Carrie Diaries

CHAPTER THIRTY Accidents Will Happen

I write a short story about Mary Gordon Howard. Her maid puts poison in her sherry and she dies a long and drawn-out death. It’s six pages and it sucks. I stick it in my drawer.

I talk to George a lot on the phone. I take Dorrit to the shrink George found for her in West Hartford.

I feel like I’m marking time.

Dorrit is surly, but she hasn’t gotten into any more trouble. “Dad says you’re going to Brown,” she says one afternoon, when I’m driving her home from her appointment.

“Haven’t been accepted yet.”

“I hope you are,” she says. “All Dad ever wanted was for one of his daughters to go to his alma mater. If you get in, I won’t have to worry about it.”

“What if I don’t want to go to Brown?”

“Then you’re stupid,” Dorrit says.

“Carrie!” Missy says, running out of the house. “Carrie!” She’s waving a thick envelope. “It’s from Brown.”

“See?” Dorrit says. Even she’s excited.

I tear open the envelope. It’s filled with schedules and maps and pamphlets with titles like, Student Life. My hands are shaking as I unfold the letter. Dear Ms. Bradshaw, it reads. Congratulations —

Oh, God. “I’m going to Brown!” I jump up and down and run around the car in glee. Then I stop. It’s only forty-five minutes away. My life will be exactly the same, except I’ll be in college.

But I’ll be at Brown. Which is pretty darn good. It’s kind of a big deal.

“Brown,” Missy squeals. “Dad will be so happy.”

“I know,” I say, floating on the moment. Maybe my luck has changed. Maybe my life is finally going in the right direction.

“So, Dad,” I say later, after he’s hugged me and patted me on the back and said things like, “I always knew you could do it, kid, if you applied yourself,” “since I’m going to Brown…” I hesitate, wanting to position this in the best possible light. “I was wondering if maybe I could spend the summer in New York.”

The question takes him by surprise, but he’s too thrilled about Brown to actually analyze it.

“With George?” he asks.

“Not necessarily with George,” I say quickly. “But there’s this writing program I’ve been trying to get into...”

“Writing?” he says. “But now that you’re going to Brown, you’re going to want to be a scientist.”

“Dad, I’m not sure...”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says with a wave, as if shooing the issue away. “The important thing is that you’re going to Brown. You don’t have to figure out your entire life this very minute.”

And then it’s the day swim team starts again.

The break is over. I’ll have to see Lali.

Six weeks have passed and she’s still seeing Sebastian.

I don’t have to go. I don’t, in fact, have to do anything anymore. I’ve been accepted to college. My father has sent in a check. I can skip classes, drop swim team, come to school intoxicated, and there’s nothing anyone can do. I’m in.

So maybe it’s pure perversity that propels me down the hall to the locker rooms.

She’s there. Standing in front of the lockers where we always used to change. As if claiming our once-mutual territory for herself, the way she claimed Sebastian. My blood boils. She’s the bad person here, the one who’s done wrong. She ought to at least have the decency to move to a different part of the locker room.

My head suddenly feels encased in cement.

I drop my gym bag next to hers. She stiffens, sensing my presence the way I can sense hers even when she’s at the other end of the hallway. I swing open the door of my locker. It bangs against hers, nearly slamming her finger.

She pulls her hand back at the last second. She stares at me, surprised, then angry.

I shrug.

We take off our clothes. But now I don’t sink into myself the way I usually do, trying to hide my nakedness. She’s not looking at me anyway, wriggling herself into her suit and stretching the straps over her shoulders with a snap.

In a moment, she’ll be gone. “How’s Sebastian?” I ask.

This time, when she looks at me, I see everything I need to know. She is never going to apologize. She is never going to admit she did anything wrong. She is never going to acknowledge that she hurt me. She will not say she misses me or even feels bad. She is going to continue forward, like nothing happened, like we were friends, but we were never that close.

“Fine.” She walks away, swinging her goggles.

Fine. I put my clothes back on. I don’t need to be around her. Let her have swim team. Let her have Sebastian, too. If she needs him badly enough to destroy a friendship, I feel sorry for her.

On my way out, I hear shouting coming from the gym. I peek through the hatched window in the wooden door. Cheerleading practice is in session.

I walk across the polished floor to the bleachers, take a seat in the fourth row, and lean into my hands, wondering why I’m doing this.

The members of the squad are dressed in leotards or T-shirts with leggings, their hair pulled back into pony-tails. They wear old-fashioned saddle shoes. The tinny thump of “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” echoes from a tape-player in the corner as the line of girls shake their pom-poms, step forward and back, turn right, place a hand on the shoulder of the girl in front of them, and one by one, with varying degrees of gracefulness and skill, slide their legs apart into a split.

The song ends and they jump to their feet, shaking their pom-poms over their heads and shouting, “Go team!”

Honestly? They suck.

The group breaks up. Donna LaDonna uses the white headband she’s been wearing around her forehead to wipe her face. She and another cheerleader, a girl named Naomi, head to the bleachers and, without acknowledging my presence, sit two rows ahead.

Donna shakes out her hair. “Becky needs to do something about that B.O.,” she says, referring to one of the younger cheerleaders.

“Maybe we should give her a box of deodorant,” Naomi says.

“Deodorant’s no good. Not for that kind of odor. I’m thinking more along the lines of feminine hygiene.” Donna titters, while Naomi cackles at this witty remark. Raising her voice, Donna abruptly changes the subject. “Can you believe Sebastian Kydd is still dating Lali Kandesie?”

“I heard he likes virgins,” Naomi says. “Until they’re not virgins anymore. Then he dumps them.”

“It’s like he’s providing a service.” Donna LaDonna’s voice rises even higher, as if she can’t contain her amusement. “I wonder who’s next? It can’t be a pretty girl — all the pretty girls have already had sex. It has to be someone ugly. Like that Ramona girl. The one who tried to be a cheerleader three years in a row? Some people never get the message. It’s sad.”

Suddenly, she turns around and, with a patently surprised expression, exclaims, “Carrie Bradshaw!” Widening her eyes, she stretches her lips into an exuberant smile. “We were just talking about you. Tell me, how is Sebastian? I mean in bed, of course. Is he really as good a fuck as Lali says he is?”

I am expecting this. I’ve been expecting it all along.

“Gosh, Donna,” I say innocently. “Don’t you know? Didn’t you do it with him an hour after you met? Or was it more like fifteen minutes?”

“Really, Carrie.” She narrows her eyes. “I thought you knew me better than that. Sebastian is far too inexperienced for me. I don’t do boys.”

I lean forward and lock my eyes onto hers. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be you.” I look around the gym and sigh. “It must be so…exhausting.”

I gather my things and hop off the bleacher. As I walk toward the door, I hear her shout, “You wish, Carrie Bradshaw. You should be so lucky.”

And so should you. You’re dead.

Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep putting myself into these terrible situations where I know I can’t win? But I can’t seem to help myself. It’s like having been burned once, I got used to the feeling, and now I have to keep burning myself again and again. Just to prove to myself that I’m still alive. To remind myself that I can still feel.

Dorrit’s shrink said it was better to feel something rather than nothing. And Dorrit had stopped feeling. She was afraid to feel, and then she was afraid of the numbness. So she started acting out.

All very neat and tidy. Tie up your problems with a big bow and maybe you can pretend they’re a present.

Outside, near the door that leads directly to the pool, I spot Sebastian Kydd parking his car.

I start running.

Not away from him, like a reasonable person, but toward him.

He’s blissfully unaware of what’s about to happen, checking his stubble in the rearview mirror.

I grab my heaviest book — calculus — and heave it at his car. The book barely grazes the trunk as it splits open and lands facedown on the pavement, pages akimbo like the legs of a cheerleader. The thud is just loud enough to jar Sebastian out of his self-loving reverie, and he jerks his head around, wondering what — if anything — is happening. I run closer and throw another book at his car. It’s a paperback — The Sun Also Rises — and it slams the front window. In the next second, he’s out of the car, crouched for battle. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” I yell, trying to fling my biology book at his head. I nearly lose my grip on the slick paper cover, so I raise the book over my head and charge at him instead.

He stretches his arms protectively across the car. “Don’t do it, Carrie,” he says warningly. “Don’t touch my car. Nobody scratches my baby and gets away with it.”

I’m picturing his car shattering into a million pieces of plastic and glass, scattered across the parking lot like the detritus of an explosion, when the ridiculousness of his statement stops me in my tracks. But only momentarily. A roar of blood fills my head as I rush him again. “I don’t care about your car. I’m trying to hurt you.”

I swing my biology book, but he snatches it out of my hands before I can make contact. But somehow I keep going, past him, past his car, stumbling across the macadam until I trip over the curb and come to rest in a heap on the frozen grass. I’m followed by my biology book, which lands with a thump a few feet away.

I am not proud of my behavior. But I’ve gone too far now and there’s no turning back.

“How dare you?” I cry, scrambling to my feet.

“Stop it! Stop it,” he shouts, grabbing my wrists. “You’re insane.”

“Tell me why!”

“No,” he says, furious. I’m happy to see he’s finally pissed off as well.

“You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you a goddamned thing.” He thrusts my arms away as if he can’t stand to touch me, while I chase after him, popping back and forth behind him like a jack-in-the-box.

“What’s the matter? Are you scared?” I taunt.

“Get away.”

“You owe me an explanation.”

“You really want to know?” He stops, turns, and gets in my face.

“Yes.”

“She’s nicer,” he says simply.

Nicer?

What the hell does that mean?

“I’m nice.” I pound my chest with my hands. My nose prickles a warning that tears are not far behind.

“Leave it alone, will you?” he asks, running his hands through his hair.

“I can’t. I won’t. It’s not fair...”

“She’s just nicer, okay?”

“What does that mean?” I wail.

“She’s not — you know — competitive.”

Lali? Not competitive? “She’s the most competitive girl I know.”

He shakes his head. “She’s nice.”

Nice — nice? Why does he keep using that word? What does it mean? And then it dawns on me. Nice equals sex. She has sex with him. She goes all the way. And I wouldn’t.

“I hope you’re very happy together.” I take a step back. “I hope you’re so happy you get married and have kids. And I hope you stay in this stupid town forever and rot — like a couple of wormy apples.”

“Thanks,” he says sarcastically, heading toward the gym. This time I don’t stop him. Instead, I shout dumb words at his back. Words like “maggots” and “mold” and “nacreous.”

I’m stupid, I know. But I don’t care anymore.

I pick up a blank piece of paper and roll it through my mother’s old Royale typewriter. After a few minutes, I write: The trick to being a queen bee isn’t necessarily beauty but industriousness. Beauty helps, but without the drive to get to the top and stay on top, beauty will only make you a bee-in-waiting.

Three hours later, I read through my handiwork. Not bad. Now all I need is a pen name. Something that will show people I mean business, that I’m not one to be messed with. On the other hand, it should also convey a sense of humor — even absurdity. I absentmindedly straighten the pages while I consider.

I reread my title, “The Castlebury Compendium: A guide to the fauna and flora of high school,” followed by, “Chapter One: The Queen Bee.” I pick up a pen, pressing the clicker in and out, in and out, until finally the name comes to me. By Pinky Weatherton, I write, in neat block letters.