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She gets up every morning and tells herself that the face in the mirror isn’t too bad. It’s certainly not the ugly. She doesn’t look like a pig or a cow. Just a middle-aged woman with a degree in child development and an ability to move objects across the room with her mind
She might have ended up a nun, whipping herself in her cloister forever. She might have cracked entirely. She might have killed her mother. Instead she went to the prom, somehow got named prom queen, and was in the bathroom when Norma and Chris, frustrated by her slow appearance to the stage, had their own trick turned against them - buckets of blood dumped over their heads as they were laughed out of the gym.
Carrie and Tommy talked more often after that – so did Sue. “You don’t have to stay here, Carrie,” Tommy had told her. “After you graduate Monday you can go anywhere.”
In the battle between Jesus and Tommy for control of her destiny, Tommy had won. She was old enough not to feel ashamed about that fact anymore.
Tommy and Sue had ended up together, though; as nature had intended. Carrie had worked in clandestine ways to save money and get a scholarship at an out of town school, and left on a Peter Pan bus on a humid August night with her meager possessions in a paper grocery bag. Margaret White hadn’t had the will to find her daughter in the end – she’d ended up taking the veil herself, a bride of Christ as she should have been years before.
Carrie had worked on-campus and throughout college, until she finally had her degree and a job in the desert. Her acne went away; she learned to style and cut her hair. Carrietta White would never be a beauty queen, but she had met a man at a lecture, brought him home, and had two children. They went to church occasionally, if not consistently, and she learned to understand that that was all right. They lived together happily, and now she had four grandchildren.
When they asked her where God was, she had the courage to gesture toward the blue sky, the cactus growing in her garden, the spider ticking its way up the wall, and say one word.
“Everywhere.”