Freak the Mighty (7 page)

I used to think all that spooky stuff about Friday the Thirteenth was just a pile
of baloney. But now I’m getting my own personal introduction to what can happen. It’s
October, and so far things have been going pretty good, better than I ever expected.
Me and Freak are like this unit, and even Mrs. Donelli says she is starting to get
used to us, which is her way of admitting that Freak is about twice as smart as she
is, and for sure he’s read more books.

She keeps saying stuff like, “Kevin, we
know
you know the answer, because you
always
know the answer, so wouldn’t it be nice if someone else got a chance? For instance,
your friend Maxwell?”

Freak goes, “He knows the answer, Mrs. Donelli.”

“Yes, Kevin, and I’m sure you’re correct because you’re
always
correct, but for a change I’d really like to hear Maxwell speak for himself. Maxwell?
Maxwell Kane?”

This is dumb because what does it matter if I know the answer? If I don’t know, then
Freak will tell me and he’ll say it in a way I can understand, which is a lot better
than Mrs. Donelli can do. So what I do, I just shrug and smile and wait, because I
know she’ll get tired of asking and move on to the next. As a matter of fact I
do
know the answer — the reason Johnny Tremain got mad and hateful is because he burned
his hand in a stupid accident — and I know about that because Freak has been showing
me how to read a whole book and for some reason it all makes sense, where before it
was just a bunch of words I didn’t care about.

My reading skills tutor, Mr. Meehan, he says stuff like, “Max, the tests have always
shown that you’re not dyslexic or disabled, and this proves it. As you know, heh heh,
my personal opinion has always been that you’re lazy and stubborn and you didn’t
want
to learn. So if hanging out with Kevin somehow improves your attitude and your skills,
that’s great. Keep up the good work.”

It was Mr. Meehan who had a word with Mrs. Donelli, and that’s why she finally gave
up on trying to make me talk in class, and instead she waits until study hall, where
she asks me the
same questions alone and I tell her the answers. She still doesn’t get it, though,
because she always goes, “But, Maxwell, if you can speak to me, then you can speak
to your classmates, right?”

Wrong. Big difference. I can’t explain what it is, except that my mouth shuts up when
there’s more than one or two people, and a whole classroom full, forget it.

“Okay, you’re shy about public speaking, but how does that apply to writing down the
answers? If you can read, then you can write, right?”

Wrong again. The reading stuff Freak helped me figure out by showing how words are
just voices on paper. Writing down the words is a whole different story. No matter
what Freak says, writing the stuff down is not like talking, and my hand feels so
huge and clumsy, it’s like the pencil is a piece of spaghetti or something and it
keeps slipping away.

Mrs. Donelli says okay for now, she’s satisfied I can read, but we’ll really have
to work on this writing thing, won’t we, Maxwell, and when she says that, I just nod
and look away, because inside I’m thinking, forget it, no way.

Like Freak says, reading is just a way of listening, and I could always listen, but
writing is like talking, and that’s a whole other ball game.

Anyhow, what happens first on Friday the Thirteenth, we’re in homeroom when this note
comes from the principal’s office:

Maxwell Kane, your presence is requested.

Gulp.

So Freak and I get up to go and the teacher says, “No, Kevin, you stay here. Mrs.
Addison was very specific. Maxwell is to go alone.”

Freak starts to smart-mouth her, then he changes his mind and he nudges me and whispers,
“Just give ’em name, rank, and serial number. Deny everything. You aren’t back by
ten hundred hours, we’ll organize a search-and-rescue mission.”

He offers to lend me his dictionary, in case I want to try out any big words on Mrs.
Addison, but I’m already so worried about being called in alone, all I can think is
they’re going to put me back in the learning disabled class. I’ve already decided
I’ll run away if they do that, I’ll go live in the woods somewhere and jump out and
scare people. Anyhow, I don’t take Freak’s dictionary along because my hands are trembly
and I might drop it, or Mrs. Addison might ask me a word and I’ll forget how to look
it up and prove I’m still a butthead goon.

Mrs. Addison is waiting outside her office, like she does, and she’s trying to smile
but she’s not really a smiling kind of person and I can tell this is serious, whatever
it is.

Like maybe somebody died.

I go, “Gram! Is Gram okay?”

“Yes, yes, everybody is fine. Come in and sit down, Maxwell. And please try to relax.”

Yeah, right.

Mrs. Addison is sitting there in her big chair and she’s looking up at the ceiling
and then she’s looking at the floor, and at her hands, and finally she gets around
to looking at me. “This is rather difficult, Maxwell. I don’t know where to begin.
First, let me say we’re all very pleased with your progress. It’s nothing short of
miraculous, and it almost convinces me you knew how to read at your level all along
and were for some reason keeping it a secret.”

I’m not really hearing what she’s saying because there’s like this little bird fluttering
around inside my chest, and it makes me blurt out: “You’re putting me back in L.D.,
right?”

Mrs. Addison comes over and pats me on the shoulder. I can tell it makes her nervous,
touching me, but she does it anyway, and she goes, “No, no. Nothing like that. This
has nothing to do with school, Maxwell. This is a personal situation.”

“Because if I have to go back in the L.D. class, I won’t. I just won’t. I’ll run away.
I will, I will.”

“Maxwell, this is
not
about your class work, or even about school. This is about your, uhm, father.”

My, uhm, father. Which makes me wish all of a sudden I’d done something wrong and
Mrs. Addison was just giving me detention.

She takes a deep breath and folds her hands together like she’s praying and she says,
“A request has been forwarded to me from the
parole board. A request from your father. Maxwell, your father wants to know if —”

“I don’t want to hear it!”

I jump up and cover my ears, holding my hands real tight. “Don’t want to hear it!
Don’t want to hear it. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!”

What happens when you go nuts in the principal’s office, she calls in the school nurse,
and the two of them are trying to hug me and calm me down, and it’s like I’m back
in day care or something.

“Maxwell?” Mrs. Addison is saying. She’s trying to pry my hands away from my ears.
“Maxwell, please forget about it, okay? Forget I said it. You don’t have to do anything
you don’t want to do, okay? And I’ll make sure of that, I promise. I swear on my honor,
he can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. I’m going to make that
very
clear to the parole board, and to his lawyer. Very clear indeed.”

Finally I take my hands off my ears, which wasn’t really working because I could still
hear everything they said, and big surprise, I’m sitting in the corner of the room,
down on the floor with my knees all hunched up, and I don’t even remember how I got
here.

It’s like I blanked out or something, and the nurse is giving me this cup of water,
and the weird thing is she’s crying.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” she says. “I cry easy, don’t you worry about it.”

I do worry about it, though, because if she’s crying, I must have hit her and I don’t
remember it. Which, if you think about it, is
really
scary. Who knows what I might do and then not remember it?

The worst thing happens later, in the cafeteria.

Freak has this thing about American chop suey. He
loves
the stuff. The gooier the better. You’d never believe a person so small could eat
so much, and when he holds up his plate, he always says, “Please, sir, more gruel,”
and I always say, “It’s American chop suey, not gruel, I looked up gruel, remember?”
and he always goes, “I beg of you, sir, more gruel!” and so finally I go up to get
him another helping.

When I come back, something is wrong. Freak’s face is all red and swollen up and he’s
making this huk-huk-huk noise. He can’t talk, all he can do is look at me and try
to say something with his eyes and then I’m running to get the nurse.

“Quick. He can’t breathe! He can’t breathe!”

Then she’s running as fast as me and she’s yelling for someone to call an ambulance.

Back in the cafeteria, Freak is turning purple. The nurse grabs him and she’s got
this plastic thing she shoves into his mouth and his eyes are closed up tight and
one of his legs is kicking.

I don’t know what to do so I start hopping up and down in one place, and when the
kids keep crowding around I push them back, and the next thing Freak’s face is starting
to look pink instead of purple and he’s breathing okay.

Right about then the ambulance comes, I never even heard the siren, and Freak is trying
to talk in the croaky voice as they put him on the stretcher. “I’m okay,” he keeps
saying. “Really, I’m okay, I just want to go home.”

The deal is, once they call the ambulance, you have to go to the hospital and get
checked out, that’s a rule. I keep trying to get into the back of the ambulance with
him, but they won’t let me. Finally Mrs. Addison has to come out and pull me away
until the ambulance leaves with just the light going and not the siren.

“You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you?” she says, walking me back into the school.

“It’s not me who had quite a day,” I say. “Kevin is the one. All he did was try and
eat his lunch.”

Mrs. Addison gives me this look, and then she goes, “You’re going to be okay, Maxwell
Kane. I’m sure of it now.”

She’s okay for a principal, but for some reason I still can’t make her understand
that it’s not me who had a really bad Friday the Thirteenth.

And I swear on the dictionary, if Freak ever tries to eat American chop suey again,
I’ll dump it on his head or something.

Gram lets me stay home the next day because Freak is getting out of the hospital,
and I’m right on the front step when the Fair Gwen pulls up in her car. Freak is riding
in the back, you can barely see him in the window, and he’s got this big grin that
makes me feel like everything is going to be okay, the way everybody keeps saying.

I go, “Is it okay if I carry him inside?” and the Fair Gwen says, “Of course.”

“He has to rest,” she says. “He stays in the house until I say different, is that
understood?”

In his room, Freak is right away ordering me around, bring me this and go do that,
and you’d never guess he’s been sick.

“A minor incident,” he says. “Easily corrected by biogenic intervention.”

“You mean that robot stuff?”

Freak goes, “Sssssh! The Fair Gwen must not know of the plan. The very idea strikes
fear into her heart.”

“Well it
is
pretty scary,” I say, “getting an operation to give you a whole new body.”

“I’m not scared,” Freak says. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“So when does it happen?”

Freak gets this faraway look and he says, “I’m not sure. Dr. Spivak, she’s my doctor,
she says maybe a year or two.”

“But how come you need a new body?” I ask. “How come you can’t just stay like you
are?”

Freak shakes his head, like he knows I’m not smart enough to understand. “No one stays
like they are,” he says. “Everybody is always changing. My problem is, I’m growing
on the inside but not on the outside.”

He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, which is fine with me. And in another couple
of days, everything is back to normal and we’re going to school like always, and everything
is going real good until Christmas vacation when, if you’ll excuse the expression,
all hell breaks loose.

I’m in the down under, trying to get the stupid wrapping paper to cover the stupid
presents I got for Gram and Grim, when this shouting starts upstairs.

Understand, Grim
never
yells at Gram, not
that I can ever remember, and Gram, well, the worst thing she ever does is cry when
she’s mad. But
somebody
sure is yelling up there, and so I sneak up the stairs and I don’t even have to put
my ear to the door, that’s how loud it is.

“Over my dead body you will!”

That’s Gram yelling, and her voice is big and full of tears. Grim’s voice isn’t nearly
as loud, and I open the door a crack to hear whatever it is that’s made Gram so mad
at him.

“I have an obligation,” he’s saying. “A man has to protect his family.”

“Not with a gun!” Gram yells. “Not in this house! I won’t have it! Oh, I can’t stand
it. How could they do this to us? How
could
they!”

“He fooled ’em,” Grim is saying. “Just like he fooled Annie. Just like he fooled us
once upon a time. Never again, though. That man tries to set foot in this house, I
aim to shoot him.”

“No guns,” Gram says. “You don’t know about guns.”

“Of course I do. I was in the army, wasn’t I?”

“That was thirty years ago! I know what will happen, don’t you think I’ve dreamt about
it for the last eight years? He’ll come in here and he’ll take that gun away from
you, and then
he’ll
do the shooting.”

By now I’ve figured out who they’re talking about, and I guess you have, too. None
other than
Him
. Killer Kane, my father.

“Maybe they won’t let him out,” Gram is saying. “If they do, they’ll give us protection.”

“Sure they will,” Grim says. “Just like they protected our Annie.”

Next thing, Gram is crying, and you can tell Grim is trying to make her feel better,
going, “There, there, my dear. I know, I know. There, there.”

A while later, I hear the cellar stairs creaking. It’s Grim, and he knocks on my door.

“Come on in.”

Grim comes inside and for once he doesn’t tell me what a rat hole I’m living in, or
how it smells like a locker room because I forgot to put my socks in the hamper. He
sits on the edge of the bed and folds his hands together. I never think about how
old he is because he never acts old, but tonight he’s all white and bent and his skin
is saggy. He’s about a thousand years old, and he says, “I guess you heard the ruckus?
Your gramma gets so upset, bless her heart. Can’t abide the idea of violence. Can’t
say I blame her.”

“Did he escape?” I ask. “Is that what happened?”

Grim shakes his head. “He’s up for parole.”

“That’s dumb. That’s
so
dumb.”

Grim goes, “You hit the nail on the head, son. What I did do, just so you know, I
went into court and made it so he won’t be allowed within a mile of this house. If
he
does
try to come here, they’ll send him back to prison, the judge promised me that much.”

I say, “Maybe you
should
get a gun.”

Grim doesn’t say anything for quite a while, and then he goes, “Maybe I will, maybe
I won’t. I can’t tell your gramma about it, though, and it breaks my heart to lie
to her. That’s one thing we’ve never done.”

“I won’t tell.”

Grim is quiet again, and then he stands up from my bed and in this real old, tired
voice he says, “Everything is going to be okay, Max. I’ll make sure of it. But for
the next few days I want you to stay in the house. Promise me you’ll do that?”

“Cross my heart,” I say. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”