Like being the smelly kid or the kid with home-cut hair, it wasn’t the kind of thing you ever really lived down. Jo had carried the humiliation with her for thirty-three years. It was finally something she felt like she owned.
The first time a kid in high school called her Carrie, she hadn’t understood. It seemed perfectly plausible that the boy who’d whispered it had simply forgotten her name. Jo had never called attention to herself. She’d discovered early on that if you stayed still and silent, people often forgot you were there. With a mother like hers, that seemed the right strategy; every movement called attention to a flaw to be fixed. Eventually, Jo was certain, she’d follow her brothers to freedom. Until then, she did her best to fly under the radar.
And then one day, everyone in school was staring straight at her.
“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.”