or town meetings, the administration's view tended to carry the day.
Now lovable Mort, still secretly nursing his jammed thumb, smiled at Carrie and said, “Go along then if you like, Miss Wright. Or would you like to sit a spell and just collect yourself)”
“I'll go,” she muttered, and swiped at her hair. She got up, then looked around at Miss Desjardin. Her eyes were wide open and dark with knowledge. “They laughed at me. Threw things. They've always laughed.”
Desjardin could only look at her helplessly.
Carrie left.
For a moment there was silence; Morton and Desjardin watched her go. Then, with an awkward throat-clearing sound, Mr. Morton hunkered down carefully and began to sweep together the debris from the fallen ashtray.
“What was that all about?”
She sighed and looked at the drying maroon handprint on her shorts with distaste. “She got her period. Her first period. In the shower.”
Morton cleared his throat again and his cheeks went pink. The sheet of paper he was sweeping with moved even faster. “Isn't she a bit, uh-”
“Old for her first? Yes. That's what made it so traumatic for her. Although I can't understand why her mother… ” The thought trailed off, forgotten for the moment. “I don't think I handled it very well, Morty, but I didn't understand what was going on. She thought she was bleeding to death.”
He stared up sharply.
“I don't believe she knew there was such a thing as menstruation until half an hour ago.
“Hand me that little brush there, Miss Desjardin. Yes, that's it.” She handed him a little brush with the legend Chamberlain Hardware and Lumber Company NEVER Brushes You Off written up the handle. He began to brush his pile of ashes onto the paper. “There's still going to be some for the vacuum cleaner, I guess. This deep pile is miserable. I thought I set that ashtray back on the desk further. Funny how things fall over.” He bumped his head on the desk and sat up abruptly. “It's hard for me to believe that a girl in this or any other high school could get through three years and still be alien, to the fact of menstruation, Miss Desjardin.”
“It's even more difficult for me,” she said. “But it's all I can think of to explain her reaction. And she's always been a group scapegoat.”
“Um.” He funneled the ashes and butts into the wastebasket and dusted his hands. “I've placed her, I think. White.
Margaret White's daughter. Must be. That makes it a little easier to believe.” He sat down behind his desk and smiled apologetically. “There's so many of them. After five years or so, they all start to merge into one group face. You call boys by their brother's names, that type of thing. It's hard.”
“Of course it is.”
“Wait 'til you've been in the game twenty years, like me,” he said morosely, looking down at his blood blister. “You get kids that look familiar and find out you had their daddy the year you started teaching. Margaret White was before my time, for which I am profoundly grateful. She told Mrs. Bicente, God rest her, that the Lord was reserving a special burning seat in hell for her because she gave the kids an outline of Mr. Darwin's beliefs on evolution. She was suspended twice while she was here-once for beating a classmate with her purse. Legend has it that Margaret saw the classmate smoking a cigarette. Peculiar religious views. Very peculiar.” His John Wayne expression suddenly snapped down. “The other girls. Did they really laugh at her?”
“Worse. They were yelling and throwing sanitary napkins at her when I walked in. Throwing them like… like peanuts.”
“Oh. Oh, dear.” John Wayne disappeared. Mr. Morton went scarlet. “You have names?”
“Yes. Not all of them, although some of them may rat on the rest. Christine Hargensen appeared to be the ringleader
as usual.”
“Chris and her Mortimer Snerds,” Morton murmured.
“Yes. Tina Blake, Rachel Spies, Helen Shyres, Donna Thibodeau and her sister Mary Lila Grace, Jessica Upshaw. And Sue Snell.” She frowned. “You wouldn't expect a trick like that from Sue. She's never seemed the type for this kind of a-a stunt.”
“Did you talk to the girls involved?”
Miss Desjardin chuckled unhappily. “I got them the hell out of there. I was too flustered. And Carrie was having hysterics.”
“Um.” He steepled his fingers. “Do you plan to talk to them?”
“Yes.” But she sounded reluctant.
“Do I detect a note of-”
“You probably do,” she said glumly. “I'm living in a glass house, see. I understand how those girls felt. The whole thing just made me want to take the girl and shake her. Maybe there's some kind of instinct about menstruation that makes women want to snarl, I don't know. I keep seeing Sue Snell and the way she looked.”
“Um,' Mr. Morton repeated wisely. He did not understand women and had no urge at all to discuss menstruation.
“I'll talk to them tomorrow,” she promised, rising. “Rip them down one side and up the other.”
“Good. Make the punishment suit the crime. And if you feel you have to send any of them to, ah, to me, feel free-”
“I will,” she said kindly. “By the way, a light blew out while I was trying to calm her down. It added the final touch.”
“I'll send a janitor right down,” he promised. “And thanks for doing your best, Miss Desjardin. Will you have Miss Fish send in Billy and Henry?”
“Certainly.” 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 skit.
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; 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.
“Hey, ol' fart-face! Ol' 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.
