Carrie

It was the seventeenth. May seventeenth. She crossed the, day off the calendar in her room as soon as she slipped into her long white nightgown. She crossed off each day as it passed with a heavy black felt pen, and she supposed it expressed a very bad attitude toward life. She didn’t really care. The only thing she really cared about was knowing that Momma was going to make her go back to school tomorrow and she would have to face all of Them.

She sat down in the small Boston rocker (bought and paid for with her own money) beside the window, closed her eyes, and swept Them and all the clutter of her conscious thoughts from her mind. It was like sweeping a floor. Lift the rug of your subconscious mind and sweep all the dirt under. Good-bye.

She opened her eyes. She looked at the hairbrush on her bureau.

Flex.

She was lifting the hairbrush. It was heavy. It was like lifting a barbell with very weak arms. Oh. Grunt.

The hairbrush slid to the edge of the bureau, slid out past the point where gravity should have toppled it, and then dangled, as if on an invisible string. Carrie’s eyes had closed to slits. Veins pulsed in her temples. A doctor might have been interested in what her body was doing at that instant; it made no rational sence. Respiration had fallen to sixteen breaths per minute. Blood pressure up to 190/100. Heartbeat up to 140 – higher than astronauts under the heavy g-load of lift-off. Temperature down to 94.3. Her body was burning energy that seemed to be coming from nowhere and seemed to be going nowhere. An electroencephalogram would have shown alpha waves that were no longer waves at all, but great, jagged spikes.

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 families and witches.

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

riding through the night, souring milk, overturning butter chums, 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 over-reacting, or 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 bird-house.

Sue looked uncomfortable but determined. ‘Ifs the way I want it, Tommy.’

‘Well, it’s not the way I want it. I think ifs 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 doing the big speeches the other night. But when it comes to putting your money where your big fat mouth

‘Wait, whoa.’ He was unoffended, grinning. ‘I didn’t say no, did I? Not yet, anyway.’

‘YOU -‘

Chapter Seven

‘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 shed say yes if I asked her?’