Carrie Read Online Free

Henry?”
    â€œCertainly.” She left.
    He leaned back and let the whole business slide out of his mind. When Billy deLois and Henry Trennant, class-cutters
extraordinaire,
slunk in, he glowered at them happily and prepared to talk tough.
    As he often told Hank Grayle, he ate class-cutters for lunch.

    Graffiti scratched on a desk in Chamberlain Junior High School:
    Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, but Carrie White eats shit.

    She walked down Ewen Avenue and crossed over to Carlin at the stoplight on the corner. Her head was down and she was trying to think of nothing. Cramps came and went in great, gripping waves, making her slow down and speed up like a car with carburetor trouble. She stared at the sidewalk. Quartz glittering in the cement. Hopscotch grids scratched in ghostly, rain-faded chalk. Wads of gum stamped flat. Pieces of tinfoil and penny-candy wrappers.
They all hate and they never stop. They never get tired of it.
A penny lodged in a crack. She kicked it.
Imagine Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy. With rats crawling all over her face. Good. Good. That would be good.
A dog turd with a foot-track in the middle of it. A roll of blackened caps that some kid had banged with a stone. Cigarette butts.
Crash in her head with a rock, with a boulder. Crash in all their heads. Good. Good.
    (saviour jesus meek and mild)
    That was good for Momma, all right for her. She didn't have to go among the wolves every day of every year, out into a carnival of laughers, joke-tellers, pointers, snickerers. And didn't Momma say there would be a Day of Judgment
    (the name of that star shall be wormwood and they shall be scourged with scorpions)
    and an angel with a sword?
    If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd's crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming—a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness.
    And if only she could be His sword and His arm.
    She had tried to fit. She had defied Momma in a hundred little ways, had tried to erase the red-plague circle that had been drawn around her from the first day she had left the controlled environment of the small house on Carlin Street and had walked up to the Barker Street Grammar School with her Bible under her arm. She could still remember that day, the stares, and the sudden, awful silence when she had gotten down on her knees before lunch in the school cafeteria—the laughter had begun on that day and had echoed up through the years.
    The red-plague circle was like blood itself—you could scrub and scrub and scrub and still it would be there, not erased, not clean. She had never gotten on her knees in a public place again, although she had not told Momma that. Still, the original memory remained, with her and with
them.
She had fought Momma tooth and nail over the Christian Youth Camp, and had earned the money to go herself by taking in sewing. Momma told her darkly that it was Sin, that it was Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists and that it was Sin and Backsliding. She forbade Carrie to swim at the camp. Yet although she
had
swum and
had
laughed when they ducked her (until she couldn't get her breath any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream) and had tried to take part in the camp's activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol' prayin' Carrie and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. “For strait is the gate,” Momma said grimly in the taxi, and at home she had sent Carrie to the closet for six hours.
    Momma had, of course, forbade her to shower with the other girls;