Carrie (9 page)

She let the hairbrush down carefully. Good. Last night she had dropped it. Lose all your points, go to jail.

She closed her eyes again and rocked. Physical functions began to revert to the norm; her respiration speeded until she was nearly panting. The rocker had a slight squeak. Wasn't annoying, though. Was soothing. Rock, rock. Clear your mind.

“Carrie?” Her mother's voice, slightly disturbed, floated up.

(she's getting interference like the radio when you turn on the blender good good)

“Have you said your prayers, Carrie?”

“I'm saying them,” she called back.

Yes. She was saying them, all right.

She looked at her small studio bed.

Flex.

Tremendous weight. Huge. Unbearable.

The bed trembled and then the end came up perhaps three inches.

It dropped with a crash. She waited, a small smile playing about her lips, for Momma to call upstairs angrily. She didn't. So Carrie got up, went to her bed, and slid between the cool sheets. Her head ached and she felt giddy, as she always did after these exercise sessions. Her heart was pounding in a fierce, scary way.

She reached over, turned off the light, and lay back. No pillow. Momma didn't allow her a pillow.

She thought of imps and familiars and witches

(am i a witch momma the devil's whore)

riding through the night, souring milk, overturning butter churns, blighting crops while They huddled inside their houses with hex signs scrawled on Their doors.

She closed her eyes, slept, and dreamed of huge, living stones crashing through the night, seeking out Momma, seeking out Them. They were trying to run, trying to hide. But the rock would not hide them; the dead tree gave no shelter.

From
My Name Is Susan Snell
by Susan Snell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. i-iv:

There's one thing no one has understood about what happened in Chamberlain on Prom Night. The press hasn't understood it, the scientists at Duke University haven't understood it, David Congress hasn't understood it—although his
The Shadow Exploded
is probably the only half-decent book written on the subject—and certainly the White Commission, which used me as a handy scapegoat, did not understand it.

This one thing is the most fundamental fact: We were kids.

Carrie was seventeen, Chris Hargensen was seventeen, I was seventeen, Tommy Ross was eighteen, Billy Nolan (who spent a year repeating the ninth grade, presumably before he learned how to shoot his cuffs during examinations) was nineteen. . . .

Older kids react in more socially acceptable ways than younger kids, but they still have a way of making bad decisions, of overreacting, of underestimating.

In the first section which follows this introduction I must show these tendencies in myself as well as I am able. Yet the matter which I am going to discuss is at the root of my involvement in Prom Night, and if I am to clear my name, I must begin by recalling scenes which I find particularly painful. . . .

I have told this story before, most notoriously before the White Commission, which received it with incredulity. In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing: We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best. . . .

“You must be crazy.”

He blinked at her, not willing to believe that he had actually heard it. They were at his house, and the television was on but forgotten. His mother had gone over to visit Mrs. Klein across the street. His father was in the cellar workroom making a birdhouse.

Sue looked uncomfortable but determined. “It's the way I want it, Tommy.”

“Well it's not the way I want it. I think it's the craziest goddam thing I ever heard. Like something you might do on a bet.”

Her face tightened. “Oh? I thought you were the one making the big speeches the other night. But when it comes to putting your money where your big fat mouth is—”

“Wait, whoa.” He was unoffended, grinning. “I didn't say no, did I? Not yet, anyway.”

“You—”

“Wait. Just wait. Let me talk. You want me to ask Carrie White to the Spring Ball. Okay, I got that. But there's a couple of things I don't understand.”

“Name them.” She leaned forward.

“First, what good would it do? And second, what makes you think she'd say yes if I asked her?”

“Not say yes! Why—” She floundered. “You're . . . everybody likes you and—”

“We both know Carrie's got no reason to care much for people that everybody likes.”

“She'd go with you.”

“Why?”

Pressed, she looked defiant and proud at the same time. “I've seen the way she looks at you. She's got a crush. Like half the girls at Ewen.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Well, I'm just telling you,” Sue said defensively. “She won't be able to say no.”

“Suppose I believe you,” he said. “What about the other thing?”

“You mean what good will it do? Why . . . it'll bring her out of her shell, of course. Make her . . .” She trailed off.

“A part of things? Come on, Suze. You don't believe that bullshit.”

“All right,” she said. “Maybe I don't. But maybe I still think I've got something to make up for.”

“The shower room?”

“A lot more than that. Maybe if that was all I could let it go, but the mean tricks have been going on ever since grammar school. I wasn't in on many of them, but I was on some. If I'd been in Carrie's groups, I bet I would have been in on even more. It seemed like . . . oh, a big laugh. Girls can be cat-mean about that sort of thing, and boys don't really understand. The boys would tease Carrie for a little while and then forget, but the girls . . . it went on and on and on and I can't even remember where it started any more. If I were Carrie, I couldn't even face showing myself to the world. I'd just find a big rock and hide under it.”

“You were kids,” he said. “Kids don't know what they're doing. Kids don't even know their reactions really, actually, hurt other people. They have no, uh, empathy. Dig?”

She found herself struggling to express the thought this called up in her, for it suddenly seemed basic, bulking over the shower-room incident the way sky bulks over mountains.

“But hardly
anybody
ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it. Lots of kids say they feel sorry for Carrie White—mostly girls, and
that's
a laugh—but I bet none of them understand what it's like to
be
Carrie White, every second of every day. And they don't really care.”

“Do you?”

“I don't know!” she cried. “But someone ought to try and be sorry in a way that counts . . . in a way that means something.”

“All right. I'll ask her.”

“You will?” The statement came out in a flat, surprised way. She had not thought he actually would.

“Yes. But I think she'll say no. You've overestimated my box-office appeal. That popularity stuff is bullshit. You've got a bee in your bonnet about that.”

“Thank you,” she said, and it sounded odd, as if she had thanked an Inquisitor for torture.

“I love you,” he said.

She looked at him, startled. It was the first time he had said it.

From
My Name Is Susan Snell
(p. 6):

There are lots of people—mostly men—who aren't surprised that I asked Tommy to take Carrie to the Spring Ball. They are surprised that he did it, though, which shows you that the male mind expects very little in the way of altruism from its fellows.

Tommy took her because he loved me and because it was what I wanted. How, asks the skeptic from the balcony, did you know he loved you? Because he told me so, mister. And if you'd known him, that would have been good enough for you, too. . . .

He asked her on Thursday, after lunch, and found himself as nervous as a kid going to his first ice-cream party.

She sat four rows over from him in Period Five study hall, and when it was over he cut across to her through the mass of rushing bodies. At the teacher's desk Mr. Stephens, a tall man just beginning to run to fat, was folding papers abstractedly back into his ratty brown briefcase.

“Carrie?”

“Ohuh?”

She looked up from her books with a startled wince, as if expecting a blow. The day was overcast and the bank of fluorescents embedded in the ceiling was not particularly kind to her pale complexion. But he saw for the first time (because it was the first time he had really looked) that she was far from repulsive. Her face was round rather than oval, and the eyes were so dark that they seemed to cast shadows beneath them, like bruises. Her hair was darkish blonde, slightly wiry, pulled back in a bun that was not becoming to her. The lips were full, almost lush, the teeth naturally white. Her body, for the most part, was indeterminate. A baggy sweater concealed her breasts except for token nubs. The skirt was colorful but awful all the same: It fell to a 1958 midshin hem in an odd and clumsy A-line. The calves were strong and rounded (the attempt to conceal these with heathery knee-socks was bizarre but unsuccessful) and handsome.

She was looking up with an expression that was slightly fearful, slightly something else. He was quite sure he knew what the something else was. Sue had been right, and being right, he had just time to wonder if this was doing a kindness or making things even worse.

“If you don't have a date for the Ball, would you want to go with me?”

Now she blinked, and as she did so, a strange thing happened. The time it took to happen could have been no more than the doorway to a second, but afterward he had no trouble recalling it, as one does with dreams or the sensation of
déjà vu.
He felt a dizziness as if his mind was no longer controlling his body—the miserable, out-of-control feeling he associated with drinking too much and then coming to the vomiting point.

Then it was gone.

“What? What?”

She wasn't angry, at least. He had expected a brief gust of rage and then a sweeping retreat. But she wasn't angry; she seemed unable to cope with what he had said at all. They were alone in the study hall now, perfectly between the ebb of old students and the flow of new ones.

“The Spring Ball,” he said, a little shaken. “It's next Friday and I know this is late notice but—”

“I don't like to be tricked,” she said softly, and lowered her head. She hesitated for just a second and then passed him by. She stopped and turned and he suddenly saw dignity in her, something so natural that he doubted if she was even aware of it. “Do You People think you can just go on tricking me forever? I know who you go around with.”

“I don't go around with anyone I don't want to,” Tommy said patiently. “I'm asking you because I want to ask you.” Ultimately, he knew this to be the truth. If Sue was making a gesture of atonement, she was doing it only at secondhand.

The Period Six students were coming in now, and some of them were looking over curiously. Dale Ullman said something to a boy Tommy didn't know and both of them snickered.

“Come on,” Tommy said. They walked out into the hall.

They were halfway to Wing Four—his class was the other way—walking together but perhaps only by accident, when she said, almost too quietly to hear: “I'd love to. Love to.”

He was perceptive enough to know it was not an acceptance, and again doubt assailed him. Still, it was started. “Do it, then. It will be all right. For both of us. We'll see to it.”

“No,” she said, and in her sudden pensiveness she could have been mistaken for beautiful. “It will be a nightmare.”

“I don't have tickets,” he said, as if he hadn't heard. “This is the last day they sell them.”

“Hey, Tommy, you're going the wrong way!” Brent Gillian yelled.

She stopped. “You're going to be late.”

“Will you?”

“Your class,” she said, distraught. “Your class. The bell is going to ring.”

“Will you?”

“Yes,” she said with angry helplessness. “You knew I would.” She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“No,” he said. “But now I do. I'll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

“Fine,” she whispered. “Thank you.” She looked as if she might swoon.

And then, more uncertain than ever, he touched her hand.

•                           •                           •

From
The Shadow Exploded
(pp. 74-76):

Probably no other aspect of the Carrie White affair has been so misunderstood, second-guessed, and shrouded in mystery as the part played by Thomas Everett Ross, Carrie's ill-starred escort to the Ewen High School Spring Ball.

Morton Cratzchbarken, in an admittedly sensationalized address to The National Colloquium on Psychic Phenomena last year, said that the two most stunning events of the twentieth century have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the destruction that came to Chamberlain, Maine, in May of 1979. Cratzchbarken points out that both events were driven home to the citizenry by mass media, and both events have almost shouted the frightening fact that, while something had ended, something else had been irrevocably set in motion, for good or ill. If the comparison can be made, then Thomas Ross played the part of a Lee Harvey Oswald—trigger man in a catastrophe. The question that still remains is: Did he do so wittingly or unwittingly?

Susan Snell, by her own admission, was to have been escorted by Ross to the annual event. She claims that she suggested Ross take Carrie to make up for her part in the shower-room incident. Those who oppose this story, most lately led by George Jerome of Harvard, claim that this is either a highly romantic distortion or an outright lie. Jerome argues with great force and eloquence that it is hardly typical of high-school-age adolescents to feel that they have to “atone” for anything—particularly for an offense against a peer who has been ostracized from existing cliques.