Carrie

‘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 Chris’s group, 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.

‘Yea. 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 sceptic 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 br**sts except for token nubs. The skirt was colourful 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 afterwards he had no trouble recalling it, as one does with dreams or the sensation of deja 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-?