Mentality

No. 1

On No Particular Day in 1984

It was always dark. Either that or he was in the Other Places. But what he always loved the most was Outside.

He knew by instinct how to describe Outside: pretty. The Outside was really pretty. It was always bright Outside, unless it was the time the Mean People were eating their last food of the day. Night.

There were big trees Outside and butterflies and flowers and all kinds of other things. When he was allowed out of the Other Places, Freak ran around, making extra careful not to get dirty - since the Mean People got especially cross when he acted like a "'ooligen" - and explored Outside. It was very fun!

But then he would always have to go back inside of the Other Places. There were three Mean People there. One was Dudley, his big cousin. He was a lot bigger than Freak. Freak always knew that Dudley shouldn't be that big, but no one ever said anything. That must mean that Freak was the odd one of the bunch.

Dudley was always being hugged by the Small Mean Person. She looked at Dudley really happily, but whenever she saw Freak, she yelled, told him really, really mean things, hit him, or just pretended he wasn't there.

Then later on Freak would get sent to his cupboard. It was his, and no one else could have it! Sometimes Freak would take food with him, or Dudley's broken toys, and hide them away. For some reason, the Mean People never saw them.

When Freak went to sleep, he saw bad things sometimes. But he also saw good things. Very nice things. And very bad things. Whenever he saw the bad things, he got really scared and started to cry. He had to be careful that the Really Big Mean Person didn't see him crying or hear him.

That was when he got hurt a lot. It wasn't very nice at all. He was supposed to "toughen up". It was what the Really Big Mean Person said to him every time he was caught crying. Then he would call Freak stupid or a waste of space.

Sometimes, when Freak was really, really, really bad, and the Really Big Mean Person was very, very angry with him, he would take off his belt or twist an arm or a leg until white hot pain lanced up that particular limb, and he heard a really sharp snap.

That's why Freak learned to always hide what he was feeling.

Then there was also a time when he was let out of his cupboard and told to sit on the floor next to the couch, since being a freakish thing made him "infereeor," or something like that, to the Mean People.

He saw this thing once where a girl, a boy, and this man they lived with next to water Outside. The boy and girl were allowed to go Outside and saw a really silly Loch Ness with its head stuck in the ground.

They helped it and met his family. Freak asked the Small Mean Person about the family and why Freak didn't have one, and she said that he didn't deserve a mummy or a daddy.

It always made him sad to think about Dudley having a mummy and daddy, but Freak not having one.

Near Night, he asked the Small Mean Person why he didn't d'serve a mummy or a daddy and she said it was because he was a freak. No one in "good taste" could love something like a freak. His mummy and daddy had both died in a car accident. She pointed at the top part of his head, and when he touched in that place he felt a zigzag line there.

She said that he was in the car with them and got that since he didn't die with them.

Later on Freak had had to see even worse bad things when he fell asleep. He could hear a man screaming, then a woman who had red hair and then a really bad man laugh. Then a flash of a really bright color like the grass. Before he woke up, he felt like he was flying. He didn't cry that time, though.

Every time he slept after that, he would always have the same dream over and over again: flying. He didn't know what it meant, but he felt safer whenever he was dreaming than anytime else.