The Pain Eater

  Dedication

  For the wounded ones.

  When you are ready,

  come back from The Beautiful Land.

  We wait for you here, with love.

  Prologue

  On a Thursday evening in late March, fourteen-year-old Maddy Malone was raped by three boys in a copse of aspen while coming home from a performance of Our Town at her high school. An additional two boys were present at the incident – one held her down by the shoulders as the others raped her, and the second stood an uneasy lookout at the edge of the copse. All five wore masks. They had also been at the play; in celebration of the cast’s recent Best Production win at a regional high school drama festival, cheap plastic masks had been handed out at intermission, along with instructions to don them at the end of the performance as a surprise for the cast. The masks were simple white faces, half of them smiling and half of them grieving, in imitation of the traditional Greek comedy and tragedy masks. The five boys had been sitting together on the side of the auditorium where the smiling masks had been handed out; Maddy had been seated opposite, and so had received a mask of tragic proportions.

  The copse wasn’t on Maddy’s regular route home; that night she’d walked a friend, Jennifer Ebinger, to her apartment before heading onward to her own house. Which meant the streets she was traversing were familiar but not overly so, as was the stand of aspen which grew at the edge of a park. Maddy had played in the park as a child; this late in the evening, however, the people she was used to seeing there – the dog-walkers and the joggers – had all gone home. So no one neutral was present to witness the event; neither were any phone pictures taken, or any live-action tweets posted by the lookout. Spur-of-the-moment, the act sucked up the boys’ attention like a supernatural vortex, leaving no thought, no consciousness for anything but their own crazed heat until they found themselves running, still masked and hooting, down the avenue, away from the copse and the still, slender body lying among the aspen.

  It was some time before Maddy moved. Her coat had been torn off, her shirt and bra shoved up, her jeans bunched down around her ankles. The night wind was bone-chilling cold. With one sharp movement, she jerked her coat over herself, then lay a while longer, shivering on the frozen ground. Finally she clambered, whimpering, to her feet, to find it took over a minute to get her jeans done up – her right hand had been twisted during the initial struggle, and she couldn’t grasp the zipper properly. After buttoning her coat and pulling up her hood, she lingered within the trees, choking on tears and shaking so badly she had to press herself against an aspen to steady herself. Beyond the copse, both the park and the street were quiet – window curtains in the houses opposite were drawn, there were no pedestrians in sight, and only the odd car passed. When Maddy was certain no one was near – not even the dead out and about, lurking in the shadows – she untwisted the string around her neck and lifted the white-featured, weeping mask onto her face.

  Shoulders hunched, she scuttled out of the trees and along the avenue, one of last fall’s torn, muddy leaves blowing home.

  Chapter One

  It was the following September, the first day of the school year, midafternoon. At the front of the second-floor classroom, Ms. Mousumi cleared her throat. Plump and middle-aged, with shoulder-length black hair and black-framed glasses, she looked the image of predictability. “Good afternoon,” she said. “Welcome to grade ten English. This year, we’ll be covering—”

  Seated in the back row, Maddy huddled with her head down, listening. The desks in this classroom were arranged in two semi-circles that faced the whiteboard. The doorway stood at the back of the room; after passing through it, Maddy had made a beeline for the opposite wall, where she had parked her butt in the rear row desk closest to the front – out of Ms. Mousumi’s line of sight, and hopefully everyone else’s too. The girl who had sat down beside her probably wouldn’t demand much in the way of idle chitchat – all Maddy knew of her was her first name, Kara, and her reputation for a quiet but remorseless braininess.

  “This year’s Shakespearean play will be The Taming of the Shrew,” continued Ms. Mousumi. Scattered groans sounded and were reproved by the teacher’s sharp glance. Head still ducked, Maddy stared at her hands. Methodically, every thirty or so seconds, the tip of her right thumbnail dug itself hard into a new spot on the back of her left hand. It was a habit she’d developed during the last months of grade nine – something that kept her mind focused and calm. Over the summer she’d laid off, but the habit had returned full force with the start of the fall semester, halfway through that morning’s homeroom period. Now, ten minutes into the last class of the day, her left hand was covered with small reddening welts.

  It didn’t hurt, not much. No, if she wanted to, Maddy could give herself a real pain buzz, but she didn’t need that. Not here. Not yet.

  “This week,” announced Ms. Mousumi, smiling brightly, “we’ll be starting a collective writing project – a novel. Each of you will contribute a chapter of at least three hundred words. We’ll go in alphabetical order, starting with…” The teacher paused to scan her attendance sheet. “…Kara Adovasio. Who is Kara?”

  Beside Maddy, Kara raised her hand. Slender, with long brown hair and glasses, she looked as brainy as her reputation made her out to be.

  “Ah – Kara. You will be our first contributor!” exclaimed Ms. Mousumi. “That means you get to decide what our class novel will be about. Keep in mind that it has to be a situation we can all write about, so nothing too specialized. Have your chapter written for Wednesday’s class, when you’ll read it aloud to the rest of us. Okay?”

  Kara grimaced slightly, and nodded.

  “Good!” Ms. Mousumi said brightly. “After you’ve read us the novel’s beginning, Kara, it’ll be…” Again, the teacher consulted her attendance sheet. “…Harvir Amin’s task to come up with the next chapter.”

  A definite groan erupted at the far side of the room, and without thinking, Maddy glanced toward its source. Slumped in his seat, a jockish boy was regarding Ms. Mousumi with unmitigated dismay. “How many words?” he croaked.

  “At least three hundred,” said Ms. Mousumi, arching an eyebrow. “That’s around two pages, thereabouts.”

  “Two whole pages full of words?” demanded Harvir. Sympathetic snickers rippled across the class.

  “Jam packed with words,” confirmed Ms. Mousumi. “I’m sure you’ll do a fabulous job, Harvir. This is your chance to entertain us, to enliven our minds. Look at it as an opportunity. You’ll be reading your chapter of the novel to us on Friday afternoon.”

  Harvir blinked, stupefied, and a mocking hand reached out and patted his shoulder. Again without thinking, Maddy’s gaze followed that hand up to the face to which it belonged. Her eyes widened, and for a moment she stopped breathing as an invisible fist of shock rammed down her throat. Then her gaze dropped, and she began once again gouging her thumbnail into the back of her left hand. Panic thudded through her, giant footsteps slamming her chest. No! she thought frantically. My god, no! All last spring, through a seemingly endless April, May, and June, she had studiously avoided them. Of the five masked boys involved in the rape, she’d been able to work out the identities of three. To date, none of these three had been in any of her classes; she’d stayed away from anyplace they were known to hang out, and had gone straight home from school every day. Managed, she had managed, but now, here was one of them – Ken Soong, seated directly across the room. Skittish, Maddy’s glance flitted across Ken’s face. Grinning broadly, he appeared to be focused entirely on the now morose Harvir. Had Ken taken the time yet to scan the rest of the class? Had he noticed Maddy, hunched and skulking in her desk on the opposite side of th
e room? If not, he would soon – it was inevitable. And when Ken Soong’s gaze finally settled upon her, Maddy knew she would feel it; she would light up like someone doused with kerosene and set on fire, her own personal nuclear holocaust.

  . . .

  Burrowed under her duvet, Maddy hugged herself and trembled. When the shakes came, the best thing to do – the only thing, she had found – was to hold herself as tightly as possible in order to keep the trembling body-sized. The other priority was to not think – it was of the utmost importance, no matter what, that she did not think. Because if she did, if Maddy let a single thought into her head, then memory would take over…and memory was exactly where she did not want to go.

  Whether she wanted to or not, however, she was going there now. Back to the sound of sudden feet pounding up behind her, the voices ordering her into the trees. And when she’d resisted – when she’d tried, in fact, to take off, to run away – the hands that had grabbed and shoved her in among the aspen, away from the friendly light of street lamps and passing headlights. “Get her down, Soong,” a voice had grunted; that was how she’d known Ken was involved – that, and his voice, when he’d spoken later on. By their voices, she’d also later been able to work out the identity of two of the other masked boys – Pete Gwirtzman and Robbie Nabigon, both one grade older and so unlikely to appear in her classes. But the names of the final two participants remained a mystery – a mystery Maddy didn’t want to solve so much as to ignore, or, better yet, disintegrate…. Just give her some kind of magic wand, and she would wave it and make everything go away.

  She hadn’t told anyone. Not a single soul. Not one word about that night and what had been done to her had ever passed Maddy Malone’s lips. She’d thought about it at first – had been desperate, even frantic, to tell – especially when her period had come late. But then her period had come, and her relief had been so great it had flattened her – left her lying motionless on her bed for hours, staring at the vast, off-white nothingness of the ceiling. There had been a rash that had lasted for a week, but Polysporin had solved that problem, and time had cleared the bruises. So even if she wanted to tell someone now, there wouldn’t be any evidence, and without evidence, what was the point?

  Maddy had followed news and Internet accounts about now-deceased Rehtaeh Parsons and her alleged attackers. The accounts were contradictory; some said the fifteen-year-old Rehtaeh consented to drunken sex with two male school peers; others stated she was gang-raped by four. What was incontestable was that one of the sex acts was photographed and posted online, followed by endless in-person and cyberbullying, which resulted in Rehtaeh’s suicide. Of the boys involved in the incident, two received one year’s probation each – both for child pornography charges. The police said there wasn’t enough evidence to press charges for sexual assault. As Maddy recalled it, during the boys’ trial the entire country was up in arms about the case; everyone was talking, in-person and online. Still, not one perpetrator had gone to jail – in spite of photographic evidence that something illegal had happened that night.

  Maddy’s family and close friends had all expressed indignation over the treatment Rehtaeh had received before her death; Maddy had little doubt they would believe and support her. But in the school halls and the cafeteria, she’d heard other points of view expressed – wisecracks and snide remarks about Rehtaeh’s “wanting it”…and worse…that had left Maddy breathless with their cruelty – the kind of cruelty that was always waiting for the next victim to come along. In addition, there were no photographs of what had happened to her; Maddy had no evidence whatsoever. And with no evidence, she could just imagine the kind of gossip that would kick into gear if she went to the police. Every breath she took would go viral; every smile would be labeled slutty and come-on. That kind of nonstop harassment had killed Rehtaeh Parsons; Maddy had little faith she would survive it. As far as she could figure it, she would be out of her mind to come forward now about what had happened in March. She was just going to have to work out some way of ignoring Ken Soong’s presence in English.

  That wasn’t going to be easy. Just seeing him, Robbie, or Pete in the halls could send a wave of acid panic through Maddy – she couldn’t think then; she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe. In those moments her body became a stranger, cringing into itself, turning and wanting to run – even if the boys hadn’t seen her, even if they were walking away from her. It didn’t seem to matter how many other kids were around, how much Maddy told herself this was here, this was now – whenever she saw Ken, Robbie, or Pete, she was back among the aspen, being shoved down onto the ground, into terror, into nothingness. That was what the rape had taught her, that was the truth she’d taken deep into herself: that without warning, without any possible way of knowing in advance, catastrophe could erupt out of complete ordinariness and be done directly to her. Anyone who thought otherwise simply didn’t know yet; they hadn’t been done to like that.

  Under the duvet, Maddy’s hoarse breaths came and went; her thoughts stuttered, stumbled, crashed. Her arms ached from holding on so tight; sometimes she left fingerprint bruises on herself. Come on, she thought, worn out from the inside of her head. Get a grip, bozo. Get a grip. Because, whether she liked it or not, she was going to have to figure out how to handle Ken’s presence in English. Since the rape, he hadn’t approached her in any way. Neither had Robbie. Pete had shadowed her in the halls for a while – just followed her around and stared, but he hadn’t touched or spoken to her. Once, she’d found a picture taped to her locker – a blurred image of a woman who’d been tied up and gagged. Maddy had assumed the picture had come from Pete and that further threats would follow, but none had. In fact, that picture had been the end of it. Pete had stopped following her around then, and she’d never noticed anything else – not from him, Robbie, Ken, or the other unidentified two.

  Maybe they were all as anxious to forget the incident as she was, Maddy thought, burrowing deeper into the duvet. The rape had seemed spontaneous; perhaps all five later regretted it. Who knew? As things stood now, it seemed almost as if some kind of a pact had been struck between herself and her assailants – an unspoken pact, to be sure, but still a kind of an agreement: If Maddy kept her mouth shut and let the memory die off in her mind – if she could act as if the whole thing had never happened – well, so could they. They weren’t like the guys who’d photographed Rehtaeh then uploaded the graphic evidence of her humiliation onto the Internet. No, these five guys didn’t seem to have even talked about what they’d done to anyone not directly involved. Other than Pete, Maddy had never noticed anyone smirking or looking at her knowingly.

  Well, she thought, hugging herself through another long tremble, she couldn’t drop English. It was a required subject. And Ken wasn’t sitting close to her; he was way over on the opposite side of the room. So there was no reason they should ever have to speak to one another, or come into any kind of contact. In fact, Maddy didn’t even have to see Ken, really. If she kept her head down and listened closely to Ms. Mousumi, she should be able to catch the gist of what was going on. And the whole time she was listening, she could pretend she was huddled in bed under her duvet like she was now – that no one else was around, it was just Ms. Mousumi’s voice and her, and the teacher was nothing more than a figment of her imagination…not really there, not really there at all.

  Then Maddy would have what she wanted more than anything. Even in a crowded room, Maddy Malone would be alone.

  . . .

  Wednesday afternoon found Maddy huddled, once again, at the far end of the back row. She’d arrived as early as possible, figuring Ken, one of the cool kids, would show up just before the bell, and she’d been correct – she’d known the instant he’d walked into the room, had lifted her head to see him standing beside his desk near the class entrance and looking right at her. Panic had roared through her; dropping her gaze, she’d clutched tightly at herself. By the time she’d been able to pull ou
t of her terror, the class was underway, Ms. Mousumi talking about the unit on poetry they were about to start. A quick glance across the room showed Ken sitting with his head down, probably on his phone.

  Yesterday, during Tuesday’s class, he hadn’t noticed her yet – Maddy was certain of this. She’d glanced at him regularly, every few minutes, and he’d looked calm and collected, joking with Harvir and David Janklow, the guy sitting on his other side. No way had he known she was there – no way – and maybe, Maddy had thought then, her heart lightening, he just wouldn’t. The entire term would pass and his gaze would never settle upon her, huddled in the opposite corner of the room.

  But today he’d spotted her right off. And it had bothered him: her presence had rippled his calm, cool exterior like the Loch Ness monster rising out of the depths. Just recalling Ken’s intent expression now sent a wave of bile up Maddy’s throat; she had to fight to keep herself from upchucking all over her desk. No way was she looking at the guy again, she thought fiercely. No matter what, she wasn’t lifting her eyes….

  “Kara, could you come to the front of the room and read the beginning of our class novel?” asked Ms. Mousumi.

  Maddy felt the air shift as Kara rose and passed behind her en route to the front of the room. Eyes lowered, she didn’t watch the other girl take up position before the whiteboard, didn’t know if Kara read from a notebook or a tablet. The words, as Kara began to speak, came at first as if from a great distance – something mundane broadcasting from a radio, sound junk filling up space. But as the story progressed, Maddy began to tune in, and as she did, she felt herself coming into a stillness – not of boredom but of an interest so intense, it lit her like a stained glass window defined by light.

  “This novel is called The Pain Eater,” said Kara. “In the hills of Faraway, there lived a tribe that had a tradition. Once in each generation, they chose a child who had to carry the pain of everyone in the tribe. They called this child ‘the pain eater.’ At the time this story is happening, their pain eater was a fifteen-year-old girl named Farang. At birth, she was taken from her parents to live with the priestesses in the temple. The head priestess named Farang – it was the tribe’s word for ‘hunger.’