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closed my eyes and I saw her small, white face with

her eyes huge and haunted by fear. She was all right!

She had to be, didn't she? What could happen to a little

girl in an expensive school controlled by such a

responsible, respectable woman as Miss Emily Dean

Dewhurst?

When Carrie was hurting and at odds with

herself and all the world, and there was no one near

who loved her, she retreated to yesterdays and the safe

comfort of the tiny procelain dolls she'd carefully

hidden away beneath all of her clothes. Now she was

the only girl in the school with a room all to herself.

She'd never been alone before. Not once in all her nine

years had Carrie spent a night in a room alone. She

was alone now and she knew it. Every girl in the

school had turned against her, even pretty Lacy St.

John.

From her very secret place Carrie would take

her dolls, Mr. and Mrs. Parkins and dear little baby Clara, and she'd talk to them as she used to do when she was locked away in the attic. "And Cathy," she told me later, "I thought maybe Momma was up in God's heaven, in the garden with Cory and Daddy, and I felt so mean at you and Chris because you let Dr. Paul put me in that place, and you know how much I liked to be with all of you. And I hated you, Cathy! I hated everybody! I hated God for making me so small

so people laugh at my big head and little body!" In the short halls and long corridors of green

carpeting Carrie heard the girls whispering. Furtively

they shifted their eyes when she looked their way. "I

told myself I didn't care," whispered Carrie hoarsely to

me, "but I did care. I told myself I could be brave like

you wanted and Chris wanted and Dr. Paul wanted. I

kept on making myself feel brave but I wasn't really

brave. I don't like dark. And I told myself God was

gonna hear my prayers and make me grow taller,

'cause everybody grows taller when they grow older,

and so would I.