Of course, the calendar tells us that Carrie was conceived later that same year ...
The girls dressed quietly for their Monday morning Period One gym class, with no horseplay or little screaming catcalls, and none of them were very surprised when Miss Desjardin slammed open the locker-room and walked in. Her silver whistle dangling between her small br**sts, and if her shorts were the ones she had been wearing on Friday, no trace of Carrie's bloody handprint remained.
The girls continued to dress sullenly, not looking at her.
'Aren't you the bunch to send out for graduation,' Miss
Desjardin said softly. 'When is it? A month? And the spring Ball even less than that. Most of you have your dates and gowns already, I bet. Sue, you'll be going with Tommy Ross. Helen, Roy Evarts. Chris, I imagine you can take your pick. Who's the lucky guy?'.
'Billy Nolan,' Chris Hargensen said sullenly.
'Well, isn't he the lucky one?' Desjardin remarked. 'What are you going to give him for a party favour, Chris, a bloody Kotex? Or how about some used toilet paper? I understand these things seem to be your sack these days.'
Chris went red. 'I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to that.'
Desjardin had not been able to get the image of Carrie out of her mind all weekend, Carrie screaming, blubbering, a wet napkin plastered squarely in the middle of her pubic hair-and her own sick, angry reaction.
And now, as Chris tried to storm out past her, she reached out and slammed her against a row of dented, olive-coloured lockers beside the inner door. Chris's eyes widened with shocked disbelief. Then a kind of insane rage filled her face.
'You can't hit us!' she screamed. 'You'll get canned for this! See if you don't, you bitch!'
The other girls winced and sucked breath and stared at the floor. It was getting out of hand. Sue noticed out of the corner of her eye that Fern and Donna Thibodeau were holding hands.
'I don't really care, Hargensen,' Desjardin said. 'If you or any of your girls - think I'm wearing my teacher hat right now, you're making a bad mistake. I just want you all to know that you did a shitty thing on Friday. A really shitty thing.'
Chris Hargensen was sneering at the floor. The rest of the girls were looking miserably at anything but their gym instructor. Sue found herself looking into the shower stall - the scene of the crime - and jerked her glance elsewhere. None of them had ever heard a teacher call anything shitty before.
'Did any of you stop to think that Carrie White has feelings? Do any of you ever stop to think? Sue? Fern? Helen? Jessica? Any of you? You think she's ugly. Well, you're all ugly. I saw it on Friday morning.'
Chris Hargensen was mumbling about her father being a lawyer.
'Shutup!' Desjardin yelled in her face. Chris recoiled so suddenly that her head struck the lockers behind her. She began to whine and rub her head.
'One more remark out of you,' Desjardin said softly, 'and I'll throw you across the room. Want to find out if I'm telling the truth?'
Chris, who had apparently decided she was dealing with a mad-woman, said nothing.
Desjardin put her hands on her hips. 'The office has decided on punishment for you girls. Not my punishment, I'm sorry to say. My idea was three days' suspension and refusal of your prom tickets.'
Several girls looked at each other and muttered unhappily.
'That would have hit you where you live,' Desjardin continued, 'Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don't believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was. So. One week's detention.'
Spontaneous sighs of relief.
'But. It's to be my detention. In the gym. And I'm going to run you ragged.'
'I won't come,' Chris said. Her lips had thinned across her teeth.
'That's up to you, Chris. That's up to all of you. But punishment for skipping detention is going to be three days' suspension and refusal of your prom tickets. Get the picture?'
No one said anything.
'Right. Change up. And think about what I said.'
She left.
Utter silence for a long and stricken moment. Then Chris Hargensen said with loud, hysterical stridency:
'She can't get away with it!' She opened a door at random, pulled out a pair of sneakers and hurled them across the room. 'I'm going to get her! Goddammit! Goddammit! See if I don't! If we all stick together we..'
'Shut up, Chris,' Sue said, and was shocked to hear a dead, adult lifelessness in her voice. 'Just shut up.'
'This isn't over,' Chris Hargensen said, unzipping her skirt with a rough jab and reaching for her fashionably frayed green gym shorts. 'This isn't over by a long way.'
And she was right.
From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 60-6 1):
In the opinion of this researcher, a great many of the people who have researched the Carrie White matter - either for the scientific journals or for the popular press - have placed a mistaken emphasis on a relatively fruitless search for incidents of telekinesis in the girl's childhood. To strike a rough analogy, this is like spending years researching the early incidents of mast***ation in a ra**st's childhood.
The spectacular incident of the stones serves as a kind of red herring in this respect. Many researchers have adopted the erroneous belief that where there has been one incident, there must be others. To offer another analogy, this is like dispatching a crew of meteor watchers to Crater National Park because a huge asteroid struck there two million years ago.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no other recorded instances of TK in Carrie's childhood. If Carrie had not been an only child, we might have at least hearsay reports of dozens of other minor occurrences.
In the case of Andrea Kolintz (see Appendix II for a fuller history), we are told that, following a spanking for crawling out on the roof, 'The medicine cabinet flew open, bottles fell to the floor or seemed to hurl themselves across the bathroom, doors flew open and slammed shut, and at the climax of the manifestation, a 300-pound stereo cabinet tipped over and records flew all over the living room, dive-bombing the occupants and shattering against the walls.'