You never think you’re going to be the girl who ends up with the boy that ate his own scabs. Correction: eats his own scabs. In fact, as a girl fantasizing about some “fairy-tale romance,” the last thing that pops into your head is that your “Prince Charming” might be a scab-eater. It’s just not a quality that one thinks about in general, let alone as something you might have to contend with in terms of who you end up falling for. Because, really, you would probably assume yourself to be immune to “falling for” the scab-eater. Unless, of course, you didn’t know that’s who he was in school.

Ella had known who the scab-eater was in her school, but how could she have known that Ray was the scab-eater in his? Having not been there and all. He being far-removed in the backwaters of Mississippi (which, to be fair, was a state of nothing but backwaters) while she was in the slightly more “cosmopolitan” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But, as any child will tell you, there’s no place on Earth so “cosmopolitan” as to avoid having a scab-eater in the class.

Looking back on her own observations of the class scab-eater, Aaron, it didn’t occur to her at any point to think, “Aaron will never find love because of this disgusting habit.” At the same time, the thought is there, latently. But not the thought that a person—even a scab-eater—is capable of reinventing themselves once they depart from the school where they became known as just that. Except that, if you’re a scab-eater, it seems, at least in Ray’s case, that it’s something about yourself that you can’t actually “change,” thus taking away from the full extent of your “reinvention potential.” Because, sooner or later, it’s going to come out to the new person in your life—the person you’ve managed to get to love you (and have sex with you)—that you eat your own scabs. In a way, it would almost be less disgusting for a person to eat their own skin. For a scab is something else entirely, something made out of things that make it, well, far gnarlier to “consume.” This being what Ella tried to explain, as gently as she could, to Ray when she first realized who he was. Nay, what he was.

She honestly thought she would never encounter such a person again after finishing elementary school. That was, she had believed, the absolute cutoff for a boy being “okay” with eating his scabs. And yes, as Ella would remind anyone with the stomach to get into a discussion about it, it was always boys—never girls—that one caught doing this. Engaging in this foul “practice.” One she naively assumed a person just “grew out of” once they realized 1) how gross it was and 2) how such grossness was off-putting to other people. Particularly someone that might actually want to fuck them. For no sooner did Ella learn of Ray’s “condition”—finally noticing him “unwittingly” doing it when they were watching a movie together one night after five months of dating—than she couldn’t stop picturing the image of him biting into his scab and eating it. Yes, she pictured it all the time now, including when she tried to have sex with him. Only to experience an instant bout of vaginal dryness upon this “snapshot” entering into her head. When he asked her what was wrong, she couldn’t just outright tell him that she was repulsed by him now that she had identified him as “the school scab-eater” in adult form.

And again, it never occurred to Ella that the school scab-eater could even still exist once a certain grade was passed. Maybe Ray had simply learned to better conceal his “habit,” which would at least mean he was aware of its stigma and cared enough about not “offending” others to keep it to himself. But no, a scab-eater, as Ella had come to know, was unabashed in his scab-eating. Was unafraid to do it any time, any place (to use a Janet Jackson song title in a far less sexy way). Which made her think that, for all these months, Ray had been deliberately putting up a façade that would allow her to fall in love with him before he at last revealed his true identity. Almost as if it were a test for her to prove to him that the love she had formerly expressed was, in fact, real. But now she herself was wondering if it was, or if this was her proverbial “And I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that” moment. “That” being to tolerate scab-eating, least of all right in front of her.

She tried her best to “understand” it, at first. Did what she could to educate herself on the “psychology” behind it. Which could have been any number of factors: OCD, stress relief, dermatophagia, ADHD, PTSD, total dissociation. But what she felt it really boiled down to for Ray is that he got sensory satisfaction out of it. And that the sensory satisfaction was worth far more to him than “being normal.” Even so, he must have known that in order to “secure a mate,” he would have to tamp down the habit during the “courting period.” Which he did. For it was true that Ella had never witnessed him eating a scab until that first night, five months in. After which, the dam was apparently opened and he could no longer bother trying to hide who he was. Now, it was all up to Ella to decide if she could accept that.

Wrestling with Ray’s “true nature” over the next few weeks, she became increasingly unsure of whether or not she could. No film or fairy tale had ever quite covered this ground before: what to do if Prince Charming turned out to be Prince Scab-Eater. Was love really meant to “conquer all” in such a scenario? Was Ella supposed to be Ray’s Princess Charming in the sense that her love would break the spell of his curse? Scab-eating. Or was the spell being broken meant to refer to her mere acceptance of his scab-eating. Because, clearly, he wasn’t going to stop just to appeal to her comfort while sacrificing his own. As these questions weighed on her, Ella found that she herself began to unconsciously gnaw on her own skin, biting fiendishly at the areas around her nails to release her anxiety.

When Ray walked in on her doing this in her room one day, almost two months after she initially found out his “secret,” he was appalled. “Ella, what are you doing?” he demanded out of revulsion rather than concern.

Ella stopped mid-chew, realizing what he was seeing. “I, um…I don’t know.”

Ray approached the bed and sat down next to her. “Is everything okay?”

“Fine,” she lied. And then she started kissing him to shut him up. To keep him from having the gall to display any further distaste for what she had been caught doing when he was the foul one. And when he was the reason she had started resorting to this in the first place.

Indeed, over the next few weeks, Ella’s skin-biting became more maniacal as it transformed into her go-to coping mechanism. A means to evade making a decision about Ray. And what that decision would say about who she was as a person: superficial. Unable to tolerate being the school scab-eater’s girlfriend. Because that’s who Ray would forever be in her eyes now that she knew the truth.

Alas, just when she had finally gotten the courage to accept who she was—evidently vapid—and break up with Ray, he beat her to the punch. For he told her over the dinner that she had made for him that night (with seasonings on it that she couldn’t help but only see as scabs) that he couldn’t be with her anymore. “Ella,” he began, “I can’t do this. I can’t be with someone who eats their hands the way you do.”

Ella almost choked on the sip of red wine she had just taken. “Are you fucking kidding me? You, the scab-eater, have a problem with me? With something you’ve driven me to with your scab-eating?” She looked at the remaining wine in her glass and then at Ray—a choice had been made. She splashed the wine right in his face and declared, “Get the fuck out of my apartment!”

And so it was that the spell had been broken, for both of them. What’s more, Ella no longer cared if it made her “shallow” to be incapable of truly loving a scab-eater because, as it turned out, the scab-eater was even more shallow. Which violated another cliché one often found in fairy tales: that beggars can’t be choosers.