Carrie Read Online Free PDF Page A

yell out at least twice for me to turn it down before she went nuts. But that day she turned it up twice herself. I started to feel like the Whore of Babylon myself.
    â€œBut nobody came out of the Whites' place. Not even the old lady to hang her wash. That's something else—she never hung any undies on the back line. Not even Carrie's, and she was only three back then. Always in the house.
    â€œI started to relax. I guess I was thinking Margaret must have taken Carrie to the park to worship God in the raw or something. Anyway, after a little while I rolled on my back, put one arm over my eyes, and dozed off.
    â€œWhen I woke up, Carrie was standing next to me and looking down at my body.”
    She breaks off, frowning into space. Outside, the cars are whizzing by endlessly. I can hear the steady little whine my tape recorder makes. But it all seems a little too brittle, too glossy, just a cheap patina over a darker world—a real world where nightmares happen.
    â€œShe was such a
pretty
girl,” Stella Horan resumes, lighting another cigarette. “I've seen some high school pictures of her, and that horrible fuzzy black-and-white photo on the cover of
Newsweek.
I look at them and all I can think is, Dear God, where did she go? What did that woman do to her? Then I feel sick and sorry. She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the shade of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her mother's sickness hadn't touched her very deeply, not then.
    â€œI kind of started up awake and tried to smile. It was hard to think what to do. I was logy from the sun and my mind felt sticky and slow. I said ‘Hi.’ She was wearing a little yellow dress, sort of cute but awfully long for a little girl in the summer. It came down to her shins.
    â€œShe didn't smile back. She just pointed and said, ‘What are those?’
    â€œI looked down and saw that my top had slipped while I was asleep. So I fixed it and said, ‘Those are my breasts, Carrie.’
    â€œThen she said—very solemnly: ‘I wish I had some.’
    â€œI said: ‘You have to wait, Carrie. You won't start to get them for another . . . oh, eight or nine years.’
    â€œâ€˜No, I won't,’ she said. ‘Momma says good girls don't.’ She looked strange for a little girl, half sad and half self-righteous.
    â€œI could hardly believe it, and the first thing that popped into my mind also popped right out my mouth. I said: ‘Well, I'm a good girl. And doesn't your mother have breasts?’
    â€œShe lowered her head and said something so softly I couldn't hear it. When I asked her to repeat it, she looked at me defiantly and said that her momma had been bad when she made her and that was why she had them. She called them dirtypillows, as if it was all one word.
    â€œI couldn't believe it. I was just dumbfounded. There was nothing at all I could think to say. We just stared at each other, and what I wanted to do was grab that sad little scrap of a girl and run away with her.
    â€œAnd that was when Margaret White came out of her back door and saw us.
    â€œFor a minute she just goggled as if she couldn't believe it. Then she opened her mouth and whooped. That's the ugliest sound I've ever heard in my life. It was like the noise a bull alligator would make in a swamp. She just
whooped.
Rage. Complete, insane rage. Her face went just as red as the side of a fire truck and she curled her hands into fists and whooped at the sky. She was shaking all over. I thought she was having a stroke. Her face was all scrunched up, and it was a gargoyle's face.
    â€œI thought Carrie was going to faint—or die on the spot. She sucked in all her breath and that little face went a cottage-cheesy color.
    â€œHer mother yelled: ‘CAAAARRRIEEEEEE!’
    â€œI jumped up and yelled back: ‘Don't you yell at her that