird little plastic button stuck in
his neck.

“It’s called a tracheotomy,” he says, holding his finger against the button, which
stops the whistling noise. “Standard procedure to facilitate breathing.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No way,” he says. “I think it’s cool. Listen to this.”

Then he plays with his finger against the button, making his throat whistle a tune,
which he says is the theme from
Star Trek
, although you can hardly recognize it.

“So when do you come home?” I ask.

Freak can’t move much the way they’ve got him set up in the bed, so he sort of shakes
his
eyes instead of his head. “I’m not coming home,” he says. “Not in my present manifestation.”

I go, “What?”

“The Bionic Unit is on red alert,” he says. “Tonight they’ll take me down there for
my special operation. The next time you see me, I’ll be new and improved.”

“I’m scared,” I say.

“Don’t be a moron,” he says. “You’re not the one having surgery.”

“I still wish they wouldn’t.”

“Don’t argue with me,” he says.

I have to lean close to hear him because his voice is so small and whispery.

He goes, “If you argue with me, I’ll get upset and they can tell on the telemetry.
Then
you’ll
get in trouble.”

So I just stand there like a lump and don’t say anything for a while. I put the ornithopter
on the foot of the bed, but I don’t think he notices.

“See that book on the table?” he asks.

He can’t point, but I see the book on the table.

“Open it,” he says.

The book reminds me of the dictionary he gave me for Christmas, except when I open
it, all the pages are blank.

“That’s for you,” he says. “I want you to fill it up with our adventures.”

“Huh?”

“Write it down, dummy. I was going to do it, but now it looks like I’ll be busy getting
used to
my bionic body. It’ll probably take me weeks just learning how to walk with long legs.”

I put the book down.

“You’re the one with the brain,” I say. “I’m the long legs.”

“Don’t get me upset,” he warns. “I won’t have the time, so you’ll have to do it. Just
write it all down like you’re talking. Put in all the fun we had, the cool things
we did. Our adventures.”

“But you
know
I can’t write, Kevin.”

“It’s all in your head, Max, everything you can remember. Just tell the story of Freak
the Mighty, no big deal.”

I pick the book back up but I don’t say anything more about how hopeless it is, me
trying to write stuff down, because I don’t want to set off the telemetry. He does
that himself about a minute later when he starts to cough and before I can say anything,
the room is swarming with nurses and Dr. Spivak is telling me I have to leave.

“Out this second, young man, and let us do our jobs.”

They let me wait outside the ICU with the Fair Gwen, who is just standing there at
the window wringing her hands and not saying anything, and then finally they come
out and say he’s okay, it was just a bad spell, that they have him stabilized.

A while later Gram comes into the hospital and she drives me home. Nobody talks much
at supper that night, except when Grim opens his
big mouth and says, “Poor Gwen looks like she’s in terrible pain.”

I go, “Poor Gwen? She’s not the one having the special operation.”

Grim and Gram just look at each other like they can’t believe I’m so dumb, and finally
Gram says, “Maxwell, dear, make an effort to eat your vegetables.”

That night I put the empty book in the pyramid box for safekeeping, and for good luck.

The deal is, I’m not supposed to bother anybody at the hospital. Yeah, right, like
me being there is going to screw things up. The way everybody is acting around here,
you’re supposed to shut up and not do anything but wait, which makes me crazy.

So early the next morning when Grim is still snoring loud enough to rattle the windowpanes,
I get up and sneak out of the house. The way I figure, I can check on Freak and be
back in time for breakfast, no harm done.

It doesn’t work out like that, to say the least.

The sun is just coming over the millpond and there’s this spooky mist on the water.
You can hear all the frogs making a racket under the lily pads and the mosquitoes
sound like bullets whizzing by and I have to kind of slap and run until I get clear
of that smelly old pond.

Moving fast, like the sun is chasing my heels, I’m running down this long faint shadow
of me that stretches out ahead, you can’t ever catch up with it.

I’m thinking with my feet, like the rest of me is still asleep.

Not that I’m completely alone. There’s this one old guy, he’s actually out cutting
his lawn, he’s got these headlights rigged up on his rider mower, and he’s wearing
pajamas, too, like it’s normal, everybody does it.

When I get to the hospital the streetlights are just starting to click off. The lobby
is empty and there’s nobody at the desk to tell me I can’t be visiting patients at
the crack of dawn.

There are plenty of nurses in the ICU, though, and they see me coming. This one woman
runs right out from behind the telemetry station and she’s got her hands up to her
mouth and I’m pretty sure she’s trying to shush me, even though I’m not making any
noise.

She’s not telling me to be quiet, though, she’s saying, “Oh, my God, you must be Maxwell,”
even though she’s never seen me before in her life.

I go, “Is Kevin back yet?”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” she says.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“Oh dear,” she says. “Oh dear.”

Now more nurses are coming out of the ICU. One of them is the one I accidentally bumped
into yesterday and when she sees me, she goes,
“Better page Dr. Spivak, Kevin was her patient.”

That’s when I notice that some of the nurses are crying and looking at me strange
and all of a sudden I just go nuts.

Just go nuts.

I’m saying, “No way! No way!” and this nurse is trying to throw a hug on me and I
push her away.

Then I’m running down the hall and it’s like I’m Kicker again, ready to just blast
anybody who dares touch me, and I have to keep running, I’m skidding around the corners
and bumping into walls and no one can touch me even if they’re brave enough to try,
I just keep running and running until I get to these glass doors that say M
EDICAL
R
ESEARCH
.

The doors are locked and it’s dark inside.

Behind me people are shouting to call the guards, and I punch my hand right through
the glass and I’m inside, skidding over broken glass through the dark, and I keep
going until I come to this other set of doors.

N
O
A
DMITTANCE

No glass this time, they’re solid so I can’t punch through, and I’m kicking and kicking
and slamming into the doors, and that’s when all the hospital cops catch up with me.

A bunch of them jump on me and I keep going, running around in circles like an accident
of nature until finally there are so many of them on me, I can’t stand up anymore.

They’re putting handcuffs on my wrists and my ankles and they’re sitting on me and
going, “We’ll have to medicate him,” and this one cop says, “With what, an elephant
gun?”

That’s how Dr. Spivak finds me, covered with cops. She’s this worried face leaning
down. Her eyes are red and blurry and she’s saying, “I’m sorry, Maxwell, we did our
best. Better let me bandage up that hand, you’re bleeding.”

“He believed you,” I say. “You said you could give him a new body and he believed
you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The special operation,” I say. “The Bionics Unit.”

Dr. Spivak makes the cops let me up and says she’ll be responsible, but they leave
the handcuffs on me just in case, and the cop who was talking about needing an elephant
gun has this nightstick out and he’s ready to bop me if I make a move.

Dr. Spivak sighs and says, “Somebody get me a coffee, please,” and then she looks
at me and goes, “you’d better tell me all about it.”

So while she’s bandaging up my hand, I tell her about how Freak has been coming to
the medical research lab every few months to get fitted for his new bionic body, and
Dr. Spivak’s face goes soft and she nods to herself and says, “Well, that explains
it.”

“It was all a lie, wasn’t it?” I say. “You were just telling him that so he wouldn’t
be scared.”

“You know better than that, Maxwell. You couldn’t lie to Kevin. I tried a little fib
on him when he was about seven years old, because I didn’t think a child could handle
the whole truth, and you know what he did? He looked his disease up in a medical dictionary.”

That’s when I know she’s telling the truth. Freak and his dictionary.

“Kevin knew from a very young age that he wasn’t going to have a very long life,”
she says. “He knew it was just a matter of time.”

“So he was lying about getting a robot body?”

Dr. Spivak is shaking her head. “I don’t think it was a lie, Maxwell, do you? I think
he needed something to hope for and so he invented this rather remarkable fantasy
you describe. Everybody needs something to hope for. Don’t call it a lie. Kevin wasn’t
a liar.”

“No,” I say. “But what happened to him really?”

“I could tell you all the medical terminology,” she says. “But what finally happened
is his heart just got too big for his body.”

There was talk about arresting me for busting up the hospital — the cop with the nightstick
was in favor — but finally they released me into the custody of Grim.

On the way home he goes, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Just leave me alone,” I say.

“You got it,” he says.