Carrie dresses for the prom, but before she leaves, her mother attempts to dissuade her from attending, resorting to punching and scratching herself. Carrie is unmoved, and after her mother compares her to Jezebel, Carrie uses telekinesis to carry her out into the hall. As Carrie waits for Tommy to pick her up, fearing he might not, she imagines tearing the house apart with her telekinetic power, “the plumbing ripped loose and still spurting, like arteries ripped free of flesh” (156). When Tommy arrives and compliments her beauty, Carrie has the sense that she is at an end, or at the beginning of something else, but she isn’t sure of what.

Elsewhere, Chris and Billy have finished having sex in a bar called The Cavalier, just outside the town limits. Chris uneasily thinks about her intention to wait until Billy completed his part in her plan to have sex with him as a reward. However, after he secured the pig blood for her, if she hadn’t “given in willingly […] he would have taken her by force” (158), so they had sex the previous Monday. As Chris and Billy leave for the prom, Chris feels the stirring of excitement in her stomach.