Monday morning; Principal Grayle and his understudy, Pete Morton, were having coffee in Grayle's office.
“No word from Hargensen yet?” Morty asked. His lips curled into a John Wayne leer that was a little frightened around the edges.
“Not a peep. And Christine has stopped upping off about how her father is going to send us down the road.” Grayle blew on his coffee with a long face.
“You don't exactly seem to be turning cartwheels.”
“I'm not. Did you know Carrie White is going to the prom?”
Morty blinked. “With who? The Beak?” The Beak was Freddy Holt, another of Ewen's misfits. He weighed perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, and the casual observer might be tempted to believe that sixty of it was nose.
“No,” Gravle said. “With Tommy Ross.”
Morty swallowed his coffee the wrong way and went into a coughing fit.
“That's the way I felt,” Grayle said.
“What about his girl friend? The little Snell girl?”
“I think she put him up to it,” Grayle said. “She certainly seemed guilty enough about what happened to Carrie when I talked to her. Now she's on the Decoration Committee, happy as a clam, just as if not going to her Senior prom was nothing at all.”
“Oh,” Morty said wisely.
“And Hargensen-I think he must have talked to some people and discovered we really could sue him on behalf of Carrie White if we wanted to. I think he's cut his losses. It's the daughter that's worrying me.”
“Do you think there's going to be an incident Friday night?”
“I don't know. I do know Chris has got a lot of friends who are going to he there. And she's going around with that Billy Nolan mess; he's got a zoo full of friends, too. The kind that make a career out of scaring pregnant ladies. Chris Hargensen has him tied around her finger, from what I've heard.”
“Are you afraid of anything specific?”
Grayle made a restless gesture. “Specific? No. But I've been in the game long enough to know it's a bad situation. Do you remember the Stadler game in seventy-six?”
Morty nodded. It would take more than the passage of three years to obscure the memory of the Ewen-Stadler game. Bruce Trevor had been a marginal student but a fantastic basketball player. Coach Gaines didn't like him, but Trevor was going to put Ewen in the area tournament for the first time in ten years. He was cut from the team a week before Ewen's last must-win game against the Stadler Boheats. A regular announced locker inspection had uncovered a kilo of marijuana behind Trevor's civics book. Ewen lost the game-and their shot at the tourney-10~48. But no one remembered that; what they remembered was the riot that had interrupted the game in the fourth period. Led by Bruce Trevor, who righteously claimed he had been bum rapped, it resulted in four hospital admissions. One of them had been the Stadler coach, who had been hit over the head with a first-aid kit.
“I've got that kind of feeling,” Grayle said. “A hunch. Someone's going to come with rotten apples or something.”
“Maybe you're psychic,” Morty said.
From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 92-93):
It is now generally agreed that the TK phenomenon is a genetic-recessive occurrence-but the opposite of a disease like hemophilia, which becomes overt only in males. In that disease, once called “King's Evil,” the gene is recessive in the female and is carried harmlessly. Male offspring, however, are “bleeders.” This disease is generated only if an afflicted male marries a woman carrying the recessive gene. If the offspring of such union is male, the result will be a hemophiliac son. If the offspring is female, the result will he a daughter who is a carrier. It should be emphasized that the hemophilia gene may be carried recessively in the male as a part of his genetic make-up. But if he marries a woman with the same outlaw gene, the result will be hemophilia if the offspring is male.
In the case of royal families, where intermarriage was common, the chance of the gene reproducing once it entered the family tree were high-thus the name King's Evil. Hemophilia also showed up in significant quantities in Appalachia during the earlier part of this century, and is commonly noticed in those cultures where incest and the marriage of first cousins is common.
With the TK phenomenon, the male appears to be the carrier; the TK gene may be recessive in the female, but dominates only in the female. It appears that Ralph White carried the gene. Margaret Brigham, by purest chance, also carried the outlaw gene sign, but we may be fairly confident that it was recessive, as no information has ever been found to indicate that she had telekinetic powers resembling her daughter's. Investigations are now being conducted into the life of Margaret Brigham's grandmother, Sadie Cochran-for, if the dominant/recessive pattern obtains with TK as it does with hemophilia, Mrs. Cochran may have been TK dominant.
If the issue of the White marriage had been male, the result would have been another carrier. Chances that the mutation would have died with him would have been excellent, as neither side of the Ralph White-Margaret Brigham alliance had cousins of a comparable age for the theoretical male ottspring to marry. And the chances of meeting and marrying another woman with the TK gene at random would be small. None of the teams working on the problem have yet isolated the gene.
Surely no one can doubt, in light of the Maine holocaust, that isolating this gene must become one of medicine's number-one priorities. The hemophiliac, or H gene, produces male issue with a lack of blood platelets. The telekinetic, or TK gene, produces female Typhoid Marys capable of destroying almost at will…
Wednesday afternoon.
Susan and fourteen other students-The Spring Ball Decoration Committee, no less-were working on the huge mural that would hang behind the twin bandstands on Friday night. The theme was Springtime in Venice (who picked these hokey themes, Sue wondered. She had been a student at Ewen for four years, had attended two Balls, and she still didn't know. Why did the goddam thing need a theme, anyway? Why not just have a sock hop and be done with it?); George Chizmar, Ewen's most artistic student, had done a small chalk sketch of gondolas on a canal at sunset and a gondolier in a huge straw fedora leaning against the tiller as a gorgeous panoply of pinks and reds and oranges stained both sky and water. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. He had redrawn it in silhouette on a huge fourteen-by-twenty-foot canvas flat, numbering the various sections to go with the various chalk hues. Now the Committee was patiently coloring it in, like children crawling over a huge page in a giant's coloring book. Still, Sue thought, looking at her hands and forearms, both heavily dusted with pink chalk, it was going to be the prettiest prom ever.
Next to her, Helen Shyres sat up on her haunches, stretched, and groaned as her back popped. She brushed a hank of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a rose-colored smear.
“How in hell did you talk me into this?”
“You want it to be nice, don't you?” Sue mimicked Miss Ceer, the spinster chairman (apt enough term for Miss Mustache) of the Decoration Committee.
“Yeah, but why not the Refreshment Committee or the Entertainment Committee? Less back, more mind. The mind, that's my area. Besides, you're not even-” She bit down on the words.
“Going?” Susan shrugged and picked up her chalk again. She had a monstrous writer's cramp. “No, but I still want it to be nice.” She added shyly: “Tommy's going.”
They worked in silence for a bit, and then Helen stopped again. No one was near them; the closest was Holly Marshall, on the other end of the mural, coloring the gondola's keel.
“Can I ask you about it, Sue?” Helen asked finally. “God, everybody's talking.”
“Sure.” Sue stopped coloring and flexed her hand. “Maybe I ought to tell someone, just so the story stays straight. I asked Tommy to take Carrie. I'm hoping it'll bring her out of herself a little… knock down some of the barriers. I think I owe her that much.”
“Where does that put the rest of us?” Helen asked without rancor.
Sue shrugged. “You have to make up your own mind about what we did, Helen. I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't want people to think I'm, uh
“Playing martyr?”
“Something like that.”
“And Tommy went along with it?” This was the part that most fascinated her.
“Yes,” Sue said, and did not elaborate. After a pause: “I suppose the other kids think I'm stuck up.”
Helen thought it over. “Well… they're all talking about it. But most of them still think you're okay. Like you said, you make your own decisions. There is, however, a small dissenting faction.” She snickered dolefully.
“The Chris Hargensen people?”
“And the Billy Nolan people. God, he's scuzzy.
“She doesn't like me much?” Sue said, making it a question.
“Susie, she hates your guts.”
Susan nodded, surprised to find the thought both distressed and excited her.
“I heard her father was going to sue the School Department and then he changed his mind,” she said.
Helen shrugged. “She hasn't made any friends out of this,” she said. “I don't know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I don't even know my own mind.”
They worked on in silence. Across the room, Don Barrett was putting up an extension ladder preparatory to gilding the overhead steel beams with crepe paper.
“Look,” Helen said. “There goes Chris now.”
Susan looked up just in time to see her walking into the cubbyhole office to the left of the gym entrance. She was wearing wine-colored velvet hot pants and a silky white blouse-no bra, from the way things were jiggling up front-a dirty old man's dream, Sue thought sourly, and then wondered what Chris could want in where the Prom Committee had set up shop. Of course Tina Blake was on the Committee and the two of them were thicker than thieves.
Stop it, she scolded herself. Do you want her in sackcloth and ashes?
Yes, she admitted. A part of her wanted just that.
“Helen?”
“H mmmm?”
“Are they going to do something?”
Helen's face took on an unwilling masklike quality. “I don't know.” The voice was light, overinnocent.
“Oh,” Sue said noncommittally.
(you know you know something: accept something goddammit if it's only yourself tell me)
They continued to color, and neither spoke. She knew it wasn't as all right as Helen had said. It couldn't be; she would never be quite the same golden girl again in the eyes of her mates. She had done an ungovernable, dangerous thing-she had broken cover and shown her face.
The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.
