Freak the Mighty

“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. All right, I never actually drool, but you get the picture.” 

Large for his age and strongly resembling his criminal father, Max lives under the cloud of other people’s fear and disapproval. He keeps to himself and resents the judgment of others, but he can’t help believe their opinions..

“‘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.’ That’s how he talked, like right out of a dictionary. So smart you can hardly believe it.” 

Freak is brilliant and knowledgeable, and Max takes to him instantly. The two boys each are what the other needs—for Freak, a regular pal to help him express his adventurous nature, and for Max, a brilliant friend who awakens his own mind to knowledge and imagination. 

“The knights were like the first human version of robots. They wore this metal armor to protect them and make them invincible. […] It’s pretty amazing, really, that hundreds of years before they had computers they were already attempting to exceed the design limitations of the human body.”

His own body disabled, Freak finds himself fascinated with mechanical bodies, like those of robots. He also admires the knights of old for their protective outer shell of metal. 

“There’s a place I go inside my head sometimes. It’s cool and dim in there and you float like a cloud—no, you are a cloud, the kind you see in the sky on a windy day, the way they keep changing shape except you can’t really see it changing?” 

Max’s childhood has been hard; his father killed his mother in front of him; he has a learning disability; he resembles his dad and people are scared of him; even his grandparents fear he’ll turn bad. Max has found a way to zone out, an informal kind of meditation that lets his mind float and de-stress. 

“I love the Fourth. It’s just that people tend to get all choked up about firecracker holidays, and they don’t see what’s really going on, which like I say is the dads swilling beer and acting numb, that’s the basic formula.” 

Max enjoys the relaxed fun of a holiday, but what bothers him is how the men intoxicate themselves and become insensible to others. He sees the world through the eyes of a little boy whose family was destroyed by an angry man, a boy who can sense the tensions in other households and how their men block those feelings by over-drinking.

“I almost forget that Freak is riding on my shoulders. ‘Amazing perspective up here,’ he’s saying. ‘This is what you see all the time.’” 

Standing in the crowd at the July 4th fireworks show, Freak is too short to see much, so Max puts Freak on his shoulders. This works brilliantly, and Max soon forgets that the lightweight boy is up there. From his new perch, Freak warns Max of an approaching danger, Blade and his gang. It’s the beginning of their transformation into Freak the Mighty.

“Freak is still holding tight to my shoulders and when they ask him for his name, he says, ‘We’re Freak the Mighty, that’s who we are. We’re nine feet tall, in case you haven’t noticed.’ That’s how it started, really, how we got to be Freak the Mighty, slaying dragons and fools and walking high above the world.” 

After the police rescue Max and Freak from the millpond, they recognize Max as the son of Killer Kane. Freak, turning the moment to their advantage, announces their new nickname, a moniker that converts them from two ordinary, struggling boys into one superhero. 

“Each and every morning the little dude humps himself over and he bangs on the bulkhead, wonka-wonka-wonka, he may be small but he sure is noisy. ‘Get outta bed, you lazy beast! There are fair maidens to rescue! dragons to slay!’ which is what he says every single morning, exactly the same thing, until it’s like he’s this alarm clock and as soon as I hear the wonka-wonka-wonka of him beating the bulkhead, I know what’s coming next: fair maidens and dragons, and Freak with that wake-up-the-world grin of his, going, ‘Hurry up with the cereal, how can you eat that much, you big ox, come on, let’s do something, he’s so full of eveready energy you can practically hear his brain humming, and he never can sit still.” 

Max and Freak become fast friends and spend the summer before 8th grade having adventures. Freak gets Max out of the house, and Max enables Freak to do things he once could only imagine. The quote contains the longest sentence in the book, a stream-of-consciousness gush of enthusiasm from Max.

“Freak likes to make things up as he goes along. You think you’re just walking down this ordinary sidewalk and really you’re crossing this dangerous bridge, the kind made of vines that hangs high up in the air over a deep canyon, and when Freak makes it up it seems so real, you’re afraid to look down or you’ll get dizzy and fall off the sidewalk.” 

Though physically limited, Freak’s imagination expands to embrace the whole world, which he populates with fantasy and adventure. Max delights in this new way of seeing things, and his mind opens to new possibilities. 

“You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they’re supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never do fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off. Which is, I know, typical butthead behavior.”

Despite his concerns about going out late at night on one of Freak’s weird quests, Max waits impatiently for the 3:00 a.m. alarm that signals the start of the adventure. Freak’s daring, often mysterious, ideas and his elaborate sense of drama keep Max intrigued.

“‘Maxi Pad! Maxi Pad! Ask him quick about his dad!’ ‘Killer Kane! Killer Kane! Had a kid who got no brain!’” 

At school, Max and Freak are put together in classes. The other students taunt them until Freak climbs onto Max’s shoulders and they march around the room while Freak calls out their nickname, Freak the Mighty, and in moments all the kids are chanting along with him. It is a heroic moment for Freak, who dreams of being a noble knight, and for Max, who badly needs the boost to his self-esteem. 

“‘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!’” 

Max has a terrible fear of seeing his father, who, when Max was four, killed Max’s mother right in front of him. The school principal and the nurse try to soothe Max, who finally calms down but then grows worried because the nurse is crying, and he’s afraid he might have hit her during his outburst. In fact, she cries in sympathy for Max, who must live his life in the shadow of a traumatic family history.

“Some people think the stars look close enough to touch, but Freak says the sky is like a photograph from a billion years ago, it’s just some old movie they’re showing up there and lots of those stars have switched off by now. They’re already dead, and what we’re seeing is the rerun. Which makes sense if you think about it. Someday the rerun will come to an end and you’ll see all the stars start to flick off, like a billion little flames blown out by the wind.”

Killer Kane kidnaps his son, Max, and brings him up from his basement room. As they step outside, Max looks up, sees the stars, and ponders an interesting fact about the night sky, as if to distract himself from the horror of what’s happening to him. Even so, the thought of stars going dark dredges up in Max a fear about how easily the certainties to which we cling can be snuffed out.

“The cold doesn’t matter. Nothing does, really, not Grim and Gram or the old stars in the sky, or Freak and the Fair Gwen. They’re all just make-believe, this dream I was having for a long time, and now I’m awake again and he’s still filling the room somehow, even though we’re outside.”

Max’s kidnapping feels to him like the end of the world. All his past experiences and the people he loves are swept away by the immense and deadly presence of a man who terrifies him—a man who, just by standing there, fills the entire world with doom. 

“‘What I’m going to do, I’m putting my right hand down on this Bible, see?’ ‘Yes, sir, I see.’ ‘And I’m putting my other hand over my heart, can you see that?’ ‘Yes, sir, I can.’ ‘That’s good, boy. Now listen up. I, Kenneth David Kane, do swear by all that’s Holy that I did not murder this boy’s mother. And if that isn’t the truth, may God strike me dead.’ I’m waiting to see if something happens, and nothing does.” 

Max is forced to accept his father’s promise that he didn’t kill Max’s mother, but Max knows otherwise. Though young at the time, Max saw the murder and he knows his father did it. This is why Max hates and dreads the man. 

“It’s like I’m trapped underwater or something, so weak and floaty I can’t hardly fight him, can’t pry his fingers loose from my mother’s neck. From Loretta’s neck. Because everything is mixed up and he’s doing the same thing to Loretta Lee he did to my mom, choking the life out of her, and he’s got that same cold killer look because he wants her to die, like he wanted Mom to die, and nothing else matters except what he wants.”

Loretta tries to rescue Max from a burned-out tenement basement, but Killer Kane interrupts and begins to choke her. Max remembers Kane doing the same thing to Max’s mother, and he tries to intervene, but his hands still don’t have much feeling from recently being tied up, and his mind can’t quite resolve the confusion between his memory of his mom’s murder and the same thing now happening to Loretta. 

“I can’t get him loose of her, so all I can do is keep screaming. ‘I know you killed her! I saw you! I saw you do it! You killed her and I’ll never forget, not ever!’ Finally he kind of jerks his head and I can feel him looking at me and then his hands open. Loretta slips away and I can hear her breathing like a broken bird in the cellar dark.” 

This is the confrontation with his father that Max couldn’t have when he was a small child. Kane couldn’t kill his own child then, but now, when Max insists he remembers his mother’s murder, Kane tightens his hands around Max’s neck and presses hard. 

“That’s what everybody keeps saying, that this time they’ve got Killer Kane where they want him, in violation of parole, in violation of a restraining order, abduction of a minor, and two counts of attempted murder, me and the Heroic Biker Babe, which is what the papers took to calling Loretta Lee.” 

It takes Loretta, who unties Max, plus Freak’s squirt-gun ruse and Max’s quick reflexes to bring down Killer Kane. Max’s deadly father will be put away for a long time; Max can settle into his new and better life with friends, family, and school. 

“All you got from [Killer Kane] is your looks and your size. You’ve got your mother’s heart, and that’s what counts.”

Grim explains to Max what everyone’s beginning to realize, that Max isn’t like his father but instead a good person with a good head. Max is beginning to know this, too. 

“Freak goes, ‘You don’t need a time machine if you know how to remember.’ Which is something I’ll always remember, him saying that and me trying to figure it out.” 

Freak uses his imagination to wander back through time—at least, the times he’s read about—and Max appreciates the idea, even more so after Freak is gone and all Max has of him is memories. 

“[…] Freak the Mighty is almost a year old. ‘Talk about a prodigy,’ Freak says. ‘One year old and already he’s on his way to ninth grade.’ The Fair Gwen just rolls her eyes when we talk like that. Freak says we can’t expect her to understand, because you can’t really get what it means to be Freak the Mighty unless you are Freak the Mighty.” 

A year after they meet, Freak’s 13th birthday becomes the occasion for a celebration of his and Max’s friendship. Their bond is as unusual as it is close.

“‘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.’” 

Freak knew from a young age that his life would be short, and, as was his way, he decorated his future with an elaborate fantasy. To the end, Freak made his life more wondrous an adventure than it might otherwise have been. 

“I don’t know if this makes sense, but for a long time I felt like I was a balloon and somebody had let the air out of me. I didn’t care if I ever got the air back, because what does it really matter if we’re all going to die in the end?” 

The death of his best friend leaves Max in a deep depression. He hides in his basement room for days until his grandparents finally get him to come up and give them some comfort.