Read Online Carrie by Stephen King - Free Book Online

it. Acted crazy as a bat in a henhouse, she did. Her mom tried to be nice, tried to find out what the matter with her was. She got hysterical and started to rave about an angel with a sword who would walk through the parking lots of roadhouses and cut down the wicked. We left.”
    Judith Allison, however, had at least an idea of what might have been wrong with her daughter; she thought that Margaret had gone through a miscarriage. If so, the baby was conceived out of wedlock. Confirmation of this would shed an interesting light on the character of Carrie's mother.
    In a long and rather hysterical letter to her mother dated August 19, 1962, Margaret said that she and Ralph were living sinlessly, without “the Curse of Intercourse.” She urged Harold and Judith Allison to close their “abode of wickedness” and do likewise. “It is,” Margaret declares near the end of her letter, “the oney [sic] way you & That Man can avoid the Rain of Blood yet to come. Ralph & I, like Mary & Joseph, will neither know or polute [sic] each other's flesh. If there is issue, let it be Divine.”
    Of course, the calendar tells us that Carrie was conceived later that same year . . .
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    The girls dressed quietly for their Monday morning Period One gym class, with no horseplay or little screaming catcalls, and none of them were very surprised when Miss Desjardin slammed open the locker-room door and walked in. Her silver whistle dangled between her small breasts, and if her shorts were the ones she had been wearing on Friday, no trace of Carrie's bloody handprint remained.
    The girls continued to dress sullenly, not looking at her.
    â€œAren't you the bunch to send out for graduation,” Miss Desjardin said softly. “When is it? A month? And the Spring Ball even less than that. Most of you have your dates and gowns already, I bet. Sue, you'll be going with Tommy Ross. Helen, Roy Evarts. Chris, I imagine that you can take your pick. Who's the lucky guy?”
    â€œBilly Nolan,” Chris Hargensen said sullenly.
    â€œWell, isn't he the lucky one?” Desjardin remarked. “What are you going to give him for a party favor, Chris, a bloody Kotex? Or how about some used toilet paper? I understand these things seem to be your sack these days.”
    Chris went red. “I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to that.”
    Desjardin had not been able to get the image of Carrie out of her mind all weekend, Carrie screaming, blubbering, a wet napkin plastered squarely in the middle of her pubic hair—and her own sick, angry reaction.
    And now, as Chris tried to storm out past her, she reached out and slammed her against a row of dented, olive-colored lockers beside the inner door. Chris's eyes widened with shocked disbelief. Then a kind of insane rage filled her face.
    â€œYou can't hit us!” she screamed. “You'll get canned for this! See if you don't, you
bitch!”
    The other girls winced and sucked breath and stared at the floor. It was getting out of hand. Sue noticed out of the corner of her eye that Mary and Donna Thibodeau were holding hands.
    â€œI don't really care, Hargensen,” Desjardin said. “If you—or any of you girls—think I'm wearing my teacher hat right now, you're making a bad mistake. I just want you all to know that you did a shitty thing on Friday. A really shitty thing.”
    Chris Hargensen was sneering at the floor. The rest of the girls were looking miserably at anything but their gym instructor. Sue found herself looking into the shower stall—the scene of the crime—and jerked her glance elsewhere. None of them had ever heard a teacher call anything shitty before.
    â€œDid any of you stop to think that