Carrie Read Online Free Page A

Carrie had hidden her shower things in her school locker and had showered anyway, taking part in a naked ritual that was shameful and embarrassing to her in hopes that the circle around her might fade a little, just a little—
    (but today o today)
    Tommy Erbter, age five, was biking up the other side of the street. He was a small, intense-looking boy on a twenty-inch Schwinn with bright-red training wheels. He was humming “Scoobie Doo, where are you?” under his breath. He saw Carrie, brightened, and stuck out his tongue.
    â€œHey, ol' fart-face! Of prayin' Carrie!”
    Carrie glared at him with sudden smoking rage. The bike wobbled on its training wheels and suddenly fell over. Tommy screamed. The bike was on top of him. Carrie smiled and walked on. The sound of Tommy's wails was sweet, jangling music in her ears.
    If only she could make something like that happen whenever she liked.
    (just did)
    She stopped dead seven houses up from her own, staring blankly at nothing. Behind her, Tommy was climbing tearfully back onto his bike, nursing a scraped knee. He yelled something at her, but she ignored it. She had been yelled at by experts.
    She had been thinking:
    (fall off that bike kid push you off that bike and split your rotten head)
and something had
happened.
    Her mind had . . . had . . . she groped for a word. Had
flexed.
That was not just right, but it was very close. There had been a curious mental bending, almost like an elbow curling a dumbbell. That wasn't exactly right either, but it was all she could think of. An elbow with no strength. A weak baby muscle.
    Flex.
    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 hate-love-dread 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 Jesus—even the Catholics—up 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