Freak the Mighty

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. 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.
Called me Kicker for a time this was day care, the year Gram and Grim took me over – and I had a thing about booting anyone who dared to touch me. Because they were always trying to throw a hug on me, like it was a medicine I needed.
Gram and Grim, bless their pointed little heads, they’re my mother’s people, her parents, and they figured whoa! better put this little critter with other little critters his own age, maybe it will improve his temper.
Yeah, right! Instead, what happened, I invented games like kick-boxing and kick-knees and kick-faces and kick teachers, and kick-the-other-little-day-care-critters, because I knew what a rotten lie that hug stuff was. Oh, I knew.
That’s when I got my first look at Freak, that year of the phoney hugs. He didn’t look so different back then, we were all of us pretty small, right? But he wasn’t in the playroom with us every day, just now and then he’d show up. Looking sort of fierce is how I remember him. Except later it was Freak himself who taught me that remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not.
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. And for some reason little Kicker never got around to kicking little Freak.
Maybe it was those crutches kept me from lashing out at him, man those crutches were cool. I wanted a pair for myself. 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.
“I’m Robot Man,” little Freak would go, making these weird robot noises as he humped himself around the playground. Rrrr…rrr…rrr…like he had robot motors inside his legs, going rrrrr…rrrr…rrrr, and this look, like don’t mess with me, man, maybe I got a laser cannon hidden inside these leg braces, smoke a hole right through you. No question, Freak was hooked on robots even back then, this little guy two feet tall, and already he knew what he wanted.