Why not just have a sock hop and be done with it?); George Chizmar, Ewen’s most artistic student, had done a small chalk sketch of gondolas on a canal at sunset and a gondolier in a huge straw fedora leaning against the tiller as a gorgeous panoply of pinks and reds and oranges stained both sky and water. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. He had redrawn it in silhouette on a huge fourteen-by-twenty-foot canvas flat, numbering the various sections to go with the various chalk hues.
Now the Committee was patiently coloring it in, like children crawling over a huge page in a giant’s coloring book. Still, Sue thought, looking at her hands and forearms, both heavily dusted with pink chalk, it was going to be the prettiest prom ever.
Next to her, Helen Shyres sat up on her haunches, stretched, and groaned as her back popped. She brushed a hank of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a rose-colored smear.
“How in hell did you talk me into this?”
“You want it to be nice, don’t you?” Sue mimicked Miss Ceer, the spinster chairman (apt enough term for Miss Mustache) of the Decoration Committee.
“Yeah, but why not the Refreshment Committee or the Entertainment Committee? Less back, more mind. The mind, that’s my area. Besides, you’re not even-” She bit down on the words.
“Going?” Susan shrugged and picked up her chalk again. She had a monstrous writer’s cramp. “No, but I still want it to be nice.” She added shyly: “Tommy’s going.”
They worked in silence for a bit, and then Helen stopped again. No one was near them; the closest was Holly Marshall, on the other end of the mural, coloring the gondola’s keel.
“Can I ask you about it, Sue?” Helen asked finally. “God, everybody’s talking.”
“Sure.” Sue stopped coloring and flexed her hand. “Maybe I ought to tell someone, just so the story stays straight. I asked Tommy to take Carrie. I’m hoping it’ll bring her out of herself a little . . . knock down some of the barriers. I think I owe her that much.”
“Where does that put the rest of us?” Helen asked without rancor.
Sue shrugged. “You have to make up your own mind about what we did, Helen. I’m in no position to throw stones. But I don’t want people to think I’m, uh…”
“Playing martyr?”
“Something like that.”
“And Tommy went along with it?” This was the part that most fascinated her.
“Yes,” Sue said, and did not elaborate. After a pause: “I suppose the other kids think I’m stuck up.”
Helen thought it over. “Well . . . they’re all talking about it. But most of them still think you’re okay. Like you said, you make your own decisions. There is, however, a small dissenting faction.” She snickered dolefully.
“The Chris Hargensen people?”
“And the Billy Nolan people. God, he’s scuzzy.
“She doesn’t like me much?” Sue said, making it a question.
“Susie, she hates your guts.”
Susan nodded, surprised to find the thought both distressed and excited her.
“I heard her father was going to sue the School Department and then he changed his mind,” she said.
Helen shrugged. “She hasn’t made any friends out of this,” she said.
“I don’t know what got into us, any of us. It makes me feel like I don’t even know my own mind.”
They worked on in silence. Across the room, Don Barrett was putting up an extension ladder preparatory to gilding the overhead steel beams with crepe paper.
“Look,” Helen said. “There goes Chris now.”
Susan looked up just in time to see her walking into the cubbyhole office to the left of the gym entrance. She was wearing wine-colored velvet hot pants and a silky white blouse-no bra, from the way things were jiggling up front-a dirty old man’s dream, Sue thought sourly, and then wondered what Chris could want in where the Prom Committee had set up shop. Of course Tina Blake was on the Committee and the two of them were thicker than thieves.
Stop it, she scolded herself. Do you want her in sackcloth and ashes?
Yes, she admitted. A part of her wanted just that.
“Helen?”
“H mmmm?”
“Are they going to do something?”
Helen’s face took on an unwilling masklike quality. “I don’t know.”
The voice was light, overinnocent.
“Oh,” Sue said noncommittally.
(you know you know something: accept something goddammit if it’s only yourself tell me)
They continued to color, and neither spoke. She knew it wasn’t as all right as Helen had said. It couldn’t be; she would never be quite the same golden girl again in the eyes of her mates. She had done an ungovernable, dangerous thing-she had broken cover and shown her face.
The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.
From My Name Is Susan Snell (p. 40): I can understand some of what must have led up to the prom. Awful as it was, I can understand how someone like Billy Nolan could go along, for instance. Chris Hargensen led him by the nose-at least, most of the time. His friends were just as easily led by Billy himself. Kenny Garson, who dropped out of high school when he was eighteen, had a tested third-grade reading level. In the clinical sense, Steve Deighan was little more than an idiot. Some of the others had police records; one of them, Jackie Talbot, was first busted at the age of nine for stealing hubcaps. If you’ve got a social-worker mentality, you can even regard these people as unfortunate victims.
But what can you say for Chris Hargensen herself?
It seems to me that from first to last, her one and only object in view was the complete and total destruction of Carrie White….
“I’m not supposed to,” Tina Blake said uneasily. She was a small, pretty girl with a billow of red hair. A pencil was pushed importantly in it.
“And if Norma comes back, she’ll spill.”
“She’s in the crapper,” Chris said. “Come on.”
Tina, a little shocked, giggled in spite of herself. Still, she offered token resistance: “Why do you want to see, anyway? You can’t go.”
“Never mind,” Chris said. As always, she seemed to bubble with dark humor.
“Here,” Tina said, and pushed a sheet enclosed in limp plastic across the desk. “I’m going out for a Coke. If that bitchy Norma Watson comes back and catches you, I never saw you.
“Okay,” Chris murmured, already absorbed in the floor plan. She didn’t hear the door close.
George Chizmar had also done the floor plan, so it was perfect. The dance floor was clearly marked. Twin bandstands. The stage where the King and Queen would be crowned
(i’d like to crown that fucking snell bitch carrie too) at the end of the evening. Ranged along the three sides of the floor were the prom-goers’
tables. Card tables, actually, but covered with a froth of crepe and
ribbon, each holding party favors, prom programs, and ballots for King and Queen.
She ran a lacquered, spade-shaped fingernail down the tables to the right of the dance floor, then the left. There: Tommy R. & Carrie W. They were really going through with it. She could hardly believe it. Outrage made her tremble. Did they really think they would be allowed to get away with it? Her lips tautened grimly.
She looked over her shoulder. Norma Watson was still nowhere in sight.
Chris put the seating chart back and riffled quickly through the rest of the papers on the pitted and initial-scarred desk. Invoices (mostly for crepe paper and ha’penny nails), a list of parents who had loaned card tables, petty-cash vouchers, a bill from Star Printers, who had run off the prom tickets, a sample King and Queen ballot-Ballot! She snatched it up. No one was supposed to see the actual King and Queen ballot until Friday, when the whole student body would hear the candidates announced over the school’s intercom. The King and Queen would be voted in by those attending the prom, but blank nomination ballots had been circulated to home rooms almost a month earlier. The results were supposed to be top secret.
There was a gaining student move afoot to do away with the King and Queen business all together-some of the girls claimed it was sexist, the boys thought it was just plain stupid and a little embarrassing.
Chances were good that this would be the last year the dance would be so formal or traditional.
But for Chris, this was the only year that counted. She stared at the ballot with greedy intensity.
George and Frieda. No way. Frieda Jason was a Jew.
Peter and Myra. No way here, either. Myra was one of the female clique dedicated to erasing the whole horse race. She wouldn’t serve even if elected. Besides, she was about as good-looking as the ass-end of old drayhorse Ethel.