Growing up Gabe: He has to work a little harder. And he's OK with that.

For years, they sat behind him in class. They brushed past him in the hallways. They giggled in corners of the cafeteria.

Gabe Murfitt didn't really see them. And then, one day, he did.

It was the first dance of his junior-high-school career. The girls were clustered in a knot at the center of the gym. Gabe's best friend cut through the crowd. He picked out a tall, thin, brown-haired one with braces on her teeth. He asked the question: Will you dance with Gabe Murfitt?

OK, she said. But only if he asks me himself.

Gabe left his wheelchair by the edge of the gymnasium. He moved toward the girl on his knees. He ignored the queasy stomach. He asked her to dance.

She said yes. And then she asked how.

Even now, six months later, he can't believe she did it. He asked her, and she did it. She got down on her knees and danced.

"I looked over, and all these girls were staring at me," said Gabe, who asked her later for a second dance. "They were looking at me like, 'How can he get a dance and we can't?' "

Gabe Murfitt is ready to turn 13 today — ready to pull away from his parents, ready to start dating girls, ready to become a teenager. But his body is not built for independence. He can't go to the bathroom alone. He can't dress himself in time to catch the morning bus. He can't comb his hair without help from his mother.

This is a fact of Gabe's life: He was born with malformed legs, and with hands but no real arms. It is a fact Gabe has acknowledged, then ignored. He has played baseball. He has played the drums. He has danced. He has done all these things differently from the average seventh-grader, but he has done them nonetheless.

It takes some thinking, that's all. Some strategizing. Like the after-school dance at Leota Junior High in Woodinville. The machine-powered wheelchair was too risky, Gabe thought: What if he drove over the girl's foot? So he went with walking that day, using his knees like his friends use their feet.

When the music kicked in, Gabe could not reach far enough to touch the girl's waist. But her arms were long enough. She could touch him, and she did, resting her hands on his shoulders. They swayed back and forth on their knees.

"I was freaking out just to ask her," said Gabe. "The second time, it was no biggie."

GABE WAS NOT AFRAID of junior high. His older brother Zane had cleared the way. The teachers saw good things in the Murfitt name. And as for friends, Gabe had a sprawling group of them from Hollywood Hill Elementary School — his "posse," as Zane called them.

But Gabe's parents were less sure. Three different elementary schools in the Northshore School District fed into Leota. That meant more than 100 kids who didn't know Gabe, who had never seen him before.

"We were so fearful about junior high," said Gigi Murfitt, who works part time as an accountant. "We kind of planned on it being a really scary year."

But on the first day of school, Gabe charged in with confidence, scrawling the word "exciting" on his name placard when asked to describe himself in Language Arts class. By late September, he had asked a girl to dance. By December, he had performed in the school play. In January, he was playing on the basketball team. He started February with a 3.6 grade-point average.

When March Madness hit, Gabe was in the thick of it, throwing out college-basketball statistics to anyone who would listen. In the cafeteria, Leota's assistant principal, Scott Farquhar, sidled up to Gabe's table at lunch and smirked.

"Whose team lost this weekend, Gabe?" he asked.

"Doesn't count!" yelled Gabe. "I knew Duke was going to lose, so it doesn't count."

The table of boys went back to their discussion — who had dumped who and who was likely to get back together. They finished their fries and chicken nuggets and carried the debate outside.

"You like her!" one of Gabe's friends said.

"Do not!" said the other.

"Do too!" said the first.

Gabe sat between them in his wheelchair, his freckled face tilted upward. He watched them with his mouth slightly open, blue eyes wide and darting from one face to the other. The two boys leaned into each other's space. Gabe shrieked with laughter.

GABE LISTED THREE FACTS about himself for an exercise in Language Arts class: I have an older brother named Zane. I am the youngest child. I play baseball.

He listed his three favorite things: my scooter, my cats, my brother Zane.

Zane Murfitt is a lanky baseball and football player in his sophomore year at Woodinville High School. He is a smooth, quick, versatile athlete — one of the top players to pass through Leota Junior High, a former coach said.

Zane has spent years pounding into Gabe this message: If I can be an athlete, so can you.

"He's proved people wrong his entire life," said Zane. "I know whatever he wants to do, he's going to be successful."

At Hollywood Hill, gym teacher Ed Hogle made a video of what Gabe could do. The camera followed Gabe as he hit a baseball, played hockey and jumped rope. The fear was that junior-high coaches, afraid of liability, would send Gabe to the library more often than not.

It hasn't happened. Sure, there are certain things Gabe can't do in gym class. He sat out the unit on indoor soccer. He tried to play the first day, and the gym teacher watched in horror as the ball shot toward Gabe "like a heat-seeking missile" and knocked him down.

Sometimes it makes him mad, the things he can't do. He gets silent. The strain shows on his face.

But the thing about Gabe: He sticks with it.

"When he falls, he falls like an athlete," said Leota gym teacher Jim Mangialardi. "He rolls over, then he pops right up."

While the other boys are racing each other down the basketball court, Gabe does his own work. He throws layups with a lightweight ball into a child-sized basketball hoop. His hair soaks in sweat. His cheeks flush apple-red.

There is no doubt, his coaches say, that Gabe is a natural athlete. He has strength. He has balance. He has a game face. And he has a better attitude than most of his peers.

He joined the basketball team this past season, playing the last two minutes of the first three quarters of a few games. His performance, said coach Mike Benjamin, either inspired or shamed the rest of the team into becoming better players. There were no more excuses — no more sore knees or tired arms. Because there was Gabe, playing the sport on chapped knees, focusing the strength in one part of his body to make up for the weakness in another.

"I would have loved to seen him play without a disability," said Benjamin. "Because I think what you'd see — you'd see Zane."

THE CONSENSUS at Leota Junior High is that Gabe is over it. That he doesn't care that his bones are fused and won't stretch out to make long legs. That he doesn't mind that his arms are three inches long and his thumbs have no bones in them. That it doesn't matter that his hearing is worse than his grandmother's.

Mostly, Gabe says, they are right. This body is fine enough for him. He has always found a way to use it. When he was an infant, his mother found him drinking in his crib from a milk bottle he had raised to his lips with his feet. As the years passed, he learned to use his pointer and middle fingers to get things done. He could grab a pencil with them, then steady it with his chin on the eraser. He could wedge a baseball between them, then throw it 10 feet.

He got tired of sliding down the stairs on his stomach — it was giving him rug burn. So he invented his own "tall walk," standing on his knees and moving forward. Later, he found a way to "run." He sits on his rear end and hurls himself forward in a full body-hop from one base to another on the field.

Gabe will never grow like his brother, who shot up 11 inches in the space of two years. But he has added a few inches of his own over the past few years. At 3 feet 2 inches tall, he can touch the kitchen table now. He can reach the bathroom counter. He can pull the shower knob and open the refrigerator door.

Sometimes, he has sweet dreams of stretching his legs. It doesn't happen often. But it happens.

"I'd like for a day to be like a normal person — long legs, long arms," said Gabe. "I just want to see what it's like."

There are, of course, some joys that come with a machine-powered wheelchair. He can speed down the school's concrete paths at seven miles an hour. He can cut sharp corners.

And in gym, before he got his scooter, he liked to put his wheelchair into overdrive as his friends ran laps.

"I just sit there holding the handle while kids are sucking wind behind me," said Gabe.

Girls badger him for a ride on the machine. Boys tug at the horn lever. The thing is still a novelty to them. But for Gabe, it's mostly a nuisance. Occasionally, he hates it. He has spent most of his 13 years in that chair.

One morning, in kindergarten, Gabe told his mother he didn't need the wheelchair that day. He had just watched Zane climb out of the van and run into school. Gigi told her son that he would always need the wheelchair. It was one of the few times Gigi has seen her younger son cry.

THIS YEAR, as a member of a youth group, Zane has talked to hundreds of students about Gabe.

In schoolwide assemblies, Zane has first described Gabe as a friend who has challenges, then revealed the friend as his brother. The message is simple: Don't judge.

He is talking about the stares. It makes Zane crazy, those stares. So hard to stand still, stay quiet, keep the anger to himself. In these assemblies, Zane gets to finally have his say about the way Gabe is gawked at in the mall, on the street, at a hometown parade. He gets to talk to kids who might hurt his brother. He gets to stop them from doing it.

What bugs Gabe the most are the parents. He can't figure out why they do it — whether it's pity or disgust or disbelief. And the worst thing, Gabe said, is that their children are standing by, watching.

"I just look at them like, 'You're an idiot,' " said Gabe. " 'You know better than that at age 56.' "

As for the kids, he understands. His mother once told him that kids have a right to be curious. What they need from you, she said, are answers. So when the kids flap their arms at you like a chicken, she said, remember: They don't know about you. You have to tell them.

And so he did. It was first grade, and all the kindergartners were mocking him from behind a fence. The teacher's aide gave him a suggestion: Show them your chair.

Gabe's wheelchair is an $18,000 machine that looks like a bright-red tractor, complete with taillights, headlights, a control panel and a horn. He stood up on it, pointed to the various buttons, honked the horn.

The teasing stopped.

And it never really started up again. Occasionally, a kid will stop Gabe on the street and ask whether a car accident made him look so strange. But inside the school community, there is nothing. No teasing, no taunting, no treating Gabe differently.

"It's wasn't a cool thing to mess with my brother," said Zane. "Kids were kind of tainted if they did it."

And now the kids know him. They know his aide, Christine Dahl, who takes notes for Gabe, carries his books, opens his locker and gets his lunch in the cafeteria. And when she is not there, they do these things for him. It's just a fact of life: Sometimes Gabe needs help; most of the time, he doesn't.

He recently stood in front of his science class for a presentation on the genetic disorder called TAR syndrome. It's what the doctors thought Gabe had when he was born. Then they realized he didn't have the life-threatening blood condition that comes with it.

Eventually, they came up with another diagnosis. The words slipped out of Gabe's mouth that day in class: pseudothalidomide tetraphocomelia. That was the name the doctors gave it, this rare blend of disorders. He would be healthy, they said. But he would be different.

Gabe and his science-project partner, Ryan Lally, agreed that he looked an awful lot like a TAR child.

Ryan held up a photograph of a baby with TAR for the class to see.

"These are his feet — kind of like Gabe's; they're slanted in or out," Ryan said, pointing to Gabe's sockless feet.

For their presentation, Ryan played the reporter, Gabe the subject. Ryan asked Gabe how he took a shower. He asked how he threw a ball. He asked how he hit a ball.

Gabe gave the same answer every time: "Just like any other normal person," he said, his face flushing pink.

AS GIGI REMEMBERS it, Gabe came out of the womb screaming. When they first saw him, she and her husband went silent.

For a few days, Gigi convinced herself Gabe's body would stretch into something more normal. She asked a doctor what kind of shoes she could buy for the boy in the meantime. His feet might be difficult to fit.

The doctor lost his patience. Your boy is never going to walk, he said.

Then, through the sound of her own sobs, Gigi heard a second voice, from another doctor who had entered the room.

Give him all the love you can, that doctor said. Don't protect him. Everything else will fall into place.

The Murfitts took those words, tucked them away, made them their own. And one day, several months after Gabe was born, Gigi decided: No more wrapping her boy in a blanket, hoping passers-by would see only his head. It sent the wrong message to her son.

She took Gabe to the state fair that September, dressed in a tiny tank top.

It took Steve Murfitt longer to find his optimism. He was an athlete, an outdoorsman. He had so many trips planned for the family — his wife and two strong boys.

"It kind of crushed me," said Steve, a salesman in the construction business. "All I kept thinking was all the things we weren't going to be able to do."

In the thick of a depression, Steve pulled himself closer to God. He tapped that connection for strength. He used it for guidance.

Gigi followed Steve.

"I just kind of crawled into the lap of God and said, 'Help.' "

STEVE MURFITT is standing in the living room of the family's home in Woodinville, remote control in hand. On the television screen, Gabe dribbles a basketball down the court, then passes it to a taller kid, who threw it in for a basket. A reporter talks over the action, praising Gabe for his courage and determination.

Gabe stands by his father's side, his left hand resting at Steve's calf. Occasionally, he jumps up and down. He has seen this piece dozens of times before, but it always thrills.

The camera cuts back to the news anchor.

"Gabe, you're the man," the anchor says.

This is not the first time Gabe has been singled out. At last year's Hollywood Hill graduation, he became a school celebrity when the video of him playing sports lit up a screen. Then came two awards — one for academic achievement, one for athletic achievement.

"So then I drove up to the stage," Gabe recalled.

"Wait," he paused, turning to his mother. "Was that before or after I got the standing ovation?"

Of course, Steve Murfitt was proud of his younger son. And he is just as proud of Zane. They are his boys — loved, admired and disciplined equally. They both get kisses, and they both get chores.

Sometimes, it feels strange, all this attention heaped on Gabe. Steve holds up a photograph of the Challenger Little League team he coaches. Any one of these kids, he says, deserves to have his or her picture in the paper. Every one of them has turned something bad into good.

Steve recruited several of them into the league. Whenever he sees a child with a disability — in a restaurant, in a mall, on the street — he walks right up to them. "Ever thought of playing baseball?" he asks.

Steve, a former college-football player, got his degree in athletic training. He knows what these kids can do if they try.

TODAY, GABE will throw out the first pitch at the Mariners game against the Texas Rangers. The chance came from the television segment that ran a couple of months ago, in cities across the country, from San Francisco to Chicago. The Mariners called. A representative from the Oprah Winfrey show called.

The family laughs about it. Gabe's just a boy, really — no more, no less. A boy who annoys his older brother with questions. A boy who whines to his parents about brushing his teeth. A boy who shows off his sports trivia to friends. A boy who signs a petition to "impeach" a student band leader.

Someday, years from now, Gabe will go to college, become a sixth-grade social-studies teacher, get married and have children. That's the plan anyway. That's what Gabe wants to do.

But today, on his 13th birthday, this is what Gabe wants to be: a boy.

Cara Solomon: 206-464-2024 or csolomon@seattletimes.com