The Pain Eater

by Beth Goobie

  “What’re you talking about?” she asked, trying to keep impatience out of her voice.

  “Oh,” said Herb, releasing a wispy smoke ring. “I’m just concerned about your happiness, Maddy. You don’t look too happy these days. And it’s important to keep happy, y’know.”

  Maddy stared outright, no longer bothering to hide her confusion. Stepping back, Herb gave her a silly little grin and saluted airily. “Have a good day, Maddy,” he said. “A cheerful, smiling day.”

  He wandered off into the crowd. Face twisted in disbelief, Maddy watched him go. What a weirdo, she thought. Was he like that all the time, or did he have insanity attacks only during Thursday lunch hours? Exactly what she needed – some schizoid trying to randomly psych her out on her midday smoke break.

  Or maybe not so random. When Maddy got to her locker to pick up her books for her afternoon classes, she found something small and white above her padlock – a decal of a Greek comedy mask, its broad grin leering at her. The glue on the back seemed to be extra-strength; no matter how she scratched, she couldn’t get the sticker off. Nauseated and blinking back tears, she finally grabbed her books and took off down the hall, leaving the jaunty little sneer in place behind her.

  . . .

  He wasn’t one of the five, Maddy was sure of it. Herb Whoever hadn’t been one of the three who raped her, nor had he been the one to hold her down or the one to stand lookout. He hadn’t been present in that copse of aspen last March in any capacity, but he knew about it. What exactly he knew, she didn’t want to guess, but it was enough. And if he knew about it, so did others – outside the five guys directly involved and herself, that was.

  It had to happen sometime, she’d known that – the story getting out, comments being dropped, smirks and stares. In a way, she was surprised it had taken this long. Although, when Maddy thought about it, Herb’s comments had been pretty benign. There’d been no dirty innuendo, no sly nuance – just a keep-your-mouth-shut message delivered in a way that would make sense only to her. And even she hadn’t gotten it until she’d seen the decal on her locker. If Herb or any of the five had finally decided to start leaking lurid stories about last March, they were going about it in a decidedly indirect manner.

  She hadn’t looked at her phone since the previous week’s mask tweet, and she sure as hell wasn’t checking it now. Instead, Maddy focused on just lying on her bed and keeping her breathing even. Her stomach ached; it felt as if she was digesting toxic waste instead of tonight’s roast beef and mashed potatoes. She was probably getting an ulcer – she remembered her Aunt Cass talking about her own symptoms when she’d had one, and Maddy’s current aches and pains fit the bill. That meant a diet of boiled vegetables, plain broiled chicken, and rice for months on end, she thought morosely. No Doritos, no french fries, no nothing that tasted like anything. Pressing both hands on her stomach, she swallowed a surge of bile. This isn’t an ulcer, she told herself firmly. It’s just an upset stomach – something minor, like a bit of food poisoning. If she didn’t think about it, it would go away. What she should do was think about something else – something pleasant, something that would make her smile. When was the last time she’d laughed at anything? When had she last felt happy?

  I’m just concerned about your happiness, Maddy. Casual, innocuous, Herb’s voice floated through Maddy’s mind. It’s important to keep happy, y’know. Have a cheerful, smiling day.

  Maddy lay, her face frozen, staring at the ceiling. Even here, in her bedroom, they had hold of her. They had hold of her face. If she smiled now, she was doing what they wanted, but if she never smiled at all, what did that leave her with? Were those her only two options – the two masks, one smiling, the other weeping? And either way – silence, never-ending?

  Will anyone eat my pain? Maddy wondered.

  . . .

  Jeremy stood at the front of the class, studying the two pages in his hand. Beside Maddy, Kara thumbed her phone, an expression of calculated indifference on her face. As Jeremy had gotten to his feet, she’d quietly sung “Doo doo doo doo,” but Jeremy had given no sign of hearing her.

  Across the room, Julie was watching Jeremy, the usual smirk playing with her lips. Maddy’s gaze flicked left, across David’s, then Ken’s, face. On cue, Ken’s eyes leapt to meet hers, his expression so intense, Maddy felt it like something invisible coming at her. Dropping her own gaze, she started jamming in a thumbnail.

  “I’m not sure if I got three hundred words,” said Jeremy, glancing at Ms. Mousumi. “I was very tired when I finished writing this. I never knew sitting and writing something could wear you out.” He took a deep breath. “When I was thinking about what everyone else wrote, I thought there was something missing. So I wrote about that. Here it is.

  “Farang hated the full moon. Every month when it got close, she got scared and worried. Her stomach got upset so she couldn’t eat. She couldn’t fall asleep. Then, when she did, she got nightmares about a black monster that lived inside her and tore out her guts. She cried so hard she got headaches, and her eyes got blurry and she couldn’t see much. Mostly, she curled into a ball and just stayed like that for days before the full moon.

  “What was she scared of? Eating the poison, of course. Even if she didn’t know the poison was there, every time she ate the food in the cage she felt pain. All of us feel pain. We know it’s not great. But Farang’s pain was monster pain. It was like an umbrella closed tight inside you that suddenly opens wide. It was like a tsunami way off in the distance – all the water sucked out, all the animals and humans run off to higher ground, and there’s just Farang lying on the beach, because the tribe tied her up and left her there. So there she is all alone, waiting for all that pain to hit. Or it’s like an electric drill, drilling into her gut. Or like lightning hitting from the inside out. Maybe it’s the way cancer feels, when your cells are dying, and the life is going out of you bit by bit.

  “But mostly I think it’s like something coming awake inside of you. Something that isn’t part of you, something like an alien that’s gotten into you and hidden down deep, pretending to be sleeping, pretending to not be there – the way the moon gets small every month, goes down into almost nothing. Making you believe it’s gone away and maybe won’t come back. Because that was what the moon was to Farang. It was pain – pain that was horrible, pain that took over everything, pain she couldn’t get away from by taking an aspirin. And most of all – pain that wasn’t hers. And when it’s not your pain, it’s twice as bad. Ten times, a hundred times.

  “That’s the part of this story that I think is missing. The pain Farang has to face. The way it takes over everything, and really rips her to pieces every time. Every single time. And there’s nothing she can do about it. There’s that tsunami coming at her, and she’s tied up alone on the beach, and everyone else has run away and left her, and she’s going to feel it. We’re just writing a story, but Farang has to feel it.

  “I think we should all think about that a little more.” In a dense, heartbeat silence, Jeremy walked to his desk and sat down. Three seats over, Maddy heard Paul Benitez heave a sigh. She shot Kara a glance to see the other girl sitting bolt upright, looking impressed. Julie’s smirk, on the other hand, had wilted considerably.

  “Well,” said Ms. Mousumi. “I’m not surprised it wore you out to write that, Jeremy. You put a lot into it.”

  Jeremy nodded. “I guess,” he said. “Feelings can be huge, y’know?”

  The smile Ms. Mousumi gave him was brilliant. “So is genius,” she said. “Class, this was a fascinating chapter that Jeremy’s given us, but we’re not going to have time for comments today. We have to complete our poetry unit, because Monday we start on some short stories. To do that, we’ll be dividing into study groups, which I’ll be naming off now. Group One: Kara Adovasio, Julie Armstrong, Emeka Kumalo, Amy Rupp. Group Two: Maddy Malone, August Zire, David Janklow, Vince Cardinal. Group Three…”
>
  But Maddy was no longer listening. Her initial few seconds of curiosity, wondering how Kara and Julie were going to handle being within arm’s reach of one another, had been smashed and scattered to the winds. According to Ms. Mousumi’s list, she’d just been placed in a work group with David Janklow, one of The Masked Avengers…for days, maybe even for weeks. How on earth was she going to manage that? A leering mask tweet and a decal on her locker were bad enough, but this? She couldn’t do it, there was just no way. Like Jeremy had said, feelings were huge. A thumbnail pressed into the back of a hand wasn’t going to be enough to deal with it – she’d freak. She’d go crazy, psycho, and everyone would know.

  Before she could stop it, Maddy’s gaze lifted and flew across the room, directly to David’s face. Mouth open, he was staring back at her with an expression of unmitigated horror.

  Maddy’s stomach imploded. A black monster awoke and began tearing at her gut. In her mind, she watched a vast ocean retreat into the distance, where it reared up, about to rush in on her. When it reached her, she would drown. She would drown in absolute terror. There was no way around it. There was just no way around any of it.

  Maddy jabbed her thumbnail in so deep, she drew blood.

  . . .

  The classroom was emptying out. As soon as the bell had rung, Kara had leapt to her feet and clapped a hand onto Jeremy’s shoulder. They’d left together, a society of mutual congratulations. Maddy hadn’t watched David leave, or anyone else. She’d sat, a sodden lump in her desk, waiting until every other student had exited the room, then gotten shakily to her feet.

  “Ms. Mousumi?” Slowly, Maddy approached the teacher, who was at her desk, keying something into a laptop.

  “Yes, Maddy?” the teacher smiled.

  “I was wondering…” Maddy’s mouth had gone dry. Her tongue felt thick and oversized. She seemed to have lost the ability to think in words. “Well…” Suddenly, a sentence burst out of her mouth: “I want to switch study groups.”

  Ms. Mousumi’s eyebrows rose. “For the short story unit?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Maddy, her gaze dropping. Her heart was pounding so hard, it hurt. She felt like she was going to black out, drop in a faint straight to the floor.

  Ms. Mousumi leaned back in her chair and studied Maddy. “Why do you want to switch groups?” she asked.

  Maddy stood staring downward. She couldn’t give her actual reason. She had no proof. And even if it was okay to say it without proof, the words were too enormous. It’d be like trying to shove a skyscraper out of her mouth. The reality of what had happened on that dark night last March just didn’t fit into this sunny September afternoon classroom.

  “Please,” said Maddy. “It’s important.”

  Ms. Mousumi sat silently. Maddy could feel the teacher’s eyes probing her face. “I need a reason, Maddy,” Ms. Mousumi said finally. “Part of the assignment is being able to work with classmates who aren’t your personal friends. If you feel you can’t work with someone in the group I’ve assigned you to, I need to know why.”

  “No, I can work with them,” protested Maddy, her face growing hot. “I mean, most…” But she couldn’t name David. To name him would result in further questions, each growing more specific. Just thinking about where this could lead brought on a wave of dizziness so intense, Maddy had to touch Ms. Mousumi’s desk to remind herself where she was.

  “Please,” she said.

  Ms. Mousumi took a careful breath. “You’ll have to give me a reason,” she said.

  Despair took Maddy, whirled her around, and sped her toward the door. “Oh, forget it,” she said over her shoulder. “Just forget I said anything.” Veering too quickly around the back row of desks, she bumped the outer one. Pain tore through her right thigh, the shock of it blowing the last possibility of thought from her brain.

  “Maddy, come back here,” called Ms. Mousumi.

  Putting on a burst of speed, Maddy made it out the door.

  . . .

  Terror lay inside her like a sickness. It pressed down on her like heavy sky. It wrapped around her like a cape; every time she turned, there it was – mocking, whispering, hissing. All weekend Maddy wore fear like a skin, seven layers deep, something so close it felt as if it had become her. Sitting alone in the tree house, she stared at the smudged mural opposite and struggled to keep calm, to keep memory dead and buried, where it belonged. A cigarette ember wasn’t an option – she currently had five blisters in various stages of healing, and two looked to be infected. All five ached, and with the weather growing colder, she had to wear pants, which rubbed. To make things worse, the blisters were ugly. Maddy didn’t like to look at them; their raw scabs and draining pus felt like something erupting out of her body – alien and evil. How had she become the person she was now? How had she gotten to this place of twisted self-hatred? She hadn’t done anything wrong. She hadn’t attacked and hurt someone else. So why was she being punished this way – shut out of ordinary human activity, all those normal parts of life like smiling, conversation, hellos and how are you’s?

  Despair reared up through Maddy, so absolute she could barely breathe. A pack of cigarettes lay within reach; she fumbled for it, then jerked her hand back. Not the fire. She had to stay clear of the blessed fire for a week at least. But how? The memories were awakening – she could feel them stirring in her gut. Soon they would be taking shape; they’d take over the inside of her head and then they’d rule. She would be back there again. It would happen again. It would be coming at her from inside, where there was no chance to get away. She had to stop it. She had to stop her head from letting the memories take over again. Her head was the problem – it was her head.

  Maddy swung her head back against the tree house wall and felt a thud reverberate through her skull. Solid – the wall felt solid and strong, real. Bam! Again, Maddy swung her head back – not hard enough to hurt, just enough to keep her here in the real world, where she was alone, where she was safe. Again – bam! And bam! again, again. Each time, the thud took hold of her; it pulled her away from everything else; the thud was all there was and all there could be for as long as it lasted. Bam! Bam! Bam! A slow, steady rhythm, Maddy kept it up until nothing remained of the memories – they’d retreated back into her gut where they lived, waiting for the moment they could come at her again.

  What she was left with was a dull nothingness in her brain. Her eyes felt glazed, her breathing was slow and even. If the back of her head now hurt, the rest of her did not. The rest of her, in fact, was ready for sleep – a sleep that could start immediately, a sleep that could go on, as far as Maddy was concerned, for the rest of her life.

  Curling up on the floor, she sighed the sigh of the released and drifted off.

  Chapter Eight

  Monday afternoon, Maddy walked swiftly down the corridor toward her English class. She’d waited for the last minute; only the odd scurrying student could be seen as she reached the open door and the bell went off, pulling her nerves into high alert. Head down, she ducked through the doorway and to the right, averting her gaze from the desks to her immediate left, where Ken and David sat. If Ms. Mousumi glanced at her as she passed, Maddy didn’t know it. Upon entering the classroom, she’d folded herself inward like a jackknife; her goal now was to be present as little as possible. From this point onward, during English class she would not exist.

  If she didn’t exist, her memories couldn’t exist.

  Maddy slid into her seat and focused on her left hand. To her right, Kara was talking animatedly with Jeremy, who’d turned around to face her. Then Ms. Mousumi began to speak, cutting through the chatter as she called the class to order. The student responsible for the next chapter, Elliot du Pont, ambled to the front of the room and stood momentarily surveying his phone.

  Or so Maddy assumed. Since taking her seat, she hadn’t glanced up and she didn’t intend to ever again. From a
distance, she knew Elliot as one of a lanky, wisecracking set of guys who usually took up position at the rear of a class and muttered nonstop jokes back and forth. The bane of a teacher’s existence, Elliot draped himself in contempt as if it were the national flag. The only school club Maddy could envision him joining was the Science Club, and that would be in order to learn the more complicated interactions of acids and bases. As in acids and bases that led to explosions satisfying the cravings of the most avid anarchist.

  “Okay,” drawled Elliot, his voice meandering out of his mouth. “I didn’t write much. To be honest, I think this is a dumb assignment. Or maybe the assignment is okay, but the story is dumb. Because we all know there’s no such thing as a pain eater. You can’t eat pain. How’re you supposed to dine on it – with ketchup and mustard? Like I said, it’s dumb. You can’t eat your own pain, and you sure as hell can’t eat someone else’s.

  “So that’s all I’ve got to say about The Pain Eater. Pain eaters don’t exist, so I can’t write a story about one of them. End of chapter. Thank you and the end.”

  In the pause that followed, a few snickers trickled across the class. With a smug grin, Elliot began a laconic amble back to his desk. Wide-eyed, Maddy watched him progress to his seat. Even for Elliot, the arrogance displayed here was surprising. It had caught Maddy off guard – so much so, she’d forgotten her fear and had watched him read his “chapter.”

  From her left came a sharp intake of breath. “What you have just observed, class,” said Ms. Mousumi, rising to her feet, “is a student failing an assignment. Remember that you are each being graded on what you write, and that grade will contribute toward your final mark. Elliot has just earned himself a zero on this assignment – not for his opinion, but for his lack of effort. If you want to write a chapter about the tribe’s misguided faith in pain-eating, fine. But work it into the story. Choose a member of the tribe and give him or her that opinion. And remember, the minimum requirement is three hundred words.