Chapter Text
Screams, loud, painful. Crying, crying out to God for help, mercy. A bible dripping wet is slumped pathetically on the stairs. Splatters of blood make a trial to the woman lying in bed. Withering in pain and despair.
“Help me Lord, I’m dying.”
Another scream and the woman curled into herself.
“Lord protect me in my hour of death- ”
One final blood curdling scream, than its silent.
The woman reaches down between her legs and slowly pulls back her night gown. The little thing whimpers and squirms.
“Cut it down,” the woman shakes her head. “Cut it down.”
She reaches for the scissors in the bedside table; she holds them above her head and brings them down. They stop, inches away from the little, bloody body. The baby starts to cry.
A heartbeat.
The woman puts down the scissors and picks up her child; she brings it to her chest and begins to cry.
16 years later.
She walked between the students, head down and eyes anywhere people weren't. She stopped and lifted them a moment to watch the tall, pretty blond girl and her friends come out into the pool area. She ducked and watched out of the corner of her eye as Tommy Ross, the most popular and handsome boy in school kiss his girlfriend.
She looked away.
The P.E teacher blew the whistle. “Come on ladies, in the water! Caps on please!”
She put her swimming cap on and lowered herself into the water, as far away as possible while still being in the pool. She watched the girls jumping and splashing water, trying to hit the volley ball over the net.
“Don’t be afraid of the ball ladies,” Miss Desjardin called from the edge of the pool.
One of the girls gave the ball a particularly hard hit and it went up, and came down inches away from her.
“Okay, let’s get Carry White in the game,” Miss Desjardin said, “Can’t stand on the sidelines all the time, come on.”
Carrie inched her way towards the other girls.
“Carry serve,” Miss Desjardin called.
“Yeah, Carrie, throw it yeah!” Her team mates clapped. Carrie hit the ball; it hit the blond girl in the back of the head. The other girls gasped. Sue turned to Carrie touching the back of her head.
She backed away in horror. One of the girls started laughing, setting off a chain reaction.
“Ha, ha, so funny Chris,” Sue said, pushing her friend gently. She laughed harder.
Carrie slowly walked forward laughing nervously. Chris turned and threw the ball towards her, “You eat shit.”
The water splashed her, and her smile disappeared.
The other girls started laughing harder.
The locker room was filled with shouts, echoes, and the subterranean sound of showers splashing on tile. The girls had been playing volleyball in Period One, and their morning sweat was light and eager. Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into. Steam hung in the air; the place might have been an Egyptian bathhouse except for the constant rumble of the Jacuzzi whirlpool in the corner. Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard balls after a hard break.
“—so Tommy said he hated it on me and I—”
“—I'm going with my sister and her husband. He picks his nose but so does she, so they're very—”
“—shower after school and—”
Carrie quietly walked past the girls into the shower. After everyone went out she removed the towel and turned on the water. Carrie was petite, her form was soft and her eyes gentle, she could probably even be called pretty if it weren't for the dullness in her eyes. Depression hung over her like a cloud, dulling her features making her blond hair look sickish and her skin pale; and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was. She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewen High had individual—and thus private—showers, like the high schools at Westover or Lewiston. They stared. They always stared.
She closed her eyes and washed her body with a piece of soap. She dropped it and bent to pick it up. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened in a soundless scream. The soap was covered in blood.
She shrieked.
The sound was very loud in the humid locker room.
Carrie frantically grabbed the towel and stumbled out of the shower. “He- help me!” she sobbed grabbing on to one of the girls.
Sue jumped back startled out of her conversation with Chris, “Get off me you freak!”
“Look at what she did to your shirt!” Chris said, pointing at the blood smeared all over Sue.
Carrie reached out as the girls lunged back yelling at her to stop.
“Help,” Carrie gasped, “I’m bleeding to death!”
“Oh my god, its period blood,” Chris said in disgust.
Sue’s eyes widened, “Blood? Oh my god!”
Carrie’s calls for help grew louder, “It’s just your period,” Chris yelled back. “Plug it up,” she said handing a tampon to her. Carrie reached out, Chris pulled her hand back smeared in Carrie’s blood. The girls started laughing, looking at it in disgust and cryptic glee. A tampon suddenly struck her in the chest and fell with a plop at her feet. A red flower stained the absorbent cotton and spread. Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins, some from purses, some from the broken dispenser on the wall.
They flew like snow and the chant became: “Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it—”
Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing—a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There's no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm—It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to scream and back away, flailing her arms and sobbing. It was at this point, when looking back, that some of them would claim surprise. Yet there had been all these years, all these years of let's short-sheet Carrie's bed at Christian Youth Camp and I found this love letter from Carrie to Flash Bobby Pickett let's copy it and pass it around and hide her underpants somewhere and put this snake in her shoe and duck her again, duck her again; Carrie tagging along stubbornly on biking trips, known one year as pudd'n and the next year as truck-face, not able to catch up; catching poison ivy from urinating in the bushes and everyone finding out (hey, scratch-ass, your bum itch?); Billy Preston putting peanut butter in her hair that time she fell asleep in study hall; the pinches, the legs outstretched in school aisles to trip her up, the books knocked from her desk, the obscene postcard tucked into her purse; Carrie on the church picnic and kneeling down clumsily to pray and the seam of her old madras skirt splitting along the zipper like the sound of a huge wind-breakage; Carrie always missing the ball, even in kickball, falling on her face in Modern Dance during their sophomore year and chipping a tooth, running into the net during volley-ball; wearing stockings that were always run, running, or about to run, even the time Chris Hargensen called up after school from the Kelly Fruit Company downtown and asked her if she knew that pig poop was spelled C-A-R-R-I-E: Suddenly all this and the critical mass was reached. The ultimate shit-on, gross-out, put-down, long searched for, was found. Fission.
The chant grew louder, till it swallowed Carrie’s cries. Chris pulled out her iphone and began filming it. Carrie backed into the side of one of the four large shower compartments and slowly collapsed into a sitting position. Slow, helpless groans jerked out of her.
Sue stopped, she watched and felt as if something cracked inside her. Sue said slowly, hesitantly “Wait- I, stop.” Anger and a sort of wild fear gripped her, and before she knew what she was doing she pushed between the crowd of girls yelling at them to stop, just stop! When she finally broke free everything went quiet. The girls watched her, their eyes shining solemnly. Silently asking why she, popular, perfect Sue Snell, dared break the bond between those on top and those less fortunate.
She didn't answer; she didn't even think she had an answer to give to them. A broken sob came from behind her and she turned back to Carrie.
“All right, it’s okay, it’s okay-”she said soothingly, Carrie crawled towards her desperately, Sue was vaguely aware of how thankful she was that Carrie still held the towel tightly against herself.
“Okay, Carrie, can you stand up, ca- an you please stand up?”
Carrie pathetically clawed at her skirt, torn between reaching out, and holding her stomach where an acute stab of pain pierced her, “It hurts, it hurts!” she sobbed.
Before giving her time to second guess herself Sue dropped to floor on top of all the bloody tampons and sanitary napkins and wrapped her arms around the girl, whether to choke her or give her some form of comfort she wasn't sure. Carrie writhed in her grasp, clutching frantically at Sue. She tightened her hold not sure if it was cutting off Carrie’s air circulation, until the girl’s sobs started coming less frequently.
That was when the door pumped open with a flat and hurried bang and Miss Desjardin burst in to see what the matter was. When the girls were gone to their Period Two classes and the bell had been silenced (several of them had slipped quietly out the back door before Miss Desjardin could begin to take names), Miss Desjardin not knowing what to make of the two bloody girls franticly pulled them apart. Sue fell back, and Carrie started hyperventilating all over again.
“Carrie- Carrie, honey calm down-"
“Miss Desjardin, I don’t think she knows what her period is,” Sue said.
“No!” Carrie yelled, the lights started flickering, “NO! NO!-"
Miss Desjardin employed the standard tactic for hysterics: She slapped Carrie smartly across the face. She hardly would have admitted the pleasure the act gave her, and she certainly would have denied that she regarded Carrie as a small, pathetic nobody. A first-year teacher, she still believed that she thought all children were good.
“Everyone get out, now- just get out!” She yelled over her shoulder. She turned back to a stunned Carrie, “Oh, it’s okay, come on, it’s okay.” A terrible and black foreknowledge grew in Rita Desjardin's mind. It was incredible, could not be. She herself had begun menstruation shortly after her eleventh birthday and had gone to the head of the stairs to yell down excitedly: “Hey, Mum, I'm on the rag!”
“Carrie?” she said now. She advanced toward the girl. “Carrie?”
Carrie flinched away. At the same instant, a rack of softball bats in the corner fell over with a large, echoing bang. They rolled every which way, making Desjardin jump.
“Carrie, is this your first period?” But now that the thought had been admitted, she hardly had to ask. The blood was dark and flowing with terrible heaviness.
Both of Carrie's legs were smeared and splattered with it, as though she had waded through a river of blood. “It hurts,” Carrie groaned. “My stomach . . .”
“That passes,” Miss Desjardin said. Pity and self-shame met in her and mixed uneasily. “It’s okay, totally normal.You have to . . . uh, stop the flow of blood. You—”
Carrie stopped listening; she painfully looked up and watched as the last of the girls emptied out of the locker room. At the last moment, Sue looked back. There was a bright flash overhead, followed by a flashgun-like pop as a light bulb sizzled and went out. Miss Desjardin cried out with surprise, and it occurred to her
(the whole damn place is falling in)
that this kind of thing always seemed to happen around Carrie when she was upset, as if bad luck dogged her every step. The thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come. She took one of the sanitary napkins from the broken dispenser and unwrapped it. “Look,” she said. “Like this”
When Miss Desjardin led Carrie up to the office fifteen minutes later, the halls were mercifully empty. Classes droned onward behind closed doors. Carrie's shrieks had finally ended, but she had continued to weep with steady regularity.
She tried twice to explain the commonplace reality of menstruation, but Carrie clapped her hands over her ears and continued to cry. Mr. Morton, the assistant principal, was out of his office in a flash when they entered. Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, two boys waiting for the lecture due them for cutting French I, goggled around from their chairs. “Come in,” Mr. Morton said briskly. “Come right in.” He glared over Desjardin's shoulder at the boys, who were staring at the bloody hand print on her shorts. “What are you looking at?”
“Blood,” Henry said, and smiled with a kind of vacuous surprise.
“Two detention periods,” Morton snapped. He glanced down at the bloody hand print and blinked. He closed the door behind them and began pawing through the top drawer of his filing cabinet for a school accident form. “Are you all right, uh—”
“Carrie,” Desjardin supplied.
“Carrie White.” Mr. Morton had finally located an accident form. There was a large coffee stain on it.
“You won't need that, Mr. Morton.”
“I suppose it was the trampoline. We just . . . I won't?”
“No. But I think Carrie should be allowed to go home for the rest of the day. And do study hall instead of P.E, she’s had a fighting experience.” Her eyes flashed a signal which he caught but could not interpret. She turned to Carrie, “Carrie honey, I’m so sorry that I slapped you,” she paused, “I could've handled that better… You know it’s totally normal for a young girls to get their periods, it usually happens a little bit earlier. Is this your first time?”
Carrie remained quiet; she lowered her head, but did not answer.
Desjardin sighed and moved to take the seat next to her, “Honey do you know what’s happening to your body? Do you know what it means?”
“I don’t know, I felt something moving down there.” Carrie said.
Mr. Morton quickly bit his tongue before betraying any sign of how disgusted he was. “Well, maybe you could see a counselor- or a nurse…”
Desjardin stared at him.
He blinked, “What I need to know is who started throwing… things, uhm-“
“It was Chris Hargensen and all her friends-“Desjardin began.
“Cassie-“
“Carrie,” Desjardin corrected.
“Carrie, did Chris Hargensen start this?” Mr. Morton said.
Desjardin looked at Carrie, “Honey you don’t have to protect them, what they did was unforgivable.”
She didn't say anything.
Mr. Morton sighed, “Okay look it doesn't seem like Carrie is going to point a finger so Miss Desjardin, I need you to get to the bottom of this. Let the punishment fit the crime.”
She nodded, “Okay, you can be excused; we’re going to call your mom, okay?”
For the first time during the conversation Carrie looked up, “What?”
“We’re going to have to call your mother… I know we've had trouble in the past ever since the state stopped letting her home school you, but we've got to bring her into this-“
“No,” Carrie gasped, shaking her head.
“Sweetie we have no choice, we have to call your mom-“
“No!” she screamed suddenly. Morton recoiled, and Miss Desjardin jumped as if struck from behind. The water jug suddenly burst apart, sending water and bits of glass crashing to the floor.
Carrie got up and quickly left the office. She sat on the bench outside the door and tried breathing.
“Hey,” one of the boys besides her smirked and made a crude gesture.
She dropped her head and closed her eyes, waiting for her doom. When she opened them her mother blocked her whole view. She was not smiling.
She took Carrie and they walked out of the building attached at the hip. Miss Desjardin followed them, making sure to keep a good pack of students between her and Margret White. She watched as Carrie got into the car. What surprised her is when Carrie looked out; she followed her line of vision and saw Sue. Desjardin vaguely remembered that a blond girl had been holding Carrie when the whole incident happened. She had a strong feeling she knew who the blond girl was, Carrie probably knew also. Sue, for her part, either didn't see or pretended not to see that she was being watched. Miss Desjardin looked back at Carrie, but the car was already gone. Something big was going to happen, she could feel it; she just didn't know how she felt about it.