A long excerpt from an autobiographical book by Norma Watson gives an account of what happened in the gym immediately after blood showers Carrie and Tommy. Tommy is struck by a falling bucket and quickly dies, though the crowd is initially unaware of his death. Carrie is drenched in blood, her eyes being the “only part of her that wasn’t completely red” (209). Watson describes the feeling of seeing Carrie amidst her classmates at the prom as “watching a person rejoin the human race” (209). After the blood, however, the crowd starts laughing—a cascading sound that “[keeps] swelling, getting louder and louder” (209). As Carrie attempts to flee, someone trips her, generating more raucous laughter, and when Miss Desjardin tries to help her, Carrie uses her telekinesis to hurl the teacher across the room. Carrie leaves the gym, and Tommy is discovered to have died, shocking the crowd.

When Carrie returns, she uses her power to lock all of the attendees in the gym and activate the sprinkler system, at first only meaning to ruin “their dresses and their hairdos and [take] the shine off their shoes” (232). This does not satisfy Carrie, however, and her thoughts quickly grow violent and retributive, her parenthetical thought stream devolving into “(hurt them then hurt them)” (233).