“Carrie?” she asked a girl who’d muttered the name as they stood side by side at the bathroom sink.
“Like the book,” the girl explained with a roll of her eyes, as though everyone else in the ninth grade had read it. The revelation meant nothing to Jo. She skulked through the rest of the school day, and when the last bell rang, she bolted across Mattauk to the public library, pulled a copy of Carrie off the shelves, and sprinted all the way home without stopping. It was a five-mile trip, all told, but Jo was through her front door before her mother ever suspected a thing.
She locked herself in her bedroom that evening, ignoring her mother’s demands to open the door, and read the scene that told her what it all meant. Sixteen-year-old Carrie, kept innocent by her freakish mother, is convinced that she’s dying when she gets her first period. Jo reread the chapter twice, her entire body burning with shame. She knew what had happened. Brownnosing Ellen Goodwin had sold her out for a few glorious days in the spotlight.
It wasn’t until years later that Jo read the rest of Carrie. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t put the book down back in high school. She suspected things might have turned out differently for her—and very differently for Ellen Goodwin.
Ellen had been sitting in front of her two days earlier when Jo felt the first trickle halfway through algebra class. She instantly knew what it was. Her mother had kept her out of the health classes the other kids attended—not to leave Jo innocent of the ways of the world, but so she could explain it all to her daughter in her own flowery words.
Jo still cringed when she recalled her mother leaning forward and clutching Jo’s hands as if imparting a secret. “Soon you’ll be getting your period,” she’d announced in a hushed, honeyed tone. “It’s a very special day in every girl’s life. It’s the day you become a woman.”
Jo recoiled in horror. She had no interest whatsoever in joining any club to which her mother belonged. When she saw her mom’s lipstick-slathered smile start to flicker, she did her best to hide her feelings. It wasn’t easy. Because there was more. So much more. Over the course of an hour, the woman who had trained Jo to sit up straight, cross her legs daintily at the ankle, and comport herself like a lady informed her (in much more elegant terms) that blood would gush from her vagina once a month and would continue to do so until Jo married a man she “loved very much,” at which point he would use his penis to fill her vagina with his “seed.” Then, for nine months, she would grow into a ravenous, monstrous, “glowing” version of herself until a “gorgeous little baby” popped out of her and the gushing commenced once more. Even more terrifying, Jo’s mother made it clear that the whole process might be set into action if Jo were ever to let down her guard. “Boys who can’t help themselves” would do their best to get past her defenses, and girls who weren’t careful ended up with babies they couldn’t feed, diseases that couldn’t be cured, and lives that were wrecked beyond repair.
At the end of the talk, Jo promptly burst into tears.
“Oh my goodness, Josephine, what’s the matter?” Her mother had read several advice books and couldn’t understand how it had gone so wrong. “These are things all of us go through.”
“No,” Jo insisted, her fists clenched in her lap. “Not me.” None of her secret escape plans had involved tending to leaking privates five days every month. And never in her worst nightmares had she imagined a life spent defending a hole she barely knew existed against wanton boys, oozing pustules, and squalling infants.
“Yes, you,” her mother informed her. “There’s no way to avoid it. It’s just part of being a woman.”
“We’ll see about that,” Jo said.
The three years that followed were filled with dread as Jo waited for her mother’s prophesy to come to pass. Though she never joined in, she eavesdropped on other girls talking, and by the beginning of ninth grade, she knew most of them had been visited by the curse, as they called it. Jo prayed the curse would just pass her by—the way her aunt Aimee had never grown molars. Instead, it waited just long enough for her guard to come down. Then it struck when she least expected it—right in the middle of algebra class—forever ruining her best pair of Forenza jeans.
She remained in her chair after the other kids filed out of the classroom—until she and Ellen Goodwin were the only two left. Jo was only vaguely aware of Ellen hovering over Ms. Abram’s desk. Her brain could no longer process the barrage of stimuli. She felt feverish and light-headed. Her entire nervous system was buzzing, overloaded by fear.
Later, Jo recalled the concerned look on Ms. Abram’s face when the teacher was suddenly standing over her chair—and the crimson smear left behind on the wood when the teacher and Ellen coaxed Jo out of her chair. Then the scene changed, as if in a time lapse, and she found herself crying in the principal’s office with Ms. Abram’s shawl wrapped around her waist. The men who passed by did their best to ignore her. The ladies at the front desk smiled and attempted to lift her spirits.
“It happens to all of us at one time or another,” one of the school secretaries whispered. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Then why are you whispering?” Jo hissed back. The secretary had despised her from that moment forward.
Back at home, Jo sat in the bathroom with the kit her mother had prepared for her, a white wooden basket with a pink satin bow that had been hidden under the sink behind the toilet paper packages, waiting for that very moment. Inside were six bulky sanitary napkins, a frilly bag in which to stuff them, and a little bottle of Midol. Jo dumped it all out on the floor and sobbed. She’d never felt so betrayed. And over the two weeks that everyone called her Carrie, she didn’t blame Ellen Goodwin or her mother or even God. Instead, she focused her wrath on the body she hadn’t been able to train or control.