Carrie (Page 21)

‘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 seventhirty.’

‘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 had 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 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 offence against a peer who has been ostracized from existing cliques.

‘It would be uplifting if we could believe that adolescent human nature is capable of salvaging the pride and self image of the low bird in the pecking order with such a gesture,’ Jerome has said in a recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, ‘but we know better. The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is despatched quickly and without mercy.’

Jerome, of course, is absolutely right-about birds, at any rate – and his eloquence is undoubtedly responsible in large part for the advancement of the ‘practical joker’ theory, which The White Commission approached but did not actually state. This theory hypothesizes that Ross and Christine Hargensen (see pp. 10-18) were at the centre of a loose conspiracy to get Carrie White to the Spring Ball, and, once there, complete her humiliation. Some theorists (mostly crime writers) also claim that Sue Snell was an active part of this conspiracy. This casts the mysterious Mr Ross in the worst possible light, that of a practical joker deliberately manoeuvring an unstable girl into an situation of extreme stress.

The author doesn’t believe that likely in fight of Mr Ross’s character. This is a facet which has remained largely unexplored by his detractors, who have painted him as a rather dull clique-centred athlete; the phrase ‘dumb jock’ expresses this view of Tommy Ross perfectly.

It is true that Ross was an athlete of above-average ability. His best sport was baseball, and he was a member of the Ewen varsity squad from his Sophomore year. Dick O’Connell, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, has indicated that Ross would have been offered a fairly large bonus for signing a contract, had he lived.

But Ross was also a straight-A student (hardly fitting the ‘dumb-jock’ image), and his parents have both said that he had decided pro baseball would have to wait until he had finished college, where he planned to study for an English degree. His interests including writing poetry, and a poem written six months prior to his death was published in an established ‘little magazine’ called Everleaf. This is available in Appendix V.

His surviving classmates also give him high marks, and this is significant. There were only twelve survivors of what has become known in the popular press as Prom Night. Those who were not in attendance were largely the unpopular members of the Junior and Senior classes. If these ‘outs’ remember Ross as a friendly, goodnatured fellow (many referred to him as ‘a hell of a good shit’), does not Professor Jerome’s thesis suffer accordingly’