Stephen King - Carrie

Chris went red.” I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to that.”

Desjardin had not been able to get the image of Carrie out of her mind all weekend, Carrie screaming, blubbering, a wet napkin plastered squarely in the middle of her pubic hair-and her own sick, angry reaction.

And now, as Chris tried to storm out past her, she reached out and slammed her against a row of dented, olive-colored 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 you-or any of you girls-think I'm wearing my teacher hat right now, you're making a bad mistake. I just want you all to know that you did a shitty thing on Friday. A really shitty thing.”

Chris Hargensen was sneering at the floor. The rest of the girls were looking miserably at anything but their gym instructor. Sue found herself looking into the shower stall-the scene of the crime-and jerked her glance elsewhere. None of them had ever heard a teacher call anything shitty before.

“Did any of you stop to think that Carrie White has feelings? Do any of you ever stop to think? Sue? Fern? Helen? Jessica? Any of you? You think she's ugly. Well, you're all ugly. I saw it on Friday morning.”

Chris Hargensen was mumbling about her father being a lawyer.

“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. 6~6l):

In the opinion of this researcher, a great many of the people who have researched the Carrie White matter-either for the scientific journals or for the popular press-have placed a mistaken emphasis on a relatively fruitless search for incidents of telekinesis in the girl's childhood. To strike a rough analogy, this is like spending years researching the early incidents of 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 300-pound stereo cabinet tipped over and records flew all over the living room, dive-bombing 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. Lift 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 witness-ship 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 Friday-the 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 paper-clip-bender, napkin-ripper, corner-folder. For John Hargensen, the town's leading legal light, he was bringing up the heavy ammunition-a whole box of heavy-duty clips in the middle of his desk blotter.

Hargensen was a tall, impressive man with a self-confident way of moving and the kind of sure, mobile features that said this was a man superior at the game of one-step-ahead 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 off-the-rack job to shame. His briefcase was thin, real leather, and bound with glittering stainless steel. The smile was faultless and full of many capped teeth-a smile to make the hearts of lady jurors melt like butter in a warm skillet. His grip was major league all the way-firm, 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 forty-five 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