The Super Freak

by Brian Falkner

  He was a very good one, no doubt about that. Very well made with highly advanced technology. He looked just like a human, and I don’t think any of the other kids at school could tell he was really a robot. They knew there was something a little strange about him and nobody played with him or talked to him much. He was an outsider like me.

  But I could tell that he was artificial. I noticed little things about the way he moved and the way he spoke which gave it away. When he walked, or moved his arms, every little movement was exact. Just like a robot. He made one careful, precise movement after another, not like other kids who were usually just a big tangle of arms and legs. If you’ve ever seen one of those mechanical, robotic arms working on a Japanese car factory assembly line, then you can understand the sort of movements he made.

  If you walked behind him and listened really carefully, you could hear the pneumatics that powered his mechanical arms and legs. Sort of a ‘sssshhhh’ing sound.

  Then, there was the way his eyes moved; that was a dead giveaway. His eyes didn’t flick around all over the place like normal kids’ eyes. They stayed staring precisely on the same thing until he wanted to look at something else. Then they would move, very precisely, to focus on the new thing. Even the way he blinked was very exact and at perfectly timed intervals.

  I had a robot in my French class and its name was Ben Holly.

  ‘Conjugate!’ Frau Blüchner roared. Conjugate is what you do when you are learning a foreign language. Your teacher gives you a verb and you have to give her different forms of that word. In English, for example, if she said ‘to walk’, you’d have to say ‘I walk, you walk, he/she walks, we walk, they walk.’

  Except this was French, and the word was ‘parler’ which means to speak. ‘Je parle, tu parles, il/elle parle, nous parlons, vous parlez, ils/elles parlent,’ I chanted in time with the rest of the class.

  Frau Blüchner was actually Mrs Blüchner but we all called her Frau Blüchner. Not to her face though. She taught French and German, although she was actually Dutch. She was about two metres tall, fifty years old, and built like a panzer tank with an attitude to match. When she said ‘conjugate’, you conjugated!

  She scared the wits out of everyone at school, including, I am sure, the other teachers. All the kids hated her, except, perversely, for me.

  I was a bit lazy at my schoolwork, I have to admit. If my homework was ever done on time it was only because I’d stayed up late the night before, doing it all at the last minute. In class I had a habit of losing concentration and staring out of the windows. I couldn’t help it. I was easily bored.

  But in Frau Blüchner’s class I paid attention. Everybody paid attention. Frau Blüchner had a voice that could cut straight through sheet steel and disembowel you from fifty metres away. And, if that didn’t work, she had chalk. Chalk ends to be exact. Little left over bullets of chalk that were a bit too small for writing with, so she kept them in a box on her desk.

  The one time I had drifted off in French, I had woken up with a smacking sound and a sudden stinging sensation on my face as a chalk bullet caught me square on the cheek. She was a deadly accurate shot.

  A parent had once complained to Mr Curtis, the principal, about the chalk. Mr Curtis had invited the parent in for a conference with himself and Frau Blüchner. The story goes that the conference lasted no more than five minutes, after which both the parent and Mr Curtis walked out white-faced, and the matter was closed.

  Nobody argues with a panzer tank.

  The day she’d caught me, I’d been watching the birds and thinking about what it would be like to be able to fly. To be light and free, going where you wanted, when you wanted, to be … that’s when the chalk end got me, and it got me good.

  ‘Care to join us?’ Frau Blüchner had asked, in her thick Dutch accent.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Blüchner,’ I had mumbled, and I never let myself lose attention in her class again. I always did my homework too, and put extra effort into my French assignments. Anything to avoid that lashing tongue or those slashing chalk ends.

  Today though, I was in trouble. We’d been given a French song to translate into English. ‘Gentille Alouette’, you may know it:

  Alouette, gentille Alouette,

  Alouette je te plumerai.

  Alouette, gentille Alouette,

  Alouette je te plumerai.

  Je te plumerai la tête,

  Je te plumerai la tête,

  Et la tête, et la tête,

  Alouette, Alouette.

  O-o-o-o-oh

  It’s all about plucking the feathers out of a bird. I’m not sure why you’d want to pluck the feathers out of a bird. It’s just an old French folk song. Our homework was to translate the song into an English song. Not just word for word, because that was pretty easy, but to make it rhyme and scan. The problem was, I had been reading a really good book and had put off doing my homework.

  Normally, as I said, I would never put off my French homework, but the book was so good I decided that it was too exciting to put down and I would get up early in the morning to do my homework. Good plan. The only problem was, I stayed up so late reading, that the next morning I slept in.

  Now I was sitting in Frau Blüchner’s class and it was very nearly the end of the period. I was praying that she wasn’t going to pick me to read out my song about plucking the feathers out of a bird. I didn’t have a song.

  Her eyes roamed around the room and eventually settled on me. Probably because of the guilty look on my face.

  Don’t pick me. I thought desperately at her, the same way I had at Mr Saltham in P.E. Pick someone else. Don’t pick me, don’t pick me, don’t pick me, don’t pick me.

  ‘Erica,’ Frau Blüchner said abruptly to the girl behind me. ‘Stand up and read out your song.’

  Now is probably a good time to tell you about Erica McDonald. She wasn’t all that tall, although she wasn’t short, but she was the most extraordinarily beautiful creature I had seen in my life.

  Erica was from Scotland, or at least her parents were. I don’t know whether she’d been born there, or after they had emigrated to New Zealand, but she had a lovely soft Scottish accent.

  Her hair was a kind of a sandy blond colour and there was a warm, friendly smile always on the verge of shining out from her eyes and mouth. She was smart too. Not like Jan Marks, who was almost as beautiful as Erica but had a vacancy behind her eyes that went on forever.

  She sounds perfect doesn’t she? And she almost was. But Erica McDonald was the ultimate Ice Queen. I mean she was Frosty the Snow-Girl. Those lips that looked ready to smile never did. She clearly thought she was a bit too good for the rest of us, and kept to herself as much as possible. She had a boyfriend (according to the school grapevine), a senior at Rosmini College. I’d had her in my class nearly a whole year and I don’t think I’d spoken to her once. Which was partly me, of course, but mostly her. She wouldn’t speak to the likes of me. Yet I still had a crush on her, in an ‘it’ll never happen’ sort of way.

  ‘Stand up and read out your song,’ said Frau Blüchner. As Erica got to her feet, I found myself wondering why Frau Blüchner had not picked me. Could it possibly be I had changed her mind? I was certain she had been staring directly at me. Or had she been staring over my shoulder at Erica the whole time?

  Was it possible that, somehow by projecting my thoughts as strongly as I could at Frau Blüchner’s brain, I had implanted the thought into her mind? It seemed even more unlikely than my theory about Ben being a robot. And yet when you thought about that time in PE …

  Erica finished and sat down. Frau Blüchner just nodded and said quietly, ‘All right.’ This was high praise from her.

  The bell still hadn’t gone for end of period, and the teacher moved back to the blackboard and paused, thinking for a moment. More conjugation coming up, I thought, and wondered what word it would be. An odd thought popped into my mind and I focused on Frau Blüchner’s head and concentrated over and over again on a singl
e word.

  Knickers, I thought. There was no way Frau Blüchner was going to write knickers on the blackboard. It wasn’t even a French word. But if she wrote knickers it would prove my (unlikely) theory. Knickers, knickers, knickers, knickers, knickers, I thought. She reached down and absent-mindedly picked up a piece of chalk. There was a cough from the back of the class and she looked around, distracted by the sound.

  Then, as if in a daze, she wrote a ‘K’ then an ‘N’, followed by an ‘I’.

  Knickers, Frau Blüchner wrote on the blackboard as if it was a common French verb. She slammed the chalk down on the chalk tray and turned back to the class.

  ‘Conjugate,’ she said.

  Nobody said anything. I suspect they were all too stunned and, anyway, you can’t conjugate an English noun in French, so nobody knew what to do. In another teacher’s class there would have been muffled sniggering. But not in Frau Blüchner’s.

  As for me, I was the most surprised of all and more than a little bewildered at what had just happened. It seemed I had somehow made Frau Blüchner write the word knickers on the blackboard just by thinking about it.

  ‘Conjugate!’ Frau Blüchner roared, but still there was silence. Her face began to go red, a sure sign of an explosion building, but still nobody said anything. What was there to say? Her eyes flicked around the room, looking for a victim. They settled on her son.

  Frau Blüchner’s son was named Markus Blüchner, but we all called him Blocker. Yeah, that Blocker. Actually I called him Blockhead, but not to his face. He’d beaten up kids for far less than that. He called me Freak. To my face. Not that any of the teachers would know anything about that. As far as the teachers were concerned he was a hero. The star of the league team. A try-scoring prop-forward, a polite and gentle giant. Teachers can be so blind. In reality, he was heavy, strong and a merciless bully.

  Blocker got no special treatment in his mother’s French class. I suspected he got a harder time than most, just to show us, or him, that he was getting no favours. So, it was no surprise that she picked him to conjugate. Unfortunately for Blocker the word was not conjugateable.

  ‘But …’ Blocker began, trying desperately to figure a way out of this one.

  ‘I didn’t ask for buts, I asked you to conjugate!’

  I wondered if she was like that at home. It might explain a bit about Blocker.

  Blocker was still silent.

  ‘Conjugate!’

  Eventually he stuttered, ‘Je knicker, tu knickers, il/elle knicker.’

  The rest of the class froze. You know that feeling when you desperately want to burst out into giggles, but you dare not. Jenny Kreisler, sitting to my right, clapped both hands over her mouth. I suppose I was the only one who wasn’t inwardly cracking up. I was still too flabbergasted.

  Ben the robot, a few seats in front of me, had no such constraint. He was actually shaking as he struggled to hold in his laughter. I guess his humour circuits were getting overloaded.

  Blocker’s mother went purple. Blocker didn’t stop; he just tried to do his best. Even getting it wrong was preferable to not trying, I suppose.

  ‘Nous knickons, vous knickez, ils/elles knickent,’ he finished.

  The volcano was building, and I braced myself for the eruption, when all of a sudden Frau Blüchner turned and looked at the board, and all the steam went out of her as if someone had popped a release valve.

  ‘Who wrote …’ she started to say, but stopped, because she knew that it was her.

  She stood there for a while, shaking her head uncomprehendingly. Then she marched to the blackboard and scraped the offending word off with a duster, before writing up naítre (to be born).

  At that point two things happened. The bell went for the end of class and Ben Holly erupted into a fit of giggles. His programmers needed to work on that. Frau Blüchner turned and glared at him but said nothing.

  Ben was just about falling out of his chair, and that set off the rest of the class. Most of them tried to contain it until they were safely clear of the danger zone that was French class. Then they burst into uncontrollable laughter.

  Not Blocker though. The evil eye he gave little Ben Holly was enough to slice through flesh and bone. Most of the class had been laughing but Ben had started it, and I knew that he was in for a beating at lunchtime. I hoped it wouldn’t damage any of his circuits.

  I’m still not sure what made Blocker so malevolent just then. Was it because he thought Ben was laughing at him? Or was it because he thought Ben was laughing at his mother?

  Either way, Ben Holly was in for a hiding. And I was in for a lot of thinking.

  SIX

  GWF

  Blocker didn’t wait until lunchtime. He waylaid Ben in the stairwell, pinning him against the wire-reinforced glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  The clatter of kids’ feet continued below the landing, but those of us coming down stopped as a knob of kids bunched up to watch Ben get the snot kicked out of him.

  There were six or seven kids in front of me, so it seemed I was going to have to watch as well.

  I didn’t want to. I was feeling uncommonly guilty. It hadn’t been Ben’s fault really, it had been mine. If I hadn’t made Frau Blüchner write knickers on the board, then Ben wouldn’t be about to get his teeth smashed in.

  ‘Something funny in class?’ big, sneering Blocker Blüchner asked little Ben Holly, knowing he wouldn’t answer.

  Ben just shook his head, terrified.

  ‘Here’s a good joke,’ Blocker said, and punched Ben in the stomach, hard.

  Ben gasped and doubled up, clutching at his midriff.

  ‘You’ll split your sides,’ Blocker said and drew back his fist for another strike.

  I couldn’t do nothing. It just wasn’t fair. I aimed all my attention at the back of Blocker’s head and thought furiously: Leave him alone, you big ugly ape. Leave him alone, you big ugly ape.

  Blocker paused, one arm drawn back, and I slammed the thought again and again into his brain. Leave him alone, you big ugly ape!

  Then, to my horror, Blocker slowly turned and looked directly at me. To my even greater horror I saw the other kids were turning too, with looks of disbelief. Urgently I replayed my mental videotape of the last few seconds and realised, to my immense fright, that I had been concentrating so hard I had said the words out loud!

  ‘What did you say, Freak?’ Blocker asked, almost unable to comprehend that someone would be stupid enough to say such a thing.

  Nothing! I wanted to scream. I didn’t say anything! But it was far too late for that. ‘Leave him alone,’ I said out loud, and added ‘Blockhead.’ What did I have to lose?

  Blocker moved towards me, pushing through the crowd of kids gathered on the stairs but, just at that moment, the sound of a door closing came from the classroom above us. Frau Blüchner was on her way down. The kids quickly started to disperse, and Blocker stopped where he was.

  ‘I’m going to get you, Freak,’ he said, in a voice that was as low as it was deadly and punctuated with a stabbing finger in my direction.

  Out of nowhere another bizarre thought popped into my head and, without stopping to think, I said, ‘You think you’re so tough, I’ll take you on. I’ll take you on at GWF!’

  There was a gasp from the crowd, and Blocker’s eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘You’re on, Freak,’ he said with a malicious sneer. ‘You are so dead.’

  ‘OK, then,’ I said, wondering why kids like Blocker always spoke in such terrible clichés. ‘But in the meantime, try not to be so noisome.’

  While he tried to work out what that meant, I pushed through the crowd, and walked, much more casually than I felt, past Blocker. I wasn’t feeling all that clever though, because unless I could come up with something, and fast, I was shortly going to be turned into mincemeat by the toughest son-of-a-bum in year nine.

  A hand caught me by the arm as I walked out of G block, and I whirled around, expecting a fight. But it wa
s Erica.

  ‘You did a good thing,’ she said in that beautiful burr of an accent, and, for the first time, I saw the smile that was bubbling just below the surface. Just for a brief flash. Then the Ice Queen was back and, before I could say anything, she was off, gliding down the path towards F block.

  Ben came and stood by me as I watched Erica walk away. He was rubbing his stomach and looking a bit confused.

  ‘Why did you stick up for me?’ he asked in his perfectly controlled, but quite realistic-sounding, artificial voice.

  ‘No reason,’ I said. There was no way of explaining it.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ he said, and the way he said it conveyed such emotion that I found myself wondering if he really was a robot. Maybe it was all the stress of the moment or maybe it was something else but, normally, I never would have said what I said next.

  ‘Are you a robot?’ I asked, and winced, realising how silly it sounded when you said it aloud.

  ‘What!?’ Ben gave me a funny look. Once started though, I had to continue.

  ‘Are you a real kid, or are you a robot?’

  ‘I’m a kid,’ Ben said emphatically. ‘A real kid.’

  ‘Well, you walk like a robot.’

  There was silence while he digested this.

  ‘Do I?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re not a robot? Maybe your creators wouldn’t tell you. Maybe they’d want you to think you were a real kid.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ben looked more and more confused. ‘Right. I hadn’t thought of that. How would we tell?’

  I thought about that for a moment, then said, ‘We could cut one of your arms open, and see if there’s wires and stuff inside.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Ben, quite calmly really, considering what I was suggesting. ‘But what if you were wrong? There’d be blood everywhere.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  We started to head down the path, in the same direction as Erica.

  ‘Do you have a mum and dad?’ I asked, thinking he might live in a laboratory or something.

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Just like other kids.’