Carrie

‘She thinks they’re for lipstick!’ Ruth Grogan suddenly shouted with cryptic glee, and then burst into a shriek of laughter. Sue remembered the comment later and fitted it

Into a general picture, but now it was only another senseless sound in the confusion. Sixteen? She was thinking. She must know what’s happening, she…

More droplets of blood. Carrie still blinked around at her classmates in slow bewilderment.

Helen Shyres turned around and made mock throwingup gestures.

‘You’re bleeding!’ Sue yelled suddenly, furiously. ‘You’re bleeding, you big dumb pudding!’

Carrie looked down at herself.

She shrieked.

The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.

A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread.

Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall. They flew like snow and the chant became: ‘Plug it up. Plug it up. Plug it-‘

Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing – a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There’s no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm-It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.

The girls stopped, realizing that fission and explosion had finally been reached. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let’s short-sheet Carrie’s bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let’s copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and duck her again, duck her again: Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd’n and the next year as truck-face, always smelling sweaty, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your bum itch?). Billy Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse; Carrie on the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge windbreakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, failing on her face in Modern Dancing during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volleyball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, always showing sweat stains under the arms of her blouses; even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, grossout, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission.

She backed away, howling in the new silence, fat forearms crossing her face, a tampon stuck in the middle of her pubic hair.

The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly.

Carrie backed into the side of one of the four large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her. Her eyes rolled with wet whiteness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen.

Sue said slowly, hesitantly: ‘I think this must be the first time she ever-‘

That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss Desjardin burst in to see what the matter was.

From The Shadow Exploded (p. 41):

Both medical and psychological writers on the subject are in agreement that Carrie White’s exceptionally late and traumatic commencement of the menstrual cycle might well have provided the trigger for her latent talent.

It seems incredible that, as late as 1979, Carrie knew nothing of the mature woman’s monthly cycle. It is nearly as incredible to believe that the girl’s mother would permit her daughter to reach the age of nearly seventeen without consulting a gynaecologist concerning the daughter’s failure to menstruate.

Yet the facts are incontrovertible. When Carrie White realized she was bleeding from the vaginal opening, she had no idea of what was taking place. She was innocent of the entire concept of menstruation.

One of her surviving classmates, Ruth Grogan, tells of entering the girls’ locker room at Ewen High School the year before the events we are concerned with and seeing Carrie using a tampon to blot her lipstick with. At that time Miss Grogan said: ‘What the hell are you up to?’ Miss White replied: ‘Isn’t this right?’ Miss Grogan then replied: ‘Sure. Sure it is.’ Ruth Grogan let a number of her girl friends in on this (she later told this interviewer she thought it was ‘sorta cute’), and if anyone tried in the future to inform Carrie of the true purpose of what she was using to make up with, she apparently dismissed the explanation as an attempt to pull her leg. This was a facet of her life that she had become exceedingly wary of…

When the girls were gone to their Period Two classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly out the back door before Miss Desjardin could begin to take names), Miss Desjardin employed the standard tactic for hysterics: She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a fat, whiny bag of lard. A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.

Carrie looked up at her dumbly, face still contorted and working. ‘M-M-Miss D-D-Des-D-‘