Carrie went in, opened the towel cabinet, and began to hunt purposefully but carefully, not leaving anything out of place. Momma's eyes were sharp.
The blue box was in the very back, behind the old towels they didn't use any more. There was a fuzzily silhouetted woman in a long, filmy gown on the side.
She took one of the napkins out and looked at it curiously. She had blotted the lipstick she stuck into her purse quite openly with these - once on a street corner. Now she remembered (or imagined she did) quizzical, shocked looks. Her face flamed. They had told her. The flush faded to a milky anger.
She went into her tiny bedroom. There were many more religious pictures here, but there were more lambs and fewer scenes of righteous wrath. A Ewen pennant was tacked over the dresser. On the dresser itself was a Bible and a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark.
She undressed - first her blouse, then her hateful kneelength skirt, her slip, her girdle, her pettipants, her garter belt, her stockings, She looked at the pile of heavy clothes, their buttons and rubber, with an expression of fierce wretchedness. In the school library there was a stack of back issues of Seventeen and often she leafed through them, pasting an expression of idiotic casualness on her face. The models looked so easy and smooth in their short, kicky skirts, pantyhose, and frilly underwear with patterns on them. Of course easy was one of Momma's pet words (she knew what Momma would say to a question) to describe them. And it would make her dreadfully self-conscious, she knew that. Naked, evil, blackened with the sin of exhibitionism, the breeze blowing lewdly up the backs of her legs, inciting lust. And she knew that they would know how she felt. They always did. They would embarrass her somehow, push her savagely back into clowndom. It was their way.
She could, she knew she could be
(what)
in another place. She was thick through the waist only because sometimes she felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gaping, whistling hole was to eat and eat and eat-but she was not that thick through the middle. Her body chemistry would not allow her to go beyond a certain point. And she thought her legs were actually pretty, almost as pretty as Sue Snell's or Vicky Hanscom's. She could be
(what o what o what)
could stop the chocolates and her pimples would go down. They always did. She could fix her hair. Buy pantyhose and blue and green tights. Make little skirts and dresses from Butterick and Simplicity patterns. The price of a bus ticket, a train ticket. She could be, could be, could be
Alive.
She unsnapped her heavy cotton bra and let it fall. Her br**sts were milk-white, upright and smooth. The ni**les were a light coffee colour. She ran her hands over them and a little shiver went through her. Evil, bad, oh it was. Momma had told her there was Something. The Something was dangerous, ancient, unutterably evil. It could make you Feeble. Watch, Momma said. It comes at night. It will make you think of the evil that goes on in parking lots and roadhouses.
But, though this was only nine-twenty in the morning, Carrie thought that the Something had come to her. She ran her hands over her br**sts
(dirtypillows)
again, and the skin was cool but the ni**les were hot and hard, and when she tweaked one it made her feel weak and dissolving. Yes, this was the Something.
Her underpants were spotted with blood.
Suddenly she felt that she must burst into tears, scream, or rip the Something out of her body whole and, beating, crush it, kill it.
The napkin Miss Desjardin had fixed was already wilting and she changed it carefully, knowing how bad she was, how bad they were, how she hated them and herself. Only Momma was good. Momma had battled the Black Man and had vanquished him. Carrie had seen it happen in a dream. Momma had driven him out of the front door with a broom, and the Black Man had fled up Carlin Street into the night, his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement.
Her momma had torn the Something out of herself and was pure.
Carrie hated her.
She caught a glimpse of her own face in the tiny mirror she had hung on the back of the door, a mirror with a cheap green plastic rim, good only for combing hair by.
She hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of black heads. She hated her face most of all.
The reflection was suddenly split by a jagged, silvery crack. The mirror fell on the floor and shattered at her feet, leaving only the plastic ring to stare at her like a blinded eye.
From Ogilvie's Dictionary of Physic Phenomena:
Telekinesis is the ability to move objects or to cause changes in objects by force of the mind. The phenomenon has most reliably been reported in times of crisis or in stress situations, when automobiles have been levitated from pinned bodies or debris from collapsed buildings, etc.
The phenomenon is often confused with the work of poltergeists, which are playful spirits. It should be noted that poltergeists are astral beings of questionable reality, while telekinesis is thought to be an empiric function of the mind, possibly electrochemical in nature ...
When they had finished making love, as she slowly put her clothes in order in the back seat of Tommy Ross's 1963 Ford, Sue Snell found her thoughts turning back to Carrie White.
It was Friday night and Tommy (who was still looking pensively out the back window with his pants still down around his ankles; the effect was comic but oddly endearing) had taken her bowling. That, of course, was a mutually accepted excuse. Fornication had been on their minds from the word go.
She had been going out more or less steadily with Tommy ever since October (it was now May) and they had been lovers for only two weeks. Seven times, she amended. Tonight had been the seventh. There had been no fireworks yet, no bands playing 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' but it had gotten a little better.