Carrie – Room to Run

From @KingdomSearch (http://www.kingdom-search.com)

Carrie: Report of Deceased

My edition is Signet (first Signet Printing, April, 1975) 46 47 48 49 50 51 52.

& here is the Medical Record:

Dirk, in Germany, the guy behind the absolutely amazing Kingdom Search, informed me (via his Twitter) of the following:

“there R 2 different hospital forms in different Carrie editions … The US editions say “Westover Mercy Hospital” & “State of Maine”, while the Brit. say “Andover…” & “Commonwealth of Maine” … Additionally, the US ed. have handwritten entries for “by,” “Doctor,” & “Pathologist” fields – which are missing in Brit. ed.”

Seriously … how great is it to have that kind of knowledge at your fingertips?  I’m in awe.

Anyways, he gave me permission to post the British edition’s Report of Deceased (& gave me a scanned version – much better than my camera phone photo).  So here it is!
(how cool is this?)

Carrie – Wreckage

“to rip off a Carrie:  To cause either violence or destruction; mayhem; confusion; (2) to commit arson (from Carrie White 1963-1979)”

& it’s done.  There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in completing a novel, juxtaposed with a certain sense of loss.  But in the King universe, if there is one thing we know, it’s that the story is never over.  So for the rest of the weekend (as i’m overdue, i’m really in a stew), I will be wondering about Sue Snell & Ms. Desjardin, the town of Chamberlain & little Annie Jenks.

Onto ‘Salem’s Lot!  Right in time for the whole vampire craze that has swept the nation.

Carrie – Prom

“In her mouth she tasted olives.”

When I get bad-news scared, I taste metal in my mouth.  I suppose it’s not a whole lot different than olives.  My body gets a surge of hot fire in my veins (adrenaline?) & a flash of metal on my tongue.  So weird.

In high school, a lot of things can be considered to get ya bad-news scared.  When everything revolves around reputation, confusion, ohmygodthepressureofmylife! … even the slightest blow to your ego can be temporarily crippling.

I had received the worst news ever the summer before starting high school, so I knew the difference between genuine bad news & bad-news scared.  Bad news brought me to my knees – literally – & automatically blocked out memories in order to shield me from unimaginable heartache.  Bad-news scared brought me metal & fire & gave me a decision on how to deal with it.

The day it was announced that I was a part of the Homecoming Court, I had one of those bad-news scared moments.

A senior, I was sitting in class, anxiously awaiting the announcement.  I had nominated my friends, of course, so I was excited for which one of them would be up for Queen.  A popular girl in the “friendly with a lot of people” sense (not the Heathers sense, not that our class had a lot of those – to my knowledge anyway), I also knew there was a slight chance I would hear my own name.  I didn’t count on it, though.  See, part of me still has had that underlying reality of being an ugly duckling, of girls playing “Run Away from Niki” at recess, of being the weird one.  Childhood up to grade eight was a constant fight to make – & keep – friends.  But that’s good for another story.

Turns out, I sold myself short.  Ten names were called – five guys, five girls – & one was mine.

I. Was. Shocked.

The little nerdy girl with glasses & braces & a grown-out perm felt validated in a way that only high school can make you feel validated.

That feeling lasted all of five minutes.

“Niki!  Niki!”  I heard my name shouted as I walked between classes.  ”Niki!  Jesus, walk fast enough?!” Duree teased.  ”Congratulations.  But hey – why does Mary hate you so much?”

Metal.  Fire.

Mary was the toughest girl in our class, at least physically.  She was scrappy & could be mean & no one dared get on her bad side.  I respected her, I mean, hell, high school is all about survival of the fittest & she excelled.  & while I can’t say I really ever knew her, we were still friendly towards each other.  I had never said a bad thing against her &, up until that day, to my knowledge, she hadn’t either.  We coexisted &, honestly, I admired her chutzpah.  Even envied her badassedness.

So to hear that she “hated” me … yeah … Metal.  Fire.

“We were in the locker room after gym when Court was announced.  Mary flipped.  Started slamming her shit, telling everyone how bullshit she thought it was that you were nominated.  Nik, what the hell did you do to piss Mary off?”

Metal.  Fire.

I had no idea, but I had to get to the bottom of this & right quick.

Grapevine to grapevine, by the middle of the next period, I had it figured out.  This girl, Amy, who I was very good friends with in junior high & still friendly with, had told a few of her good friends
(grapevine to grapevine)
that I had told her
(grapevine to grapevine)
that I had already started making my Homecoming Court dress.

Sidebar – We usually wore fancy outfits to Homecoming anyways, but if you were on Homecoming Court, it was just understood that you wore an even fancier dress: full-length, custom-made, 95% of the time with velvet.

It all started to make perfect sense.  I had, in fact, told Amy that I was going to have a dress made.  Because I was.  But it was going to be a short, knee-length number, nothing at all like what a Homecoming Court dress would be.

(speaking of … shit, i was going to have to cancel that!  what in the hell was i going to wear?!)

Forty long minutes later, we were at the lunch tables.  My friends & I were fervently discussing the rumor.

“Look,” I laughed.  ”Every year, there’s an outcast.  Every year one of the girls doesn’t belong.  This year, it’s obviously me.  I’m just happy this year’s rumor is as tame as it is.  Remember the old ones?  Pregnancies, sluts, stealing boyfriends.  This misunderstanding is nothing compared to them.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t it piss you off that she’s over there, spreading rumors about you?  I mean Mary – MARY – hates you.  That’s never good.”  Sarah could always bring it home.

Metal.  Fire.

My friends were right.  & since when did I back down?  I stood up & marched right over to the table where the rumor mill had begun.

“Hi guys,” I said to the table.  Then, to Amy, “Did you tell people that I had already started having my dress made?”

“Yeah.  You did,” she replied defiantly, arms crossed.

“Do you remember me showing you the design for the dress?  It’s knee-length.  It’s hardly the kind of dress somebody wears on Court, would you agree?”
(i like to imagine that at this point, what was going through her head was: metal. fire.)
“This is what you’re gonna do.  You’re going to go up to every person you told that nasty rumor to & you’re going to tell them that you got it wrong.  Understand?  Starting with Mary.”

By this time, all eyes on the table were fixated on the two of us.  Now they swung towards Mary.

To her credit, Amy did, in fact, tell Mary (& a number of other girls) that she was wrong.  But the damage had been done.

Of course, it’d be easy to finish the story with an “I won Homecoming Queen anyways” or, heh, an “I cooked them all in a water-electrical fire,” but it’s not as dramatic as that.  It’d also be easy to go the “Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc” route & blame my losing the crown to this one little mishap, but Michelle won it fair & outright.  She’s an awesome girl, well-liked by all, & super sweet.  She deserved it.

& when they announced her name, as we all stood there, trying so hard to look like the adults we would soon enough become, do you know what I did not experience?

Metal.  Fire.

Carrie – Wormwood

“Let this place be called racca, ichabod, wormwood.”

Not nearly as well-versed in the Bible as I once was (kinda hafta be, with thirteen years of Catholic school – even if ya didn’t pay attention, ya learned by osmosis/diffusion/repetition, repetition, repetition), I had to look up what these were.  I knew wormwood
(coughcough absinthe coughcough)
but didn’t think it was used in that sense as Carrie went on her roaring rampage of revenge through Chamberlain.

It wasn’t.

Racca – otherwise known as Raca, one c – means fool, simpleton.
Ichabod – no, not Crane of Headless Horseman fame, although I suppose one could draw macabre connections – was slain in a Biblical battle when the Ark was taken.
Wormwood – as in Star of Wormwood – is a star that crashes into Earth in Revelations.

So, unsurprisingly, they all are Biblical references
(given Carrie’s background)
that mean, essentially,
(bare bones here, people)
that Carrie’s gonna rein down a whole lotta hellfire, slaying the fools of Chamberlain who wronged her.

Hell hath no fury, yeah?

Carrie – Stormed the Beach at Normandy

“Teddy Duchamp’s been dead since 1968, God love him.”

Carrie – Javelin

“They drove their own VWs or Javelins or Dodge Chargers.”

Christine (hmmm … & my middle name … whoa nelly), Christine Hargensen, yet another antagonist, discusses the kind of guys she usually dates versus current boyfriend Billy Nolan.

Several years ago, I began this project on an informal basis.  I got through an entire shelf’s worth of books before, for a reason I can’t recall, I stopped.  I had made notes then, little notes to myself: recurring characters, certain phrases King repeats, lines that resonated with me.  So when I got to page 128 in Carrie & noticed it was dog-eared, I couldn’t wait to find out why.

About three-quarters of the way down the page, I smiled as I read the line above & knew immediately my reasoning behind flipping the top left corner of the page atop itself.

You know those little bobble-head dolls that are so tchotchke-popular?  Little baseball players or ’80′s pop culture icons, all shiny & bouncy-headed?  Back in the late ’70′s, when I was a wee girl, I only knew one bobble-head.  It was a small brownish-gray felt cat, perched in the rear window of my dad’s pea green – oh, you guessed it – Javelin.

At that time, we had two vehicles: the Javelin & a big old yellow van.  The big yellow van was the location of my first drive-in movie, the family trip to Kansas City to see Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour at Arrowhead Stadium, the numerous “MOM!  He’s touching me!” fights.  But the Javelin … the Javelin….

The Javelin was the car in which I always wanted to ride.  Dad’s car.  My Dad, who was, to me, cooler than ten Steve McQueens (not that I knew who that was at the time).  Mustached Dad who wore big collared shirts & polyester slacks.  Skinny, brown-eyed Dad who carried me up the stairs at bedtime.  Tanned, smiling Dad who slipped into the driver’s side of the Javelin with ease & confidence.

It was sufficiently beat up, that car.  A dingy green, the metal dull & showing in the interior, the springs in the seats … well … sprung.

But I loved it.  It smelled like Dad, it held me in its arms like Dad, & with Dad behind the wheel, it went fast.  & as I’d flip around on my knees in the back seat, inhaling dusty leather, & peer out the rear window, I’d tap that little grey felt bobblehead cat & giggle to myself.  Nothing could go wrong in the back seat of Dad’s Javelin.

Last night, I took a pen & underlined the word in the novel.  Normally, when reading Stephen King, I feel close to my mom, as she was the catalyst for this love affair.  But last night, I smiled & thought of my Pops & his Javelin.

Carrie – Card Tables

“A list of parents who had loaned card tables.”

I know it’s not the most provocative of quotes from the book, but after last night’s emotional release, it’s for the best.  Plus, I only read a handful of pages before I finished Part One: Blood Sport.  But it stuck out to me & I will, of course, tell you why.

This weekend, while at a friend’s thirtieth birthday party, a few of us were discussing our upcoming Thanksgiving Sunday.  I was telling them that I wasn’t sure how it would work since my dining room table is in Iowa (thanks Mom & Dad!), being refurbished.  Considering my options, I lamented about how I didn’t have a card table.

“I don’t feel like I’m an adult if I don’t have a card table.  I mean, when my parents were my age, they had a card table.  Everyone had a card table.”

My friends, such good people that they are, reassured me.

“I don’t have a card table.”

“I don’t know anyone who has a card table.”

“Niki, you also don’t have a garage.”

“Or a basement.”

“Or kids.  What good’s a kids’ table if none of us have kids?”

“She’s right.  Three very important prerequisites for a card table.”

I nodded, feeling better.  ”Right.  Besides, I don’t play cards.  Although it’d be good to do puzzles on….”

So to read this description of the Prom plans in Carrie, made my heart smile a little.  Card tables.  Such fantastic childhood memories spent sitting around them.  Thanksgiving feasts at the kiddie table.  Puzzles with Pops.  Folding them out, folding them up.  & sometimes, yes, sometimes, actually playing cards on them.

Carrie – We Were Kids

“It is so easy to forget one thing: we were kids.  We were kids.”

Sue Snell, as an adult, tries to plead her case to a judgmental world.  In the media storm that followed the events of Carrie’s Prom, several theories were presented, not only about Carrie & her “gift,” but also about the events leading up to Carrie’s Prom … & the  teenagers who played an integral role in them.

No regrets.  It’s a phrase I hear/read now & then, most often spoken/written by people who are either a) lying to themselves, b) trying too hard to show others that they are free-spirited hard-asses, or c) both.  Oh sure, I believe there are the randoms out there who honestly say & believe it, but in my experience, they are few & far between.  If you are one of them, hell, more power to ya, my friend.

I used to be one of those people who fell into the c) category.  ”Yeah, man,” I’d say.  ”No regrets.  Life’s too fuckin’ short.  Live it the best ya can, be as good as you can, but don’t ever regret a single moment.  Not worth it, dude.”

(no really – i used to still talk like that.)

But the truth of it is, I do live life with regrets … most, if not all, being from my youth.  Youth, which is the very time people are supposed to make mistakes.

When I was in Junior High (man, this is painful – could it be that i end up crying, just retelling it, after over twenty years?) … When I was in Junior High, my younger sister was in the 5th grade.  She was frail, being that she had Marfan’s Syndrome, Scoliosis, & therefore had to don a full back Milwaukee brace.  Even though she had these medical problems (& was terribly teased as a result), the bond of sisterhood & sibling rivalry was still strong.

One morning, we were running late for the bus.  She played the snare drum; I played the flute.  I refused to help her carry her drum to the bus stop.  Crying, she pleaded with me that it “wasn’t fair.”

“That’s what you get for choosing the drums, dummy.  You knew they were heavy.”

“But Nik—”

“Hurry up.  God.”

As it turned out, we weren’t as late as we thought.  We got to the corner with time to spare.  Time we used bickering back & forth.

I don’t even recall what she said to me that made me so infuriated.  That was how inconsequential it was.  But whatever it was, it didn’t justify what I did next.

I can still see my 13-year-old right hand, in slow motion, snap out from my side & catch her on the cheek: crack!  As her head whipped to the side, over her shoulder, the large yellow Bluebird bus appeared.  There was just enough time for me to see her sky blue eyes fill up with tears, looking at me so wounded, before I hopped past the folding doors & up the stairs.  I couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

One of the oldest ones on the bus, I took my spot in the back row.  The hierarchy as such, my sister fell somewhere in the middle.  Kids were shouting & laughing, throwing wads of paper at one another, & I smiled at them with a beauty queen grin, lifeless & phony.  The regret was filling up my body faster than I could handle.

I kept looking up towards her, willing her to turn around.  I wanted so badly to mouth, “I’m sorry.”  I was pulled between hugging her & hanging back.  On the one hand, as her sister, I wanted to squeeze her & apologize, to reverse time.  On the other hand, a strong intuition warned me that to single her out like that would only make things worse right now.  I remained ass firmly placed in seat.

When we reached my school, Sacred Heart, I passed by her on the way out.  I got her attention just long enough to see that there was a very distinct red hand-print on her left cheek.  My God.  I had left a hand-print.

This young girl, beautiful in every way, my own sister, who weathered so much misfortune – outcast for no other reason than some metal surrounding her torso – teased incessantly, uninvited from slumber parties, ostracized every day – bore my hand-print on her cheek.  As if her life wasn’t shit enough, now she had to go to school with a visible mark of just how right she was when she insisted how life “wasn’t fair.”

At my hand.

(ok, when i thought i may be crying as i write this, i underestimated my own propensity for sensory recollection & empathy.)

Less than a year later, we buried her.

+++++++++++

So while now, as I look back, I can forgive those peers of hers who treated her so callously,
(we were kids)
I still cannot fully forgive myself, even though my “excuse” is the same.
(we were kids)
& so I live with it as punishment … as a constant reminder to treat people better, love people more, be as fair as I can in this world of ours.

I like to think that that is what Sue was saying when she wrote her book in this novel:  Please don’t hate me.  I was just a kid.  & maybe, if I tell myself that enough, if I put it in writing, if I convince enough people to forgive me … I might just be able to forgive myself.

Carrie – The Eff Word

“Today she had even said the Eff Word.  Yet Momma had let her out almost as soon as she broke.”

One of the most terrifying moments I can remember from my adolescence took place in my parents’ garage.

For me, the high school years were all about seeing how far I could stretch my limits.  Someone told me, “No;” I told them, “Watch me.”  My mind was a sponge, expanding with every new experience.  & I was determined to soak in every one possible.  I wanted to touch, to taste, to push, to punch my place in the world.  There was a lot of underlying resentment, but that’s understandable following the traumatic & sudden death of my kid sister.

I could understand Carrie’s rage … if not the source of it, then the manifestation of such … much to my parents’ chagrin.

It was during a particular bout of authority-challenging that found me being chased around the house by my father.  How dare he insist I do my chores!  I had a social life to attend to!  After-school activities!  Boys!

On my knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, I equated myself with Cinderella.  Poor, poor me.  I have fun to get to & yet here I am, slopping water on linoleum.  I’m a slave to The Man & The Man is my dad.  & there he was, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, disapproving look on his face.

I’ve never much liked people watching me work.  Just standing there, staring.  I feel judged.  I feel disrespected.  I feel used.  ”If you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” so to speak.

You can see now how this did not bode well.

First there was the pouting.  Then there was the smart-assed comment.  Then there was the shouting.  The standing.  The walking.  Then he was following.  Then I was screaming about how unfair everything was, how he couldn’t possibly understand, how I was a prisoner in my own home.

(in other words, i was throwing a completely immature & unreasonable temper tantrum of the “i’m a fifteen-year-old girl” design.)

Then I was running out of the house, through the garage door.  Only problem was that the garage door was … oh, you guessed it … closed.

So me, pacing next to one of the cars, Dad standing in the doorway.  In many ways, I felt as if I was at the end of my rope.  So I uttered what so many of us utter when we feel like we’re at the end of our ropes.

“FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOUUUUUU!!!”

You know that scene in A Christmas Story when the dad & Ralphie are changing the tire?  Yeah.

::le gulp::

I thought my dad was going to lose his shit.  But remarkably, he didn’t.

But it’s that moment, that “ohshitwhatinthehelldidijustdoiamgoingtodierighthereandnow” moment when things shift.  Suddenly, one of the things I was most afraid of doing, a line I knew better than cross, a taboo that only adults can say … I did it.  I crossed it.  I said it.  To.  My.  Dad.  The man whose approval meant the most to me (& still does) in this world.  I had been insolent & young & stupid & wrong.  But I had grabbed whatever power that that one word held & I had screamed it.

Suddenly, the power shifted slightly – or so I felt at the time.  If the f-bomb was already out there, what else could I say?!  It was both an awakening & a challenge.

I was horrendous.  Manipulative, disrespectful, idiotic, & just plain mean.  I put my parents through holy hell in so many more ways than I will get into on a public forum.  Good golly, Miss Molly, I am still apologizing & feeling the guilt for it.

(let me be very clear here: in this story, absolutely zero bad judgment &/or blame goes on my dad.  he is the most amazing man &, if anything, the fact that he kept his cool as well as he did with my arrogant defiance is a testament to that.)

So when I read about Carrie’s outburst towards her mother (make no mistake, where my parent was inevitably the patient hero in my story, Margaret White truly is the evil antagonist here), I got it.  I got the release, the power shift, the acknowledgment of having someone over a barrel.  I got it.

Teenaged girls & the way they fight authority … it’s always a wild ride.