"Freak the Mighty" by Rodman Philbrick, Chapters 1-5

"I said identify yourself, earthling, or suffer the consequences."

"I'll just leave that to Gwen," she says. "She's quite a remarkable young woman, you know. Raising that poor boy all on her own."

Well, uhm, I get the impression poor Gwen wasn't expecting to see you looking so big, and now she thinks she's offended you.

So maybe he wasn't really all that fierce in day care, except I'm pretty sure he did hit a kid with his crutch once, whacked the little brat pretty good.

Well, uhm, I get the impression poor Gwen wasn't expecting to see you looking so big, and now she thinks she's offended you.

It's more than just the way Maxwell resembles him, Grim says that night in the kitchen, the boy is like him, we'd better watch out, you never know what he might do while we're sleeping. Like his father did.

Not that I have any ideas. My brain is vacant, okay? I'm just this critter hiding out in the basement, drooling in my comic books or whatever.

And when little Freak showed up one day with these shiny braces strapped to his crooked legs, metal tubes right up to his hips, why those were even more cool than crutches.

By this time I'm hunkering along in front of the place, trying to maintain a casual attitude, except like I said my feet are going wild that year and I keep tripping over everything.

Except I had a way of saying things with my fists and my feet even before we became Freak the Mighty, slaying dragons and fools and walking high above the world.

So I'm thinking about that for a while, lying there in the cellar dark, and pretty soon the down under starts to get small, like the walls are shrinking, and I go up the bulkhead stairs into the back yard and find a place where I can check it out.

Every now and then King Arthur would send them off on a special secret mission, which in the old days they called a 'quest.' They had to slay dragons and monsters and evil knights.

"The design limitations of the human body. You know, like we're not bullet-proof and we can't crush rocks with our bare hands, and if we touch a hot stove we get burned. King Arthur wanted to improve his men, so he made them armor-plated. Then he programmed them to go out and do these quests, slay the dragons and so on, which is sort of how they program robots right now."

It's real easy, he doesn't weigh much and I'm pretty sure I remember looking back and seeing him sitting up in the wagon happy as can be, like he's really enjoying the ride and not embarrassed to have me pulling him around.

All mechanical objects require periodic maintenance.

Gram is uneasy, I can see her eyes flitting nervously around the room, like she's crossing the border into a really foreign country.

He sits down in the wagon, and he goes, "This is an ornithopter. An ornithopter is defined as an experimental device propelled by flapping wings. Or you could say that an ornithopter is just a big word for mechanical bird."

There's this elastic band inside, and he goes, "Observe and be amazed, earthling," and then he lets it go, and you know what?

Then for a long time I never saw Freak anymore, one day he just never came back to day care, and the next thing I remember I'm like in the third grade or something and I catch a glimpse of this yellow-haired kid scowling at me from one of those cripple vans.

I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for a while, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.

Boy does that make his eyes blaze. Like whoa! talk about laser beams! He's like fuming, so upset he can hardly talk.

Many robotic devices are in fact sophisticated assembly units, machines that put together cars and trucks and computers.

They wore this metal armor to protect them and make them invincible.

Pardon my vocabulary. Sobriquet means 'nickname’ and demeanor means 'expression.’

There's this one scraggly tree behind the little freak's house, right?

There's a knife on the table and I pick it up and hand it to the Fair Gwen. She doesn't flinch away and I decide she's okay, she's really pretty cool.

"I remember like it was yesterday. We were all of us living over in the tenements in those days, because the rent was so cheap and we were all just starting out."

Maybe it was those crutches kept me from lashing out at him, man those crutches were cool. I wanted a pair for myself.

And the reason she looked familiar is, I must have seen her bringing Freak to day care, way back in the dark ages, because the next thing I notice is this crippled-up yellow-haired midget kid strutting around the sidewalk, giving orders to the beards.

All mechanical objects require periodic maintenance.

Okay, back to the down under, right? My room in the basement. Scuttle into your dim hole in the ground, Maxwell dear.

We sit out in the back yard eating from paper plates, and Freak tells robot stories that are so strange and funny I'm laughing like a maniac and then I'm choking and Freak is pounding me on the back.

Robotics, the science of designing and building functional robots, is a huge industry. There are thousands of robot units presently in use. Millions of them. They don't look like the robots you see in movies, of course, because they're designed according to function.

What I do, I keep out of range of that crutch and just reach up and pick the paper thing right out of the tree. Except it's not a paper thing. It's a plastic bird, light as a feather. I have to hold it real careful or it might break, that's how flimsy it is.

"When do we eat? My fuel cells are depleted."

All these big tough dudes came from all over to yank at the sword and they couldn't budge it. One day this wimpy little kid tried it when nobody was looking and the sword slipped out like it was stuck in butter.

"Opiate, a drug," he says. "Massive, that means large and heavy. Thus television is the drug of fat heads. Opiate of the massives."

"Grim would be, I suppose, a sobriquet for your grandfather, based on his demeanor.''

I chase after the thing until it boinks against the scrawny tree trunk and I bring it back to him and he winds it up again and makes it fly.

So I go over there to his back yard, trying to be really quiet, but I'm no good at sneaking up, not with these humongous feet, and he turns and faces me with that crutch raised up like he's ready to hit a grand slam on my head.