Carrie by Stephen King Page B

strike.
    â€œNo!”
    The hand stopped in the dead air. Momma stared up at it, as if to confirm that it was still there, and whole.
    The pie pan suddenly rose from the trivet on the table and hurled itself across the room to impact beside the living-room door in a splash of blueberry drool.
    â€œI'm going, Momma!”
    Momma's overturned teacup rose and flew past her head to shatter above the stove. Momma shrieked and dropped to her knees with her hands over her head.
    â€œDevil's child,” she moaned. “Devil's child, Satan spawn—”
    â€œMomma, stand up.”
    â€œLust and licentiousness, the cravings of the flesh—”
    â€œStand up!”
    Momma's voice failed her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war. Her lips moved. To Carrie she seemed to be reciting the Lord's Prayer.
    â€œI don't want to fight with you, Momma,” Carrie said, and her voice almost broke from her and dissolved. She struggled to control it. “I only want to be let to live my own life. I . . . I don't like yours.” She stopped, horrified in spite of herself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word.
    â€œWitch,” Momma whispered. “It says in the Lord's Book: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Your father did the Lord's work—”
    â€œI don't want to talk about that,” Carrie said. It always disturbed her to hear Momma talk about her father. “I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma.” Her eyes gleamed.
“They
better understand it, too.”
    But Momma was whispering to herself again.
    Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in her throat and the dismal roiling of emotional upset in her belly, she went to the cellar to get her dress material.
    It was better than the closet. There was that. Anything was better than the closet with its blue light and the overpowering stench of sweat and her own sin. Anything. Everything.
    She stood with the wrapped package hugged against her breast and closed her eyes, shutting out the weak glow of the cellar's bare, cobweb-festooned bulb. Tommy Ross didn't love her; she knew that. This was some strange kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason.
    He had said it would be good—that they would see to it. Well,
she
would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.
    Upstairs, Momma continued to whisper. It was not the Lord's Prayer. It was the Prayer of Exorcism from Deuteronomy.

    From
My Name Is Susan Snell
(p. 23):

    They finally even made a movie about it. I saw it last April. When I came out, I was sick. Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it. And forgetting Carrie White may be a bigger mistake than anyone realizes. . . .

    Monday morning; Principal Grayle and his understudy, Pete Morton, were having coffee in Grayle's office.
    â€œNo word from Hargensen yet?” Morty asked. His lips curled into a John Wayne leer that was a little frightened around the edges.
    â€œNot a peep. And Christine has stopped lipping off about how her father is going to send us down the road.” Grayle blew on his coffee with a long face.
    â€œYou don't exactly seem to be turning cartwheels.”
    â€œI'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