She was looking up with an expression that was slightly fearful, slightly something else. He was quite sure he knew what the something else was. Sue had been right, and being right, he had just time to wonder if this was doing a kindness or making things even worse.
“If you don’t have a date for the Ball, would you want to go with me?”
Now she blinked, and as she did so, a strange thing happened. The time it took to happen could have been no more than the doorway to a second, but afterward he had no trouble recalling it, as one does with dreams or the sensation of deja’ vu. He felt a dizziness as if his mind
was no longer controlling his body-the miserable, out-of-control feeling he associated with drinking too much and then coming to the vomiting point.
Then it was gone.
“What? What?”
She wasn’t angry, at least. He had expected a brief gust of rage and then a sweeping retreat. But she wasn’t angry; she seemed unable to cope with what he had said at all. They were alone in the study hall now, perfectly between the ebb of old students and the flow of new ones.
“The Spring Ball,” he said, a little shaken. “It’s next Friday and I know this is late notice but-”
“I don’t like to be tricked,” she said softly, and lowered her head.
She hesitated for just a second and then passed him by. She stopped and turned and he suddenly saw dignity in her, something so natural that he doubted if she was even aware of it. “Do You People think you can just go on tricking me for-ever? I know who you go around with.”
“I don’t go around with anyone I don’t want to,” Tommy said patiently. “I’m asking you because I want to ask you.” Ultimately, he knew this to be the truth. If Sue was making a gesture of atonement, she was doing it only at secondhand.
The Period Six students were coming in now, and some of them were looking over curiously. Dale Ullman said something to a boy Tommy didn’t know and both of them snickered.
“Come on,” Tommy said. They walked out into the hall.
They were halfway to Wing Four-his class was the other way-walking together but perhaps only by accident, when she said, almost too quietly to hear: “I’d love to. Love to.”
He was perceptive enough to know it was not an acceptance, and again doubt assailed him. Still, it was started. “Do it, then. It will be all right. For both of us. We’ll see to it.”
“No,” she said, and in her sudden pensiveness she could have been mistaken for beautiful. “It will be a nightmare.”
“I don’t have tickets,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard. “This is the last day they sell them.”
“Hey, Tommy, you’re going the wrong way!” Brent Gillian yelled.
She stopped. “You’re going to be late.”
“Will you?”
“Your class,” she said, distraught. “Your class. The bell is going to ring.”
“Will you?”
“Yes,” she said with angry helplessness. “You knew I would.” She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“No,” he said. “But now I do. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”
“Fine,” she whispered. “Thank you.” She looked as if she might swoon.
And then, more uncertain than ever, he touched her hand.
From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 7~76): Probably no other aspect of the Carrie White affair has been so misunderstood, second-guessed, and shrouded in mystery as the part played by Thomas Everett Ross, Carrie’s ill-starred escort to the Ewen High School Spring Ball.
Morton Cratzchbarken, in an admittedly sensationalized address to The National Colloquium on Psychic Phenomena last year, said that the two most stunning events of the twentieth century have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the destruction that came to Chamberlain, Maine, in May of 1979. Cratzchbarken points out that both events were driven home to the citizenry by mass media, and both events have almost shouted the frightening fact that, while something had ended, something else had been irrevocably set in motion, for good or ill. If the comparison can be made, then Thomas Ross played the part of a Lee Harvey Oswald-trigger man in a catastrophe. The question that still remains is: Did he do so wittingly or unwittingly?
Susan Snell, by her own admission, was to have been escorted by Ross to the annual event. She claims that she suggested Ross take Carrie to make up for her part in the shower-room incident. Those who oppose this story, most lately led by George Jerome of Harvard, claim that this is either a highly romantic distortion or an outright lie. Jerome argues with great force and eloquence that it is hardly typical of high-school-age adolescents to feel that they have to “atone” for anything-
particularly for an offense against a peer who has been ostracized from existing cliques.
“It would be uplifting if we could believe that adolescent human nature is capable of salvaging the pride and self-image of the low bird in the pecking order with such a gesture,” Jerome has said in a recent issue of The Atlantic ‘Monthly, “but we know better. The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.
Jerome, of course, is absolutely right-about birds, at any rate-and his eloquence is undoubtedly responsible in large part for the advancement of the “practical joker” theory, which the White Commission approached but did not actually state. This theory hypothesizes that Ross and Christine Hargensen (see pp. 1-l8) were at the center of a loose conspiracy to get Carrie White to the Spring Ball, and, once there, complete her humiliation. Some theorists (mostly crime writers) also claim that Sue Snell was an active part of this conspiracy. This casts the mysterious Mr. Ross in the worst possible light, that of a practical joker deliberately maneuvering an unstable girl into a situation of extreme stress.
This author doesn’t believe that likely in light of Mr. Ross’s character. This is a facet which has remained largely unexplored by his detractors, who have painted him as a rather dull clique-centered athlete; the phrase “dumb jock” expresses this view of Tommy Ross perfectly.
It is true that Ross was an athlete of above-average ability. His best sport was baseball, and he was a member of the Ewen varsity squad from his Sophomore year. Dick O’Connell, general manager of the Boston Red Sox, has indicated that Ross would have been offered a fairly large bonus for signing a contract, had he lived.
But Ross was also a straight-A student (hardly fitting the “dumb jock” image), and his parents have both said that he had decided pro baseball would have to wait until he had finished college, where he planned to study for an English degree. His interests included writing poetry, and a poem written six months prior to his death was published in an established “little magazine” called Everleaf This is available in Appendix V.
His surviving classmates also give him high marks, and this is significant. There were only twelve survivors of what has become known in the popular press as Prom Night. Those who were not in attendance were largely the unpopular members of the Junior and Senior classes. If these “outs” remember Ross as a friendly, good-natured fellow (many referred to him as “a hell of a good shit”), does not Professor Jerome’s thesis suffer accordingly?
Ross’s school records-which cannot, according to state law, be photostated here-when taken with classmates’ recollections and the comments of relatives, neighbors, and teachers, form a picture of an extraordinary young man. This is a fact that jells very badly with Professor Jerome’s picture of a peer-worshiping, sly young tough. He apparently had a high enough tolerance to verbal abuse and enough independence from his peer group to ask Carrie in the first place. In fact, Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity: a socially conscious young man.
No case will be made here for his sainthood. There is none to be made. But intensive research has satisfied me that neither was he a human chicken in a public-school barnyard, joining mindlessly in the ruin of a weaker hen…
She lay
(i am not afraid not afraid of her)
on her bed with an arm thrown over her eyes. It was Saturday night. If she was to make the dress she had in mind, she would have to start tomorrow at the
(i’m not afraid momma)
latest. She had already bought the material at John’s in Westover. The heavy, crumpled velvet richness of it frightened her. The price had also frightened her, and she had been intimidated by the size of the place, the chic ladies wandering here and there in their light spring dresses, examining bolts of cloth. There was an echoing strangeness in the atmosphere and it was worlds from the Chamberlain Woolworth’s, where she usually bought her material.