She suddenly stared fiercely at Mrs. Yorraty's big picture window. She thought (stupid frumpy old bitch break that window) Nothing. Mrs. Yorraty's picture window glittered serenely in the fresh nine o'clock glow of morning. Another cramp gripped Carrie's belly and she walked on. But . . . The light. And the ashtray; don't forget the ashtray. She looked back (old bitch hates my momma) over her shoulder. Again it seemed that something flexed . . . but very weakly. The flow of her thoughts shuddered as if there had been a sudden bubbling from a wellspring deeper inside. The picture window seemed to ripple. Nothing more. It could have been her eyes. Could have been. Her head began to feel tired and fuzzy, and it throbbed with the beginning of a headache. Her eyes were hot, as if she had just sat down and read the Book of Revelations straight through. She continued to walk down the street toward the small white house with the blue shutters. The familiar hatelovedread feeling was churning inside her. Ivy had crawled up the west side of the bungalow (they always called it the bungalow because the White house sounded like a political joke and Momma said all politicians were crooks and sinners and would eventually give the country over to the Godless Reds who would put all the believers of Jesuseven the Catholicsup against the wall), and the ivy was picturesque, she knew it was, but sometimes she hated it. Sometimes, like now, the ivy looked like a grotesque giant hand ridged with great veins which had sprung up out of the ground to grip the building. She approached it with dragging feet. Of course, there had been the stones. She stopped again, blinking vapidly at the day. The stones. Momma never talked about that; Carrie didn't even know if her momma still remembered the day of the stones. It was surprising that she herself still remembered it. She had been a very little girl then. How old? Three? Four? There had been that girl in the white bathing suit, and then the stones came. And things had flown in the house. Here the memory was, suddenly bright and clear. As if it had been here all along, just below the surface, waiting for a kind of mental puberty. Waiting, maybe, for today. From Carrie The Black Dawn of T.K. (Esquire magazine, September 12, 1980) by Jack Gaver Estelle Horan has lived in the neat San Diego suburb of Parrish for twelve years, and outwardly she is typical Ms. California She wears bright print shifts and smoked amber sunglasses; her hair is blackstreaked blonde; she drives a neat maroon Volkswagen Formula Vee with a smile decal on the gas cap and a greenflag ecology sticker on the back window. Her husband is an executive at the Parrish branch of the Bank of America; her son and daughter are certified members of the Southern California Sun 'n Fun Crowd, burnishedbrown beach creatures. There is a hibachi in the small, beautifully kept back yard, and the door chimes play a tinkly phrase from the refrain of Hey, Jude. But Ms. Horan still carries the thin, difficult soil of New England somewhere inside her, and when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd, pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal. Of course she was strange, Estelle Horan tells me, lighting a second Virginia Slim a moment after stubbing out her first. The whole family was strange. Ralph was a construction worker, and people on the street said he carried a Bible and a .38 revolver to work with him every day. The Bible was for his coffee break and lunch. The .38 was in case he met Antichrist on the job. I can remember the Bible myself. The revolver . . . who knows? He was a big oliveskinned man with his hair always shaved into a flattop crewcut. He always looked mean. And you didn't meet his eyes, not ever. They were so intense they actually seemed to glow. When you saw him coming you crossed the street and you never stuck out your tongue at his back, not ever. That's how spooky he was. She pauses, puffing clouds of cigarette smoke toward the pseudoredwood beams that cross the ceiling. Stella Horan lived on Carlin Street until she was twenty, commuting to day classes at Lewin Business College in Motton. But she remembers the incident of the stones very clearly. There are times, she says, when I wonder if I might have caused it. Their back yard was next to ours, and Mrs. White had put in a hedge but it hadn't grown out yet. She'd called my mother dozens of times about the show I was putting on in my back yard. Well, my bathing suit was perfectly decentprudish by today's standardsnothing but a plain old onepiece Jantzen. Mrs. White used to go on and on about what a scandal it was for her baby. My mother . . . well, she tries to be polite, but her temper is so quick. I don't know what Margaret White said to finally push her over the edgecalled me the Whore of Babylon, I supposebut my mother told her our yard was our yard and I'd go out and dance the hootchiekootchie buck naked if that was her pleasure and mine. She also told her that she was a dirty old woman with a can of worms for a mind. There was a lot more shouting, but that was the upshot of it. I wanted to stop sunbathing right then. I hate trouble. It upsets my stomach. But Momwhen she gets a case, she's a terror. She came home from Jordan Marsh with a little white bikini. Told me I might as well get all the sun I could. After all, she said, the privacy of our own back yard and all. Stella Horan smiles a little at the memory and crushes out her cigarette. I tried to argue with her, tell her I didn't want any more trouble, didn't want to be a pawn in their backfence war. Didn't do a bit of good. Trying to stop my mom when she gets a bee in her hat is like trying to stop a Mack truck going downhill with no brakes. Actually, there was more to it. I was scared of the Whites. Real religious nuts are nothing to fool with. Sure, Ralph White was dead, but what if Margaret still had that .38 around? But there I was on Saturday afternoon, spread out on a blanket in the back yard, covered with suntan lotion and listening to Top Forty on the radio. Mom hated that stuff and usually she'd yell out at least twice for me to turn it down before she went nuts. But that day she turned it up twice herself. I started to feel like the Whore of Babylon myself. But nobody came out of the Whites' place. Not even the old lady to hang her wash. That's something elseshe never hung any undies on the back line. Not even Carrie's, and she was only three back then. Always in the house. I started to relax. I guess I was thinking Margaret must have taken Carrie to the park to worship God in the raw or something. Anyway, after a little while I rolled on my back, put one arm over my eyes, and dozed off. When I woke up, Carrie was standing next to me and looking down at my body. She breaks off, frowning into space. Outside, the cars are whizzing by endlessly. I can hear the steady little whine my tape recorder makes. But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap patina over a darker worlda real world where nightmares happen. She was such a pretty girl, Stella Horan resumes, lighting another cigarette. I've seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy blackandwhite photo on the cover of Newsweek. I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that woman do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the shade of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her mother's sickness hadn't touched her very deeply, not then. I kind of started up awake and tried to smile. It was hard to think what to do. I was logy from the sun and my mind felt sticky and slow. I said Hi. She was wearing a little yellow dress, sort of cute but awfully long for a little girl in the summer. It came down to her shins. She didn't smile back. She just pointed and said, What are those? I looked down and saw that my top had slipped while I was asleep. So I fixed it and said, Those are my breasts, Carrie. Then she saidvery solemnly I wish I had some. I said You have to wait, Carrie. You won't start to get them for another . . . oh, eight or nine years. No, I won't, she said. Momma says good girls don't. She looked strange for a little girl, half sad and half selfrighteous. I could hardly believe it, and the first thing that popped into my mind also popped right out my mouth. I said Well, I'm a good girl. And doesn't your mother have breasts? She lowered her head and said something so softly I couldn't hear it. When I asked her to repeat it, she looked at me defiantly and said that her momma had been bad when she made her and that was why she had them. She called them dirtypillows, as if it was all one word. I couldn't believe it. I was just dumbfounded. There was nothing at all I could think to say. We just stared at each other, and what I wanted to do was grab that sad little scrap of a girl and run away with her. And that was when Margaret White came out of her back door and saw us. For a minute she just goggled as if she couldn't believe it. Then she opened her mouth and whooped. That's the ugliest sound I've ever heard in my life. It was like the noise a bull alligator would make in a swamp. She just whooped. Rage. Complete, insane rage. Her face went just as red as the side of a fire truck and she curled her hands into fists and whooped at the sky. She was shaking all over. I thought she was having a stroke. Her face was all scrunched up, and it was a gargoyle's face. I thought Carrie was going to faintor die on the spot. She sucked in all her breath and that little face went a cottagecheesy color. Her mother yelled CAAAARRRIEEEEEE! I jumped up and yelled back Don't you yell at her that way! You ought to be ashamed! Something stupid like that. I don't remember. Carrie started to go back and then she stopped and then she started again, and just before she crossed over from our lawn to theirs she looked back at me and there was a look . . . oh, dreadful. I can't say it. Wanting and hating and fearing . . . and misery. As if life itself had fallen on her like stones, all at the age of three. My mother came out on the back stoop and her face just crumpled when she saw the child. And Margaret . . . oh, she was screaming things about sluts and strumpets and the sins of the fathers being visited even unto the seventh generation. My tongue felt like a little driedup plant. For just a second Carrie stood swaying back and forth between the two yards, and then Margaret White looked upward and I swear sweet Jesus that woman bayed at the sky. And then she started to . . . to hurt herself, scourge herself. She was clawing at her neck and cheeks, making red marks and scratches. She tore her dress. Carrie screamed out Momma! and ran to her. Mrs. White kind of. . . squatted, like a frog, and her arms swooped wide open. I thought she was going to crush her and I screamed. The woman was grinning. Grinning and drooling right down her chin. Oh, I was sick. Jesus, I was so sick. She gathered her up and they went in. I turned off my radio and I could hear her. Some of the words, but not all. You didn't have to hear all the words to know what was going on. Praying and sobbing and screeching. Crazy sounds. And Margaret telling the little girl to get herself into her closet and pray. The little girl crying and screaming that she was sorry, she forgot. Then nothing. And my mother and I just looked at each other. I never saw Mom look so bad, not even when Dad died. She said The child and that was all. We went inside. She gets up and goes to the window, a pretty woman in a yellow noback sundress. It's almost like living it all over again, you know, she says, not turning around. I'm all riled up inside again. She laughs a little and cradles her elbows in her palms. Oh, she was so pretty. You'd never know from those pictures. Cars go by outside, back and forth, and I sit and wait for her to go on. She reminds me of a polevaulter eyeing the bar and wondering if it's set too high. My mother brewed us scotch tea, strong, with milk, the way she used to when I was tomboying around and someone would push me in the nettle patch or I'd fall off my bicycle. It was awful but we drank it anyway, sitting across from each other in the kitchen nook. She was in some old housedress with the hem falling down in back, and I was in my Whore of Babylon twopiece swimsuit. I wanted to cry but it was too real to cry about, not like the movies. Once when I was in New York I saw an old drunk leading a little girl in a blue dress by the hand. The girl had cried herself into a bloody nose. The drunk had goiter and his neck looked like an inner tube. There was a red bump in the middle of his forehead and a long white string on the blue serge jacket he was wearing. Everyone kept going and coming because, if you did, then pretty soon you wouldn't see them any more. That was real, too. I wanted to tell my mother that, and I was just opening my mouth to say it when the other thing happened . . . the thing you want to hear about, I guess. There was a big thump outside that made the glasses rattle in the china cabinet. It was a feeling as well as a sound, thick and solid, as if someone had just pushed an iron safe off the roof. She lights a new cigarette and begins to puff rapidly. I went to the window and looked out, but I couldn't see anything. Then, when I was getting ready to turn around, something else fell. The sun glittered on it. I thought it was a big glass globe for a second. Then it hit the edge of the Whites' roof and shattered, and it wasn't glass at all. It was a big chunk of ice. I was going to turn around and tell Mom, and that's when they started to fall all at once, in a shower. They were falling on the Whites' roof, on the back and front lawn, on the outside door to their cellar. That was a sheettin bulkhead, and when the first one hit it made a huge bong noise, like a church bell. My mother and I both screamed. We were clutching each other like a couple of girls in a thunderstorm. Then it stopped. There was no sound at all from their house. You could see the water from the melting ice trickling down their slate shingles in the sunshine. A great big hunk of ice was stuck in the angle of the roof and their little chimney. The light on it was so bright that my eyes hurt to look at it. My mother started to ask me if it was over, and then Margaret screamed. The sound came to us very clearly. In a way it was worse than before, because there was terror in this one. Then there were clanging, banging sounds, as if she was throwing every pot and pan in the house at the girl. The back door slammed open and slammed closed. No one came out. More screams. Mom said for me to call the police but I couldn't move. I was stuck to the spot. Mr. Kirk and his wife Virginia came out on their lawn to look. The Smiths, too. Pretty soon everyone on the street that was home had come out, even old Mrs. Warwick from up the block, and she was deaf in one ear. Things started to crash and tinkle and break. Bottles, glasses, I don't know what all. And then the side window broke open and the kitchen table fell halfway through. With God as my witness. It was a big mahogany thing and it took the screen with it and it must have weighed three hundred pounds. How could a womaneven a big womanthrow that? I ask her if she is implying something. I'm only telling you, she insists, suddenly distraught. I'm not asking you to believe She seems to catch her breath and then goes on flatly There was nothing for maybe five minutes. Water was dripping out of the gutters over there. And there was ice all over the Whites' lawn. It was melting fast. She gives a short, chopping laugh and butts her cigarette. Why not? It was August. She wanders aimlessly back toward the sofa, then veers away. Then the stones. Right out of the blue, blue sky. Whistling and screaming like bombs. My mother cried out, What, in the name of God! and put her hands over her head. But I couldn't move. I watched it all and I couldn't move. It didn't matter anyway. They only fell on the Whites' property. One of them hit a downspout and knocked it onto the lawn. Others punched holes right through the roof and into the attic. The roof made a big cracking sound each time one hit, and puffs of dust would squirt up. The ones that hit the ground made everything vibrate. You could feel them hitting in your feet. Our china was tinkling and the fancy Welsh dresser was shaking and Mom's teacup fell on the floor and broke. They made big pits in the Whites' back lawn when they struck. Craters. Mrs. White hired a junkman from across town to cart them away, and Jerry Smith from up the street paid him a buck to let him chip a piece off one. He took it to B.U. and they looked at it and said it was ordinary granite. One of the last ones hit a little table they had in their back yard and smashed it to pieces. But nothing, nothing that wasn't on their property was hit. She stops and turns from the window to look at me, and her face is haggard from remembering all that. One hand plays forgetfully with her casually stylish shag haircut. Not much of it got into the local paper. By the time Billy Harris came aroundhe reported the Chamberlain newsshe had already gotten the roof fixed, and when people told him the stones had gone right through it, I think he thought we were all pulling his leg. Nobody wants to believe it, not even now. You and all the people who'll read what you write will wish they could laugh it off and call me just another nut who's been out here in the sun too long. But it happened. There were lots of people on the block who saw it happen, and it was just as real as that drunk leading the little girl with the bloody nose. And now there's this other thing. No one can laugh that off, either. Too many people are dead. And it's not just on the White's property any more. She smiles, but there's not a drop of humor in it. She says Ralph White was insured, and Margaret got a lot of money when he died . . . double indemnity. He left the house insured, too, but she never got a penny of that. The damage was caused by an act of God. Poetic justice, huh? She laughs a little, but there's no humor in that, either. . . . Found written repeatedly on one page of a Ewen Consolidated High School notebook owned by Carrie White Everybody's guessedthat baby can't be blessed'til she finally sees that she's like all the rest. . . .1 Carrie went into the house and closed the door behind her. Bright daylight disappeared and was replaced by brown shadows, coolness, and the oppressive smell of talcum powder. The only sound was the ticking of the Black Forest cuckoo clock in the living room. Momma had gotten the cuckoo clock with Green Stamps. Once, in the sixth grade, Carrie had set out to ask Momma if Green Stamps weren't sinful, but her nerve had failed her. She walked up the hall and put her coat in the closet. A luminous picture above the coathooks limned a ghostly Jesus hovering grimly over a family seated at the kitchen table. Beneath was the caption (also luminous) The Unseen Guest. She went into the living room and stood in the middle of the faded, startingtobethreadbare rug. She closed her eyes and watched the little dots flash by in the darkness. Her headache thumped queasily behind her temples. Alone. Momma worked on the speed ironer and folder down at the Blue Ribbon Laundry in Chamberlain Center. She had worked there since Carrie was five, when the compensation and insurance that had resulted from her father's accident had begun to run out. Her hours were from seventhirty in the morning until four in the afternoon. The laundry was Godless. Momma had told her so many times. The foreman, Mr. Elton Mott, was especially Godless. Momma said that Satan had reserved a special blue corner of Hell for Elt, as he was called at the Blue Ribbon. Alone. She opened her eyes. The living room contained two chairs with straight backs. There was a sewing table with a light where Carrie sometimes made dresses in the evening while Momma tatted doilies and talked about The Coming. The Black Forest cuckoo clock was on the far wall. There were many religious pictures, but the one Carrie liked best was on the wall above her chair. It was Jesus leading lambs on a hill that was as green and smooth as the Riverside golf course. The others were not as tranquil Jesus turning the moneychangers from the temple, Moses throwing the Tablets down upon the worshipers of the golden calf, Thomas the doubter putting his hand in Christ's wounded side (oh, the horrified fascination of that one and the nightmares it had given her as a girl!), Noah's ark floating above the agonized, drowning sinners, Lot and his family fleeing the great burning of Sodom and Gomorrah. On a small deal table there were a lamp and a stack of tracts. The top pamphlet showed a sinner (his spiritual status was obvious from the agonized expression on his face) trying to crawl beneath a large boulder. The title blared Neither shall the rock hide him ON THAT DAY! But the room was actually dominated by a huge plaster crucifix on the far wall, fully four feet high. Momma had mailordered it special from St. Louis. The Jesus impaled upon it was frozen in a grotesque, musclestraining rictus of pain, mouth drawn down in a groaning curve. His crown of thorns bled scarlet streams down temples and forehead. The eyes were turned up in a medieval expression of slanted agony. Both hands were also drenched with blood and the feet were nailed to a small plaster platform. This corpus had also given Carrie endless nightmares in which the mutilated Christ chased her through dream corridors, holding a mallet and nails, begging her to take up her cross and follow Him. Just lately these dreams had evolved into something less understandable but more sinister. The object did not seem to be murder but something even more awful. Alone. The pain in her legs and belly and privates had drained away a little. She no longer thought she was bleeding to death. The word was menstruation, and all at once it seemed logical and inevitable. It was her Time of the Month. She giggled a strange, affrighted giggle in the solemn stillness of the living room. It sounded like a quiz show. You too can win an allexpensespaid trip to Bermuda on Time of the Month. Like the memory of the stones, the knowledge of menstruation seemed always to have been there, blocked but waiting. She turned and walked heavily upstairs. The bathroom had a wooden floor that had been scrubbed nearly white (Cleanliness is next to Godliness) and a tub on claw feet. Rust stains dripped down the porcelain below the chrome spout, and there was no shower attachment. Momma said showers were sinful. 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 snuck into her purse quite openly with theseonce 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 her dresser. On the dresser itself was a Bible and a plastic Jesus that glowed in the dark. She undressedfirst 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 o no question) to describe them. And it would make her dreadfully selfconscious, 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 down 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 eatbut 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 breasts were milkwhite, upright and smooth. The nipples were a light coffee color. 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 ninetwenty in the morning, Carrie thought that the Something had come to her. She ran her hands over her breasts (dirtypillows) again, and the skin was cool but the nipples 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 blackheads. 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 Psychic 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 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. The first time had hurt like hell. Her girl friends, Helen Shyres and Jeanne Gault, had both done It, and they both assured her that it only hurt for a minutelike getting a shot of penicillinand then it was roses. But for Sue, the first time had been like being reamed out with a hoe handle. Tommy had confessed to her since, with a grin, that he had gotten the rubber on wrong, too. Tonight was only the second time she had begun to feel something like pleasure, and then it was over. Tommy had held out for as long as he could, but then it was just . . . over. It seemed like an awful lot of rubbing for a little warmth. In the aftermath she felt low and melancholy, and her thoughts turned to Carrie in this light. A wave of remorse caught her with all emotional guards down, and when Tommy turned back from the view of Brickyard Hill, she was crying. Hey, he said, alarmed. Oh, hey. He held her clumsily. 'S all right, she said, still weeping. It's not you. I did a notsogood thing today. I was just thinking of it. What? He patted the back of her neck gently. So she found herself launching into the story of that morning's incident, hardly believing it was herself she was listening to. Facing the thing frankly, she realized the main reason she had allowed Tommy to have her was because she was in (love? infatuation? didn't matter results were the same) with him, and now to put herself in this positioncohort in a nasty showerroom jokewas hardly the approved method to hook a fella. And Tommy was, of course, Popular. As someone who had been Popular herself all her life, it had almost seemed written that she would meet and fall in love with someone as Popular as she. They were almost certain to be voted King and Queen of the high school Spring Ball, and the senior class had already voted them class couple for the yearbook. They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America. And having something she had always longed fora sense of place, of security, of statusshe found that it carried uneasiness with it like a darker sister. It was not the way she had conceived it. There were dark things lumbering around their warm circle of light. The idea that she had let him fuck her (do you have to say it that way yes this time I do) simply because he was Popular, for instance. The fact that they fit together walking, or that she could look at their reflection in a store window and think, There goes a handsome couple. She was quite sure (or only hopeful) that she wasn't that weak, not that liable to fall docilely into the complacent expectations of parents, friends, and even herself. But now there was this shower thing, where she had gone along and pitched in with high, savage glee.


The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform, in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board in front of the soap operas while hubby was off busting heavies in an anonymous Office; of joining the P.T.A. and then the country club when their income moved into five figures; of pills in circular yellow cases without number to insure against having to move out of the misses' sizes before it became absolutely necessary and against the intrusion of repulsive little strangers who shat in their pants and screamed for help at two in the morning; of fighting with desperate decorum to keep the niggers out of Kleen Korners, standing shoulder to shoulder with Terri Smith (Miss Potato Blossom of 1975) and Vicki Jones (Vice President of the Women's League), armed with signs and petitions and sweet, slightly desperate smiles. Carrie, it was that goddamned Carrie, this was her fault. Perhaps before today she had heard distant, circling footfalls around their lighted place, but tonight, hearing her own sordid, crummy story, she saw the actual silhouettes of all these things, and yellow eyes that glowed like flashlights in the dark. She had already bought her prom gown. It was blue. It was beautiful. You're right, he said when she was done. Bad news. Doesn't sound a bit like you. His face was grave and she felt a cool slice of terror. Then he smiledhe had a very jolly smileand the darkness retreated a bit. I kicked a kid in the slats once when he was knocked out. Did I ever tell you about that? She shook her head. Yeah. He rubbed his nose reminiscently and his cheek gave a small tic, the way it had when he made his confession about getting the rubber wrong the first time. The kid's name was Danny Patrick. He beat the living shit out of me once when we were in the sixth grade. I hated him, but I was scared, too. I was laying for him. You know how that is? She didn't, but nodded anyway. Anyway, he finally picked on the wrong kid a year or so later. Pete Taber. He was just a little guy, but he had lots of muscle. Danny got on him about something, I don't know, marbles or something, and finally Peter just rose up righteous and beat the shit out of him. That was on the playground of the old Kennedy Junior High. Danny fell down and hit his head and went out cold. Everybody ran. We thought he might be dead. I ran away too, but first I gave him a good kick in the ribs. Felt really bad about it afterward. You going to apologize to her? It caught Sue flatfooted and all she could do was clinch weakly Did you? Huh? Hell no! I had better things to do than spend my time in traction. But there's a big difference, Susie. There is? It's not seventh grade any more. And I had some kind of reason, even if it was a pisspoor reason. What did that sad, silly bitch ever do to you? She didn't answer because she couldn't. She had never passed more than a hundred words with Carrie in her whole life, and three dozen or so had come today. Phys Ed was the only class they'd had in common since they had graduated from Chamberlain Junior High. Carrie was taking the commercialbusiness courses. Sue, of course, was in the college division. She thought herself suddenly loathsome. She found she could not bear that and so she twisted it at him. When did you start making all these big moral decisions? After you started fucking me? She saw the good humor fade from his face and was sorry. Guess I should have kept quiet, he said, and pulled up his pants. It's not you, it's me. She put a hand on his arm. I'm ashamed, see? I know, he said. But I shouldn't be giving advice. I'm not very good at it. Tommy, do you ever hate being so . . . well, Popular? Me? The question wrote surprise on his face. Do you mean like football and class president and that stuff? Yes. No. It's not very important. High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up. That's how my brother and his buddies are, anyway. It did not soothe her; it made her fears worse. Little Susie mix 'n match from Ewen High School, Head Cupcake of the entire Cupcake Brigade. Prom gown kept forever in the closet, wrapped in protective plastic. The night pressed dark against the slightly steamed car windows. I'll probably end up working at my dad's car lot, he said. I'll spend my Friday and Saturday nights down at Uncle Billy's or out at The Cavalier drinking beer and talking about the Saturday afternoon I got that fat pitch from Saunders and we upset Dorchester. Get married to some nagging broad and always own last year's model, vote Democrat Don't, she said, her mouth suddenly full of a dark, sweet horror. She pulled him to her. Love me. My head is so bad tonight. Love me. Love me. So he loved her and this time it was different, this time there finally seemed to be room and there was no tiresome rubbing but a delicious friction that went up and up Twice he had to stop, panting, and held himself back, and then he went again (he was a virgin before me and admitted it i would have believed a lie) and went hard and her breath came in short, digging gasps and then she began to yell and hold at his back, helpless to stop, sweating, the bad taste washed away, every cell seeming to have its own climax, body filled with sunlight, musical notes in her mind, butterflies behind her skull in the cage of her mind. Later, on the way home, he asked her formally if she would go to the Spring Ball with him. She said she would. He asked her if she had decided what to do about Carrie. She said she hadn't. He said that it made no difference, but she thought that it did. It had begun to seem that it meant all the difference. From Telekinesis Analysis and Aftermath (Science Yearbook 1981), by Dean D. L. McGuffin There are, of course, still these scientists todayregretfully, the Duke University people are in their forefrontwho reject the terrific underlying implications of the Carrie White affair. Like the Flatlands Society, the Rosicrucians, or the Corlies of Arizona, who are positive that the atomic bomb does not work, these unfortunates are flying in the face of logic with their heads in the sandand beg your pardon for the mixed metaphor. Of course one is able to understand the consternation, the raised voices, the angry letters and arguments at scientific convocations. The idea of telekinesis itself has been a bitter pill for the scientific community to swallow, with its horrormovie trappings of ouija boards and mediums and table rappings and floating coronets; but understanding will still not excuse scientific irresponsibility. The outcome of the White affair raises grave and difficult questions. An earthquake has struck our ordered notions of the way the natural world is supposed to act and react. Can you blame even such a renowned physicist as Gerald Luponet for claiming the whole thing is a hoax and a fraud, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence as the White Commission presented? For if Carrie White is the truth, then what of Newton? . . . They sat in the living room, Carrie and Momma, listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing Let the Lower Lights Be Burning on a Webcor phonograph (which Momma called the victrola, or, if in a particularly good mood, the vic). Carrie sat at the sewing machine, pumping with her feet as she sewed the sleeves on a new dress. Momma sat beneath the plaster crucifix tatting doilies and bumping her feet in time to the song, which was one of her favorites. Mr. P. P. Bliss, who had written this hymn and others seemingly without number, was one of Momma's shining examples of God at work upon the face of the earth. He had been a sailor and a sinner (two terms that were synonymous in Momma's lexicon), a great blasphemer, a augher in the face of the Almighty. Then a great storm had come up at sea, the boat had threatened to capsize, and Mr. P. P. Bliss had gotten down on his sinsickly knees with a vision of Hell yawning beneath the ocean floor to receive him, and he had prayed to God. Mr. P. P. Bliss promised God that if He saved him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to Him. The storm, of course, had cleared immediately. Brightly beams our Father's mercy From his lighthouse evermore, But to us he gives the keeping Of the lights along the shore . . . All of Mr. P. P. Bliss's hymns had a seagoing flavor to them. The dress she was sewing was actually quite pretty, a dark wine colorthe closest Momma would allow her to redand the sleeves were puffed. She tried to keep her mind strictly on her sewing, but of course it wandered. The overhead light was strong and harsh and yellow, the small dusty plush sofa was of course deserted (Carrie had never had a boy in To Sit), and on the far wall was a twin shadow the crucified Jesus, and beneath Him, Momma. The school had called Momma at the laundry and she had come home at noon. Carrie had watched her come up the walk, and her belly trembled. Momma was a very big woman, and she always wore a hat. Lately her legs had begun to swell, and her feet always seemed on the point of overflowing her shoes. She wore a black cloth coat with a black fur collar. Her eyes were blue and magnified behind rimless bifocals. She always carried a large black satchel purse and in it was her change purse, her billfold (both black), a large King James Bible (also black) with her name stamped on the front in gold, and a stack of tracts secured with a rubber band. The tracts were usually orange, and smearily printed. Carrie knew vaguely that Momma and Daddy Ralph had been Baptists once but had left the church when they became convinced that the Baptists were doing the work of the Antichrist. Since that time, all worship had taken place at home. Momma held worship on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. These were called Holy Days. Momma was the minister, Carrie the congregation. Services lasted from two to three hours. Momma had opened the door and walked stolidly in. She and Carrie had stared at each other down the short length of the front hall for a moment, like gunfighters before a shootout. It was one of those brief moments that seem (fear could it really have been fear in momma's eyes) much longer in retrospect. Momma closed the door behind her. You're a woman, she said softly. Carrie felt her face twisting and crumpling and could not help it. Why didn't you tell me? she cried. Oh Momma, I was so scared! And the girls all made fun and threw things and Momma had been walking toward her, and now her hand flashed with sudden limber speed, a hard hand, laundrycallused and muscled. It struck her backhand across the jaw and Carrie fell down in the doorway between the hall and the living room, weeping loudly. And God made Eve from the rib of Adam, Momma said. Her eyes were very large in the rimless glasses; they looked like poached eggs. She thumped Carrie with the side of her foot and Carrie screamed. Get up, woman. Let's us get in and pray. Let's us pray to Jesus for our womanweak, wicked, sinning souls. Momma The sobs were too strong to allow more. The latent hysterics had come out grinning and gibbering. She could not stand up. She could only crawl into the living room with her hair hanging in her face, braying huge, hoarse sobs. Every now and again Momma would swing her foot. So they progressed across the living room toward the place of the altar, which had once been a small bedroom. And Eve was weak andsay it, woman. Say it! No, Momma, please help me The foot swung. Carrie screamed. And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world, Momma continued, and the raven was called Sin, and the first Sin was Intercourse. And the Lord visited Eve with a Curse, and the Curse was the Curse of Blood. And Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden and into the World and Eve found that her belly had grown big with child. The foot swung and connected with Carrie's rump. Her nose scraped the wood floor. They were entering the place of the altar. There was a cross on a table covered with an embroidered silk cloth. On either side of the cross there were white candles. Behind this were several paintbythenumbers of Jesus and His apostles. And to the right was the worst place of all, the home of terror, the cave where all hope, all resistance to God's willand Momma'swas extinguished. The closet door leered open. Inside, below a hideous blue bulb that was always lit, was Derrault's conception of Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And there was a second Curse, and this was the Curse of Childbearing, and Eve brought forth Cain in sweat and blood. Now Momma dragged her, halfstanding and halfcrawling, down to the altar, where they both fell on their knees. Momma gripped Carrie's wrist tightly. And following Cain, Eve gave birth to Abel, having not yet repented of the Sin of Intercourse. And so the Lord visited Eve with a third Curse, and this was the Curse of Murder. Cain rose up and slew Abel with a rock. And still Eve did not repent, nor all the daughters of Eve, and upon Eve did the Crafty Serpent found a kingdom of whoredoms and pestilences. Momma! she shrieked. Momma, please listen! It wasn't my fault! Bow your head, Momma said. Let's us pray. You should have told me! Momma brought her hand down on the back of Carrie's neck, and behind it was all the heavy muscle developed by eleven years of slinging heavy laundry bags and trucking piles of wet sheets. Carrie's eyebulging face jerked forward and her forehead smacked the altar, leaving a mark and making the candles tremble. Let's us pray, Momma said softly, implacably. Weeping and snuffling, Carrie bowed her head. A runner of snot hung pendulously from her nose and she wiped it away (if i had a nickel for every time she made me cry here) with the back of her hand. O Lord, Momma declaimed hugely, her head thrown back, help this sinning woman beside me here see the sin of her days and ways. Show her that if she had remained sinless the Curse of Blood never would have come on her. She may have committed the Sin of Lustful Thoughts. She may have been listening to rock 'n roll music on the radio. She may have been tempted by the Antichrist. Show her that this is Your kind, vengeful hand at work and No! Let me go! She tried to struggle to her feet and Momma's hand, as strong and pitiless as an iron manacle, forced her back to her knees. and Your sign that she must walk the straight and narrow from here on out if she is to avoid the flaming agonies of the Eternal Pit. Amen. She turned her glittering, magnified eyes upon her daughter. Go to your closet now. No! She felt her breath go thick with terror. Go to your closet. Pray in secret. Ask forgiveness for your sin. I didn't sin, Momma. You sinned. You didn't tell me and they laughed. Again she seemed to see a flash of fear in Momma's eyes, gone as quickly and soundlessly as summer lightning. Momma began to force Carrie toward the blue glare of the closet. Pray to God and your sins may be washed away. Momma, you let me go. Pray, woman. I'll make the stones come again, Momma. Momma halted. Even her breath seemed to stop in her throat for a moment. And then the hand tightened on her neck, tightened, until Carrie saw red, lurid dots in front of her eyes and felt her brain go fuzzy and faroff. Momma's magnified eyes swam in front of her. You spawn of the devil, she whispered. Why was I so cursed? Carrie's whirling mind strove to find something huge enough to express her agony, shame, terror, hate, fear. It seemed her whole life had narrowed to this miserable, beaten point of rebellion. Her eyes bulged crazily, her mouth, filled with spit, opened wide. You SUCK! she screamed. Momma hissed like a burned cat. Sin! she cried. O, Sin! She began to beat Carrie's back, her neck, her head. Carrie was driven, reeling, into the close blue glare of the closet. You FUCK! Carrie screamed. (there there o there it's out how else do you think she got you o god o good) She was whirled into the closet headfirst and she struck the far wall and fell on the floor in a semidaze. The door slammed and the key turned. She was alone with Momma's angry God. The blue light glared on a picture of a huge and bearded Yahweh who was casting screaming multitudes of humans down through cloudy depths into an abyss of fire. Below them, black horrid figures struggled through the flames of perdition while the Black Man sat on a huge flamecolored throne with a trident in one hand. His body was that of a man, but he had a spiked tail and the head of a jackal. She would not break this time. But of course she did break. It took six hours but she broke, weeping and calling Momma to open the door and let her out. The need to urinate was terrible. The Black Man grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and his scarlet eyes knew all the secrets of womanblood. An hour after Carrie began to call, Momma let her out. Carrie scrabbled madly for the bathroom. It was only now, three hours after that, sitting here with her head bowed over the sewing machine like a penitent, that she remembered the fear in Momma's eyes and she thought she knew the reason why. There had been other times when Momma had kept her in the closet for as long as a day at a stretchwhen she stole that fortyninecent finger ring from Shuber's Five and Ten, the time she had found that picture of Flash Bobby Pickett under Carrie's pillowand Carrie had once fainted from the lack of food and the smell of her own waste. And she had never, never spoken back as she had done today. Today she had even said the Eff Word. Yet Momma had let her out almost as soon as she broke. There. The dress was done. She removed her feet from the treadle and held it up to look at it. It was long. And ugly. She hated it. She knew why Momma had let her out. Momma, may I go to bed? Yes. Momma did not look up from her doily. She folded the dress over her arm. She looked down at the sewing machine. All at once the treadle depressed itself. The needle began to dip up and down, catching the light in steely flashes. The bobbin whirred and jerked. The sidewheel spun. Momma's head jerked up, her eyes wide. The looped matrix at the edge of her doily, wonderfully intricate yet at the same time as precise and even, suddenly fell in disarray. Only clearing the thread, Carrie said softly. Go to bed, Momma said curtly, and the fear was back in her eyes. Yes, (she was afraid i'd knock the closet door right off its hinges) Momma. (and i think i could i think i could yes i think i could) From The Shadow Exploded (p. 58) Margaret White was born and raised in Motton, a small town which borders Chamberlain and sends its tuition students to Chamberlain's junior and senior high schools. Her parents were fairly welltodo; they owned a prosperous night spot just outside the Motton town limits called The Jolly Roadhouse. Margaret's father, John Brigham, was killed in a barroom shooting incident in the summer of 1959. Margaret Brigham, who was then almost thirty, began attending fundamentalist prayer meetings. Her mother had become involved with a new man (Harold Allison, whom she later married) and they both wanted Margaret out of the houseshe believed her mother, Judith, and Harold Allison were living in sin and made her views known frequently. Judith Brigham expected her daughter to remain a spinster the rest of her life. In the more pungent phraseology of her soontobe stepfather, Margaret had a face like the ass end of a gasoline truck and a body to match. He also referred to her as a little prayin' Jesus. Margaret refused to leave until 1960, when she met Ralph White at a revival meeting. In September of that year she left the Brigham residence in Motton and moved to a small flat in Chamberlain Center. The courtship of Margaret Brigham and Ralph White terminated in marriage on March 23, 1962. On April 3, 1962, Margaret White was admitted briefly to Westover Doctors Hospital. Nope, she wouldn't tell us what was wrong, Harold Allison said. The one time we went to see her she told us we were living in adultery even though we were hitched, and we were going to hell. She said God had put an invisible mark on our foreheads, but she could see it. Acted crazy as a bat in a henhouse, she did. Her mom tried to be nice, tried to find out what the matter with her was. She got hysterical and started to rave about an angel with a sword who would walk through the parking lots of roadhouses and cut down the wicked. We left. Judith Allison, however, had at least an idea of what might have been wrong with her daughter; she thought that Margaret had gone through a miscarriage. If so, the baby was conceived out of wedlock. Confirmation of this would shed an interesting light on the character of Carrie's mother. In a long and rather hysterical letter to her mother dated August 19, 1962, Margaret said that she and Ralph were living sinlessly, without the Curse of Intercourse. She urged Harold and Judith Allison to close their abode of wickedness and do likewise. It is, Margaret declares near the end of her letter, the oney [sic] way you  That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph  I, like Mary  Joseph, will neither know or polute [sic] each other's flesh. If there is issue, let it be Divine. 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 lockerroom door and walked in. Her silver whistle dangled between her small breasts, 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 that 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 favor, 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 hairand 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, olivecolored 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 Mary and Donna Thibodeau were holding hands. I don't really care, Hargensen, Desjardin said. If youor any of you girlsthink 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 stallthe scene of the crimeand 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. Shut up! 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 madwoman, 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 can 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. 6061) In the opinion of this researcher, a great many of the people who have researched the Carrie White mattereither for the scientific journals or for the popular presshave 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 masturbation in a rapist'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 300pound stereo cabinet tipped over and records flew all over the living room, divebombing the occupants and shattering against the walls. Significantly, this report is from one of Andrea's brothers, as quoted in the September 4, 1955, issue of Life magazine. Life is hardly the most scholarly or unimpeachable source, but there is a great deal of other documentation, and I think that the point of familiar witnessship is served. In the case of Carrie White, the only witness to any possible prologue to the final climactic events was Margaret White, and she, of course is dead. . . . Henry Grayle, principal of Ewen High School, had been expecting him all week, but Chris Hargensen's father didn't show up until Fridaythe day after Chris had skipped her detention period with the formidable Miss Desjardin. Yes, Miss Fish? He spoke formally into the intercom, although he could see the man in the outer office through his window, and certainly knew his face from pictures in the local paper. John Hargensen to see you, Mr. Grayle. Send him in, please. Goddammit, Fish, do you have to sound so impressed? Grayle was an irrepressible paperclipbender, napkinripper, cornerfolder. For John Hargensen, the town's leading legal light, he was bringing up the heavy ammunitiona whole box of heavyduty clips in the middle of his desk blotter. Hargensen was a tall, impressive man with a selfconfident way of moving and the kind of sure, mobile features that said this was a man superior at the game of onestepahead social interaction. He was wearing a brown Savile Row suit with subtle glints of green and gold running through the weave that put Grayle's local offtherack job to shame. His briefcase was thin, real leather, and bound with glittering stainless steel. The smile was faultless and full of many capped teetha smile to make the hearts of lady jurors melt like butter in a warm skillet. His grip was major league all the wayfirm, warm, long. Mr. Grayle. I've wanted to meet you for some time now. I'm always glad to see interested parents, Grayle said with a dry smile. That's why we have Parents Open House every October. Of course. Hargensen smiled. I imagine you're a busy man, and I have to be in court fortyfive minutes from now. Shall we get down to specifics? Surely. Grayle dipped into his box of clips and began to mangle the first one. I suspect you are here concerning the disciplinary action taken against your daughter Christine. You should be informed that school policy on the matter has been set. As a man concerned with the workings of justice yourself, you should realize that bending the rules is hardly possible or Hargensen waved his hand impatiently. Apparently you're laboring under a misconception, Mr. Grayle. I am here because my daughter was manhandled by your gym teacher, Miss Rita Desjardin. And verbally abused, I'm afraid. I believe the term your Miss Desjardin used in connection with my daughter was shitty. Grayle sighed inwardly. Miss Desjardin has been reprimanded. John Hargensen's smile cooled thirty degrees. I'm afraid a reprimand will not be sufficient. I believe this has been the young, ah, lady's first year in a teaching capacity? Yes. We have found her to be eminently satisfactory. Apparently your definition of eminently satisfactory includes throwing students up against lockers and the ability to curse like a sailor? Grayle fenced As a lawyer, you must be aware that this state acknowledges the school's title to in loco parentisalong with full responsibility, we succeed to full parental rights during school hours. If you're not familiar, I'd advise you to check Monondock Consolidated School District vs. Cranepool or I'm familiar with the concept, Hargensen said. I'm also aware that neither the Cranepool case that you administrators are so fond of quoting or the Frick case cover anything remotely concerned with physical or verbal abuse. There is, however, the case of School District 4 vs. David. Are you familiar with it? Grayle was. George Kramer, the assistant principal of the consolidated high school in S.D. 14 was a poker buddy. George wasn't playing much poker any more. He was working for an insurance company after taking it upon himself to cut a student's hair. The school district had ultimately paid seven thousand dollars in damages, or about a thousand bucks a snip. Grayle started on another paper clip. Let's not quote cases at each other, Mr. Grayle. We're busy men. I don't want a lot of unpleasantness. I don't want a mess. My daughter is at home, and she will stay there Monday and Tuesday. That will complete her threeday suspension. That's all right. Another dismissive wave of the hand.


(catch fido good boy here's a nice bone) Here's what I want, Hargensen continued. One, prom tickets for my daughter. A girl's senior prom is important to her, and Chris is very distressed. Two, no contract renewal of the Desjardin woman. That's for me. I believe that if I cared to take the School Department to court, I could walk out with both her dismissal and a hefty damage settlement in my pocket. But I don't want to be vindictive. So court is the alternative if I don't agree to your demands? I understand that a School Committee hearing would precede that, but only as a formality. But yes, court would be the final result. Nasty for you. Another paper clip. For physical and verbal abuse, is that correct? Essentially. Mr. Hargensen, are you aware that your daughter and about ten of her peers threw sanitary napkins at a girl who was having her first menstrual period? A girl who was under the impression that she was bleeding to death? A faint frown creased Hargensen's features, as if someone had spoken in a distant room. I hardly think such an allegation is at issue. I am speaking of actions following Never mind, Grayle said. Never mind what you were speaking of. This girl, Carietta White, was called a dumb pudding and was told to plug it up and was subjected to various obscene gestures. She has not been in school this week at all. Does that sound like physical and verbal abuse to you? It does to me. I don't intend, Hargensen said, to sit here and listen to a tissue of halftruths or your standard schoolmaster lecture, Mr. Grayle. I know my daughter well enough to Here. Grayle reached into the wire IN basket beside the blotter and tossed a sheaf of pink cards across the desk. I doubt very much if you know the daughter represented in these cards half so well as you think you do. If you did, you might realize that it was about time for a trip to the woodshed. It's time you snubbed her close before she does someone a major damage. You aren't Ewen, four years, Grayle overrode him. Graduation slated June seventynine; next month. Tested I.Q. of a hundred and forty. Eightythree average. Nonetheless, I see she's been accepted at Oberlin. I'd guess someoneprobably you, Mr. Hargensenhas been yanking some pretty long strings. Seventyfour assigned detentions. Twenty of those have been for harassment of misfit pupils, I might add. Fifth wheels. I understand that Chris's clique calls them Mortimer Snerds. They find it all quite hilarious. She skipped out on fiftyone of those assigned detentions. At Chamberlain Junior High, one suspension for putting a firecracker in a girl's shoe . . . the note on the card says that little prank almost cost a little girl named Irma Swope two toes. The Swope girl has a harelip, I understand. I'm talking about your daughter, Mr. Hargensen. Does that tell you anything? Yes, Hargensen said, rising. A thin flush had suffused his features. It tells me I'll see you in court. And when I'm done with you, you'll be lucky to get a job selling encyclopedias door to door. Grayle also rose, angrily, and the two men faced each other across the desk. Let it be court, then, Grayle said. He noted a faint flick of surprise on Hargensen's face, crossed his fingers, and went in for what he hoped would be a knockoutor at least a TKO that would save Desjardin's job and take this silkass son of a bitch down a notch. You apparently haven't realized all the implications of in loco parentis in this matter, Mr. Hargensen. The same umbrella that covers your daughter also covers Carrie White. And the minute you file for damages on the grounds of physical and verbal abuse, we will crossfile against your daughter on those same grounds for Carrie White. Hargensen's mouth dropped open, then closed. You can't get away with a cheap gimmick like that, you Shyster lawyer? Is that the phrase you were looking for? Grayle smiled grimly. I believe you know your way out, Mr. Hargensen. The sanctions against your daughter stand. If you care to take the matter further, that is your right. Hargensen crossed the room stiffly, paused as if to add something, then left, barely restraining himself from the satisfaction of a hard doorslam. Grayle blew out breath. It wasn't hard to see where Chris Hargensen came by her selfwilled stubbornness. A. P. Morton entered a minute later. How did it go? Time'll tell, Morty, Grayle said. Grimacing, he looked at the twisted pile of paper clips. He was good for seven clips, anyway. That's some kind of record. Is he going to make it a civil matter? Don't know. It rocked him when I said we'd crosssue. I bet it did. Morton glanced at the phone on Grayle's desk. It's time we let the superintendent in on this bag of garbage, isn't it? Yes, Grayle said, picking up the phone. Thank God my unemployment insurance is paid up. Me too, Morton said loyally. From The Shadow Exploded (Appendix III) Carietta White passed in the following short verse as a poetry assignment in the seventh grade. Mr. Edwin King, who had Carrie for grade seven English, says I don't know why I saved it. She certainly doesn't stick out in my mind as a superior pupil, and this isn't a superior verse. She was very quiet and I can't remember her ever raising her hand even once in class. But something in this seemed to cry out. Jesus watches from the wall, But his face is cold as stone, And if he loves me As she tells me Why do I feel so all alone? The border of the paper on which this little verse is written is decorated with a great many cruciform figures which almost seem to dance. . . . Tommy was at baseball practice Monday afternoon, and Sue went down to the Kelly Fruit Company in The Center to wait for him. Kelly's was the closest thing to a high school hangout the loosely sprawled community of Chamberlain could boast since Sheriff Doyle had closed the rec center following a large drug bust. It was run by a morose fat man named Hubert Kelly who dyed his hair black and complained constantly that his electronic pacemaker was on the verge of electrocuting him. The place was a combination grocery, soda fountain, and gas stationthere was a rusted Jenny gas pump out front that Hubie had never bothered to change when the company merged. He also sold beer, cheap wine, dirty books, and a wide selection of obscure cigarettes such as Murads, King Sano, and Marvel Straights. The soda fountain was a slab of real marble, and there were four or five booths for kids unlucky enough or friendless enough to have no place to go and get drunk or stoned. An ancient pinball machine that always tilted on the third ball stuttered lights on and off in the back beside the rack of dirty books. When Sue walked in she saw Chris Hargensen immediately. She was sitting in one of the back booths. Her current amour, Billy Nolan, was looking through the latest issue of Popular Mechanics at the magazine rack. Sue didn't know what a rich, Popular girl like Chris saw in Nolan, who was like some strange time traveler from the 1950s with his greased hair, zipperbejeweled black leather jacket, and manifoldbubbling Chevrolet road machine. Sue! Chris hailed. Come on over! Sue nodded and raised a hand, although dislike rose in her throat like a paper snake. Looking at Chris was like looking through a slanted doorway to a place where Carrie White crouched with hands over her head. Predictably, she found her own hypocrisy (inherent in the wave and the nod) incomprehensible and sickening. Why couldn't she just cut her dead? A dime root beer, she told Hubie. Hubie had genuine draft root beer, and he served it in huge, frosted 1890s mugs. She had been looking forward to tipping a long one while she read a paper novel and waited for Tommyin spite of the havoc the root beers raised with her complexion, she was hooked. But she wasn't surprised to find she'd lost her taste for this one. How's your heart, Hubie? she asked. You kids, Hubie said, scraping the head off Sue's beer with a table knife and filling the mug the rest of the way. You don't understand nothing. I plugged in my electric razor this morning and got a hundred and ten volts right through this pacemaker. You kids don't know what that's like, am I right? I guess not. No. Christ Jesus forbid you should ever have to find out. How long can my old ticker take it? You kids'll all find out when I buy the farm and those urban renewal poops turn this place into a parking lot. That's a dime. She pushed her dime across the marble. Fifty million volts right up the old tubes, Hubie said darkly, and stared down at the small bulge in his breast pocket. Sue went over and slid carefully into the vacant side of Chris's booth. She was looking exceptionally pretty, her black hair held by a shamrockgreen band and a tight basque blouse that accentuated her firm, upthrust breasts. How are you, Chris? Bitchin' good, Chris said a little too blithely. You heard the latest? I'm out of the prom. I bet that cocksucker Grayle loses his job, though. Sue had heard the latest. Along with everyone at Ewen. Daddy's suing them, Chris went on. Over her shoulder Billeee! Come over here and say hi to Sue. He dropped his magazine and sauntered over, thumbs hooked into his sidehitched garrison belt, fingers dangling limply toward the stuffed crotch of his pegged levis. Sue felt a wave of unreality surge over her and fought an urge to put her hands to her face and giggle madly. Hi, Suze, Billy said. He slid in beside Chris and immediately began to massage her shoulder. His face was utterly blank. He might have been testing a cut of beef. I think we're going to crash the prom anyway, Chris said. As a protest or something. Is that right? Sue was frankly startled. No, Chris replied, dismissing it. I don't know. Her face suddenly twisted into an expression of fury, as abrupt and surprising as a tornado funnel. That goddamned Carrie White! I wish she'd take her goddam holy joe routine and stuff it straight up her ass! You'll get over it, Sue said. If only the rest of you had walked out with me . . . Jesus, Sue, why didn't you? We could have had them by the balls. I never figured you for an establishment pawn. Sue felt her face grow hot. I don't know about anyone else, but I wasn't being anybody's pawn. I took the punishment because I thought I earned it. We did a suckoff thing. End of statement. Bullshit. That fucking Carrie runs around saying everyone but her and her giltedged momma are going to hell and you can stick up for her? We should have taken those rags and stuffed them down her throat. Sure. Yeah. See you around, Chris. She pushed out of the booth. This time it was Chris who colored; the blood slammed to her face in a sudden rush, as if a red cloud had passed over some inner sun. Aren't you getting to be the Joan of Arc around here! I seem to remember you were in there pitching with the rest of us. Yes, Sue said, trembling. But I stopped. Oh, aren't you just it? Chris marveled. Oh my yes. Take your root beer with you. I'm afraid I might touch it and turn to gold. She didn't take her root beer. She turned and halfwalked, halfstumbled out. The upset inside her was very great, too great yet for either tears or anger. She was a getalong girl, and it was the first fight she had been in, physical or verbal, since gradeschool pigtail pulling. And it was the first time in her life that she had actively espoused a Principle. And of course Chris had hit her in just the right place, had hit her exactly where she was most vulnerable She was being a hypocrite, there seemed no way to avoid that, and deeply, sheathed within her and hateful, was the knowledge that one of the reasons she had gone to Miss Desjardin's hour of calisthenics and sweating runs around the gym floor had nothing to do with nobility. She wasn't going to miss her last Spring Ball for anything. Not for anything. Tommy was nowhere in sight. She began to walk back toward the school, her stomach churning unhappily. Little Miss Sorority. Suzy Creemcheese. The Nice Girl who only does It with the boy she plans to marrywith the proper Sunday supplement coverage, of course. Two kids. Beat the living shit out of them if they show any signs of honesty screwing, fighting, or refusing to grin each time some mythic honcho yelled frog. Spring Ball. Blue gown. Corsage kept all the afternoon in the fridge. Tommy in a white dinner jacket, cummerbund, black pants, black shoes. Parents taking photos posed by the livingroom sofa with Kodak Starflashes and Polaroid BigShots. Crepe masking the stark gymnasium girders. Two bands one rock, one mellow. No fifth wheels need apply. Mortimer Snerd, please keep out. Aspiring country club members and future residents of Kleen Korners only. The tears finally came and she began to run. From The Shadow Exploded (p. 60) The following excerpt is from a letter to Donna Kellogg from Christine Hargensen. The Kellogg girl moved from Chamberlain to Providence, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1978. She was apparently one of Chris Hargersen's few close friends and a confidante. The letter is postmarked May 17, 1979 So I'm out of the Prom and my yellowguts father says he won't give them what they deserve. But they're not going to get away with it. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, but I guarantee you everyone is going to get a big fucking surprise . . . It was the seventeenth. May seventeenth. She crossed the day off the calendar in her room as soon as she slipped into her long white nightgown. She crossed off each day as it passed with a heavy black felt pen, and she supposed it expressed a very bad attitude toward life. She didn't really care. The only thing she really cared about was knowing that Momma was going to make her go back to school tomorrow and she would have to face all of Them. She sat down in the small Boston rocker (bought and paid for with her own money) beside the window, closed her eyes, and swept Them and all the clutter of her conscious thoughts from her mind. It was like sweeping a floor. Lift the rug of your subconscious and sweep all the dirt under. Goodbye. She opened her eyes. She looked at the hairbrush on her bureau. Flex. She was lifting the hairbrush. It was heavy. It was like lifting a barbell with very weak arms. Oh. Grunt. The hairbrush slid to the edge of the bureau, slid out past the point where gravity should have toppled it, and then dangled, as if on an invisible string. Carrie's eyes had closed to slits. Veins pulsed in her temples. A doctor might have been interested in what her body was doing at that instant; it made no rational sense. Respiration had fallen to sixteen breaths per minute. Blood pressure up to 190100. Heartbeat up to 140higher than astronauts under the heavy gload of liftoff. Temperature down to 94.3. Her body was burning energy that seemed to be coming from nowhere and seemed to be going nowhere. An electroencephalogram would have shown alpha waves that were no longer waves at all, but great, jagged spikes. She let the hairbrush down carefully. Good. Last night she had dropped it. Lose all your points, go to jail. She closed her eyes again and rocked. Physical functions began to revert to the norm; her respiration speeded until she was nearly panting. The rocker had a slight squeak. Wasn't annoying, though. Was soothing. Rock, rock. Clear your mind. Carrie? Her mother's voice, slightly disturbed, floated up. (she's getting interference like the radio when you turn on the blender good good) Have you said your prayers, Carrie? I'm saying them, she called back. Yes. She was saying them, all right. She looked at her small studio bed. Flex. Tremendous weight. Huge. Unbearable. The bed trembled and then the end came up perhaps three inches. It dropped with a crash. She waited, a small smile playing about her lips, for Momma to call upstairs angrily. She didn't. So Carrie got up, went to her bed, and slid between the cool sheets. Her head ached and she felt giddy, as she always did after these exercise sessions. Her heart was pounding in a fierce, scary way. She reached over, turned off the light, and lay back. No pillow. Momma didn't allow her a pillow. She thought of imps and familiars and witches (am i a witch momma the devil's whore) riding through the night, souring milk, overturning butter churns, blighting crops while They huddled inside their houses with hex signs scrawled on Their doors. She closed her eyes, slept, and dreamed of huge, living stones crashing through the night, seeking out Momma, seeking out Them. They were trying to run, trying to hide. But the rock would not hide them; the dead tree gave no shelter. From My Name Is Susan Snell by Susan Snell (New York Simon  Schuster, 1986), pp. iiv There's one thing no one has understood about what happened in Chamberlain on Prom Night. The press hasn't understood it, the scientists at Duke University haven't understood it, David Congress hasn't understood italthough his The Shadow Exploded is probably the only halfdecent book written on the subjectand certainly the White Commission, which used me as a handy scapegoat, did not understand it. This one thing is the most fundamental fact We were kids. Carrie was seventeen, Chris Hargensen was seventeen, I was seventeen, Tommy Ross was eighteen, Billy Nolan (who spent a year repeating the ninth grade, presumably before he learned how to shoot his cuffs during examinations) was nineteen. . . . Older kids react in more socially acceptable ways than younger kids, but they still have a way of making bad decisions, of overreacting, of underestimating. In the first section which follows this introduction I must show these tendencies in myself as well as I am able. Yet the matter which I am going to discuss is at the root of my involvement in Prom Night, and if I am to clear my name, I must begin by recalling scenes which I find particularly painful. . . . I have told this story before, most notoriously before the White Commission, which received it with incredulity. In the wake of two hundred deaths and the destruction of an entire town, it is so easy to forget one thing We were kids. We were kids. We were kids trying to do our best. . . . You must be crazy. He blinked at her, not willing to believe that he had actually heard it. They were at his house, and the television was on but forgotten. His mother had gone over to visit Mrs. Klein across the street. His father was in the cellar workroom making a birdhouse. Sue looked uncomfortable but determined. It's the way I want it, Tommy. Well it's not the way I want it. I think it's the craziest goddam thing I ever heard. Like something you might do on a bet. Her face tightened. Oh? I thought you were the one making the big speeches the other night. But when it comes to putting your money where your big fat mouth is Wait, whoa. He was unoffended, grinning. I didn't say no, did I? Not yet, anyway. You Wait. Just wait. Let me talk. You want me to ask Carrie White to the Spring Ball. Okay, I got that. But there's a couple of things I don't understand. Name them. She leaned forward. First, what good would it do? And second, what makes you think she'd say yes if I asked her? 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 Carrie's groups, I bet I would have been in on even more. It seemed like . . . oh, a big laugh. Girls can be catmean 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 showerroom 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 Whitemostly girls, and that's a laughbut 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. Yes. But I think she'll say no. You've overestimated my boxoffice 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 peoplemostly menwho 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 skeptic 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 icecream 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 breasts except for token nubs. The skirt was colorful but awful all the same It fell to a 1958 midshin hem in an odd and clumsy Aline. The calves were strong and rounded (the attempt to conceal these with heathery kneesocks 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 afterward he had no trouble recalling it, as one does with dreams or the sensation of dj vu. He felt a dizziness as if his mind was no longer controlling his bodythe miserable, outofcontrol 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 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 Fourhis class was the other waywalking 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. 7476) Probably no other aspect of the Carrie White affair has been so misunderstood, secondguessed, and shrouded in mystery as the part played by Thomas Everett Ross, Carrie's illstarred 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 a Lee Harvey Oswaldtrigger 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 showerroom 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 highschoolage adolescents to feel that they have to atone for anythingparticularly for an offense 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 selfimage 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 dispatched quickly and without mercy. Jerome, of course, is absolutely rightabout birds, at any rateand 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. 1018) were at the center 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 maneuvering an unstable girl into a situation of extreme stress. This author doesn't believe that likely in light 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 cliquecentered athlete; the phrase dumb jock expresses this view of Tommy Ross perfectly. It is true that Ross was an athlete of aboveaverage 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 straightA 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 included 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? Ross's school recordswhich cannot, according to state law, be photostated herewhen taken with classmates' recollections and the comments of relatives, neighbors, and teachers, form a picture of an extraordinary young man. This is a fact that jells very badly with Professor Jerome's picture of a peerworshiping, sly young tough. He apparently had a high enough tolerance to verbal abuse and enough independence from his peer group to ask Carrie in the first place. In fact, Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity a socially conscious young man. No case will be made here for his sainthood. There is none to be made. But intensive research has satisfied me that neither was he a human chicken in a publicschool barnyard, joining mindlessly in the ruin of a weaker hen . . . She lay (i am not afraid not afraid of her) on her bed with an arm thrown over her eyes. It was Saturday night. If she was to make the dress she had in mind, she would have to start tomorrow at the (i'm not afraid momma) latest.