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Carrie White has feelings? Do any of you
ever
stop to think? Sue? Fern? Helen? Jessica? Any of you? You think she's ugly. Well, you're all ugly. I saw it on Friday morning.”
    Chris Hargensen was mumbling about her father being a lawyer.
    â€œShut up!”
Desjardin yelled in her face. Chris recoiled so suddenly that her head struck the lockers behind her. She began to whine and rub her head.
    â€œOne more remark out of you,” Desjardin said softly, “and I'll throw you across the room. Want to find out if I'm telling the truth?”
    Chris, who had apparently decided she was dealing with a madwoman, said nothing.
    Desjardin put her hands on her hips. “The office has decided on punishment for you girls. Not
my
punishment, I'm sorry to say. My idea was three days' suspension and refusal of your prom tickets.”
    Several girls looked at each other and muttered unhappily.
    â€œThat would have hit you where you live,” Desjardin continued. “Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don't believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was. So. One week's detention.”
    Spontaneous sighs of relief.
    â€œBut. It's to be
my
detention. In the gym. And I'm going to run you ragged.”
    â€œI won't come,” Chris said. Her lips had thinned across her teeth.
    â€œThat's up to you, Chris. That's up to all of you. But punishment for skipping detention is going to be three days' suspension and refusal of your prom tickets. Get the picture?”
    No one said anything.
    â€œRight. Change up. And think about what I said.”
    She left.
    Utter silence for a long and stricken moment. Then Chris Hargensen said with loud, hysterical stridency:
    â€œShe can't get away with it!” She opened a door at random, pulled out a pair of sneakers and hurled them across the room. “I'm going to get her! Goddammit! Goddammit! See if I don't! If we all stick together we can—”
    â€œShut up, Chris,” Sue said, and was shocked to hear a dead, adult lifelessness in her voice. “Just shut up.”
    â€œThis isn't over,” Chris Hargensen said, unzipping her skirt with a rough jab and reaching for her fashionably frayed green gym shorts. “This isn't over by a long way.”
    And she was right.

    From
The Shadow Exploded
(pp. 60-61):

    In the opinion of this researcher, a great many of the people who have researched the Carrie White matter—either for the scientific journals or for the popular press—have placed a mistaken emphasis on a relatively fruitless search for incidents of telekinesis in the girl's childhood. To strike a rough analogy, this is like spending years researching the early incidents of masturbation in a rapist's childhood.
    The spectacular incident of the stones serves as a kind of red herring in this respect. Many researchers have adopted the erroneous belief that where there has been one incident, there must be others. To offer another analogy, this is like dispatching a crew of meteor watchers to Crater National Park because a huge asteroid struck there two million years ago.
    To the best of my knowledge, there are no other
recorded
instances of TK in Carrie's childhood. If Carrie had not been an only child, we might have at least hearsay reports of dozens of other minor occurrences.
    In the case of Andrea Kolintz (see Appendix II for a fuller history), we are told that, following a spanking for crawling out on the roof, “The medicine cabinet flew open, bottles fell to the floor or seemed to hurl themselves across the bathroom, doors flew open and slammed shut, and, at the climax of the manifestation, a 300-pound stereo cabinet tipped over and records flew all over the living room, dive-bombing the occupants and shattering against the walls.”
    Significantly, this report is from one of Andrea's brothers, as quoted in the September 4, 1955, issue of
Life
magazine.
Life
is