My Life is Horrific Chapter 21 — Carrie White (Patreon)

I let out a groan as I stepped out of Miss Honey's office and pulled the door shut behind me, leaning against the frame for a second while I rubbed both hands down my face and tried to collect the scattered remains of my dignity. 

Once she had come back from whatever the principal had needed her for, we had resumed the counseling session properly, and while she had been patient and warm and genuinely wonderful at her job, the moment had passed. Whatever crack in my armor I had been about to let her see had sealed itself shut the instant Matilda had played me like a fiddle in front of her mother, and I had spent the rest of the session giving safe, surface-level answers that Miss Honey was far too professional to call out but almost certainly saw through.

It wasn't that I minded them coming round to my house, especially since Jennifer Honey was not only beautiful but the kind of beautiful that got better the longer you looked at her, the kind of face that made you forget what you were saying mid-sentence. But being outmaneuvered by a seven-year-old still stung. She had read me like one of her oversized books. I was simultaneously impressed and furious.

I pushed off the wall and headed down the corridor, the stress of the last hour settling across my shoulders. The hallway was empty, everyone in class, and the quiet gave my thoughts room to spiral. I found myself patting my pockets absently, reaching for something that wasn't there, and I realized with a grim laugh that I was craving a cigarette. I hadn't smoked since the lakehouse, but the pull was there now. Usually I didn't smoke as it wouldn't be good for my sports career but right now the stress would kill me long before then. Plus my body healed, so the tar wouldn't hurt my lungs, and it wasn't like I had much of a football career to protect anymore given that most of the team was dead.

Jesus. 

Most of the team was dead. 

That was depressing. 

I was still turning that over in my head, wondering what I was supposed to do with the next couple of hours until Beverly's classes let out, when the door to the girls' changing room about twelve feet ahead of me burst open so hard it cracked against the wall behind it.

A girl came out running.

She was blonde and thin and wearing nothing but a white towel clutched around her body with both hands, the towel was stained dark red in patches that ran from the hem all the way up to where her knuckles gripped the fabric at her chest. 

"What the fuck?" I said out loud, already moving toward her. 

Was that Carrie?

It was. Even from this distance, I recognized her. Carrie White, small and hunched and running like a wounded animal through the empty hallway of Derry High School.

A cluster of girls spilled out of the changing room door behind her, most of them still in various states of undress, sports bras and gym shorts and bare legs, their faces split between laughter and shock. They stopped at the threshold, most of them too aware of their own half-dressed state to chase further into the hallway, but they crowded the doorway and watched Carrie's retreating figure with the satisfied expressions.

Regina was among them, standing front and center in her gym shorts and a sports bra with her blonde hair pulled up in a high ponytail, Karen hovered at her shoulder looking confused but laughing because everyone else was laughing. A few of the other girls darted back inside when they saw me approaching, suddenly aware that they were standing in a public corridor in their underwear, but Regina and Karen held their ground without a flicker of self-consciousness.

I walked up to Regina with my jaw clenched. "What the hell just happened?"

Regina let out a laugh that was utterly devoid of empathy. "Oh my god, James, you should have seen it. Carrie White just got her period in the shower and she had literally no idea what was happening. She was screaming, like, actually screaming, grabbing at herself, crying, she thought she was bleeding to death. It was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life."

"How has she not had her period yet?" I asked, genuinely confused.

Regina shrugged with casual indifference. "I don't know, maybe her psycho mom never told her about it? Who cares? The point is she was literally running around the showers screaming I'm dying, I'm dying and Chris threw a tampon at her and she didn't even know what it was, she thought it was like, I don't know, a bandage or something, and then—"

Karen giggled and leaned in. "And then Gretchen told her it was a plug and she started crying even harder—"

Gretchen appeared in the doorway behind them, a smirk on her face. "I mean, technically I wasn't wrong—"

"Enough!"

The word came out louder and harder than I intended, enough to cut through their laughter like a blade, all three of them went quiet at the same time.

Regina's eyes widened at the tone, and for a second I saw something flash across her face that might have been genuine surprise, but it was quickly replaced by something else entirely. Her cheeks flushed pink and she bit her lower lip, her blue eyes going half-lidded as they traveled up from my chest to my face, and I recognized with a sinking feeling that my anger was having the exact opposite effect on her than I had intended.

"You're really hot when you're mad," she said.

"I'm leaving," I said, and turned and walked down the corridor after Carrie before Regina could say anything else.

Following her was not difficult. Small drops of blood marked the tile floor at irregular intervals. I grabbed a wad of paper towels from the dispenser outside the boys' bathroom as I passed and mopped up each drop as I went, scrubbing them away with my shoe and the damp towels so that by the time anyone else walked this corridor there would be nothing left to point and whisper about.

The trail led me down a side hallway and through a door to a storage room at the back of the school, a large, cluttered space filled with rows of metal shelving units stacked with old shit, broken sports equipment, folded wrestling mats, and boxes of supplies that probably hadn't been touched since the Carter administration.

I pushed it open slowly and stepped inside. The room was bigger than I expected, the shelves creating a maze of narrow aisles that stretched back toward the far wall where a row of small windows let in thin bars of grey daylight.

"Carrie?" I called gently. "It's James. James Mitchell. Are you okay?"

The sound of crying drifted back to me from somewhere in the maze of shelves. I moved further in following the sound. "I'm not here to make fun of you, I promise. I just want to make sure you're alright."

After another few steps I heard the crying get closer now, coming from the last aisle near the back wall.

"G-go away." 

"Please just... just go away. I don't want... I don't want anyone to s-see me like... please just leave me alone."

I turned the corner of the last shelving unit and found her. She was sitting on the concrete floor with her back pressed against the wall beneath one of the windows, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them so that she was curled into the smallest shape a human body could make. The bloody towel was still clutched around her but it had slipped off one shoulder, her wet blonde hair hung in strings over her face, and the concrete beneath her was spotted with the same dark red drops that had led me here. She was shaking all over, full-body tremor that made her teeth chatter between the sobs.

"I s-said go away!" she cried without looking up, her face buried against her knees.

"Carrie, I'm just here to help, I—"

"GET AWAY FROM ME!"

An invisible force slammed into my chest like a wrecking ball and launched me backward off my feet, sending me crashing spine-first into the metal shelving unit behind me with an impact that collapsed the top two shelves and brought a cascade of old textbooks raining down on my head and shoulders. The shelf unit rocked back on its legs and nearly toppled before it settled, and I slid down the side of it to the floor in a shower of dust and paper.

Carrie's head snapped up and the tears that had been streaming down her face were joined now by a look of pure, terrified shock at what she had just done.

"Oh, oh no, oh no no no, I'm s-sorry, I didn't, I didn't mean to do that, I don't know how, I'm so sorry, are you h-hurt, oh God, I'm so sorry—"

I groaned and shifted against the wrecked shelf, feeling the familiar sensations of my spine realigning itself as a couple of discs that had popped out of place slid back where they belonged and the lancing pain across my back faded into a dull warmth as my body knitted itself back together.

"It's okay," I said, holding up one hand from where I sat among the fallen textbooks. "Don't worry about it. I've taken rougher hits on the football field, trust me."

She stared at me, still shaking, her hands pressed over her mouth like she was trying to hold back another scream or another apology or both at once. Fresh tears spilled over her fingers and her breathing was still coming in those fast hitches that said she was right on the edge of another full breakdown.

I moved slowly, telegraphing every motion, and crossed the remaining distance between us before lowering myself down to sit on the concrete beside her, close but not touching, leaving about a foot of space between us.

"Can you tell me what happened?" I asked calmly. 

She didn't say anything for a long time, I could see her jaw working as she tried to find words that kept getting swallowed by fresh waves of humiliation.

"I was... I was in the shower," she started, her voice barely above a whisper. "After gym class. And I was just... just washing my hair and then I... I looked down and there was... there was b-blood. Coming from..." Her face crumpled and she pressed it harder against her knees, her words coming out muffled and fractured with shame. "From between my l-legs. And I tried to ask someone for help, I asked the girl next to me, but she just... she just laughed. And then they all started laughing. And they started throwing these... these things at me. White things. I don't even know what they were. And they were all pointing and screaming and I didn't know what was happening to me and nobody would help me, they just kept laughing and throwing things and I..."

She trailed off into another round of sobs that shook her whole small frame.

I sat there beside her and let the anger burn through me quietly, fury aimed at every girl in that locker room but most of all at Margaret White, the woman who had raised a daughter to eighteen without telling her that her own body was going to bleed once a month because she was too consumed by religious mania to prepare her child for the most basic fact of being a woman.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if she was the reason Carrie has started her cycle so late. 

"Hey," I said gently. "Hey, Carrie, look at me for a second."

She lifted her face just enough to peek at me over her forearm, her blue eyes red-rimmed and swollen.

"What's happening to you is completely normal. You are not dying. You are not sick. There is nothing wrong with you. This happens to every single woman in the world when her body reaches a certain age, granted it's happened to you a little later, but it's going to happen about once a month from now on. It's called the menstrual cycle. It sounds scary and it's uncomfortable, but it is normal. You are okay."

The relief that flooded her face was almost painful to watch, because underneath it was a bewildered hurt that said why didn't anyone tell me.

"But... but why... why is there so much b-blood? What's it... what's it for?"

I felt heat creep up the back of my neck and I rubbed my jaw awkwardly. "That's, uh, honestly that's something that would be a lot better explained by another woman, because it doesn't happen to men and I don't want to tell you the wrong thing and make this worse. I know someone who can explain it all to you properly, okay? Someone kind. But for now, just know that you're safe and you're healthy and nothing bad is happening to you."

She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

I shrugged off my letterman jacket, and held it out to her. "Here. Put this on. It'll cover you up better than that towel."

She looked at the jacket and then at me and then at the blood still staining the towel, and her face crumpled again. "I'll... I'll g-get blood on it..."

I smiled, a big, warm, genuine smile. "Carrie, I promise you, a little blood on a jacket is the least of my worries right now. Take it. Please."

She reached out with trembling fingers and took the jacket from my hands, pulling it on over the towel, and it swallowed her completely. The hem fell past her thighs and the sleeves hung six inches past her fingertips, she looked like a child wearing her father's coat.

I stood up, took the discarded towel, and used it to quickly wipe up the spots of blood on the concrete floor around where she had been sitting, then folded it up and tucked it under my arm.

"Okay," I said, offering her my hand to help her up. "I'm going to take you to the counselor's office. There's a woman there named Miss Honey and she's one of the kindest people you'll ever meet, she's going to help you with all of this. She'll explain everything and make sure you're comfortable. Alright?"

Carrie took my hand and I pulled her gently to her feet, steadying her when she wobbled slightly. "Th-thank you," she said in a quiet voice. "Thank you, James."

"Don't mention it."

We left the storage room and started down the corridor together, and after a few steps Carrie's hand slipped through the crook of my elbow and her body pressed close against my arm, tucking herself against my side like she was trying to disappear into the shadow of someone bigger and safer. I could feel her flinching at every closed door we passed, bracing for it to open and unleash another round of pointing fingers and cruel laughter, but the halls were empty, everyone still in class, and we made it to the counseling room without seeing a soul.

I knocked on the door and Miss Honey opened it almost immediately, her eyes taking in the scene in a single sweep, the girl in the oversized letterman jacket, the tear-streaked face, the way she was clinging to my arm, and Miss Honey's expression shifted seamlessly from curious to deeply concerned.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said softly, stepping forward and placing a gentle hand on Carrie's shoulder. "Come in, come in, let's get you sitting down. Everything's going to be alright."

She guided Carrie inside settling her into one of the soft armchairs and pulling a blanket from a small cupboard to drape over her lap. Carrie's grip on my arm loosened and then released as she sank into the chair, and the tension that had been holding her rigid slowly began to melt.

"I'm going to get you something warm to drink," Miss Honey told her. "Hot chocolate? Tea? What sounds good, sweetheart?"

"H-hot chocolate," Carrie whispered. "Please."

"Coming right up. James, could I borrow you for just one moment?"

She stepped to the side of the room while Carrie curled up in the chair, and I followed. "She got her first period in the showers after gym. She had no idea what was happening, her mom apparently never told her anything, and the other girls made it worse by laughing and throwing tampons at her. She thinks something is wrong with her. I told her it was normal but I said she should hear the rest from a woman."

Miss Honey listened to every word with her full attention, and when I finished she looked up at me with an amazingly bright smile "James, you did a very good thing just now. A really, truly wonderful thing. You should be proud of yourself."

Then she stepped forward and hugged me.

It was a brief hug, the kind a teacher or a counselor might give a student who had gone above and beyond, and it lasted maybe three seconds. But those were three very specific seconds during which Jennifer Honey's soft body pressed against my chest and her arms wrapped around my shoulders and her hair brushed my jaw, she smelled like vanilla and clean cotton, and my body, the traitorous, hormone-flooded, eighteen-year-old body that I inhabited, responded with immediate and enthusiastic approval in the most visible way possible.

I shifted my weight and angled my dick away from her as subtly as I could manage.

When she released me and stepped back with that warm smile, I caught movement in my peripheral vision and glanced toward the far corner of the room.

Matilda was sitting in her armchair, her book open in her lap, her eyes fixed on me with a look that seemed to ask. 'Do you want to bang my mom?'

I met her stare and gave her a small smirk.

Yeah. I do. And there's nothing you can do about it.

Matilda's eyes narrowed further until they were practically slits, and I could see the gears turning behind them. 

"Well," I said, clearing my throat. "I should probably make myself scarce. Let you handle things from here."

Miss Honey nodded with understanding. "Of course. Thank you again, James, truly. You've made a real difference today."

I gave Carrie a small wave from the doorway, which she returned with a tiny, shy flutter of her fingers from inside the enormous letterman jacket, and then I stepped out of the counseling room and pulled the door shut behind me and headed out. 

The parking lot was quiet when I pushed through the side exit and walked back to the Mustang, made sense since most people were still in class. I unlocked the car, leaned against the driver's side door, and let my head fall back against the roof while I stared up at the sky and tried to remember what it felt like to have a normal day.

I was reaching for the door handle when something caught my eye.

Across the road from the school, past the chain-link fence and the strip of dead grass that bordered the property, the tree line began. The forest that surrounded Derry on three sides pressed in close here,mmm. I had looked at those trees a thousand times from this parking lot and never thought twice about them.

But now, with my upgraded vision, my Hawk Eyes picking up details at triple the normal distance, I could see something moving in there.

It was deep, maybe fifty or sixty yards past the tree line, visible only as a brief flash of movement between the trunks, something large shifting through the undergrowth.

"Don't do it, James," I said to myself. "You are going to get in the car. You are going to drive home. You are going to sit on your couch and drink a beer and not investigate the mysterious thing in the forest. You are going to be smart for once in your miserable life."

I watched the tree line for another few seconds. The movement came again, closer to the edge this time, and I caught a glimpse of something that kind of looked like a person. 

"Do not go in there."

I was already walking toward the fence.

"James, you absolute moron, do not go in there."

I was already climbing it.

"This is how people die, James. This is literally how people die. They see something weird in the woods and they go look and then they die. This is the opening five minutes of every horror movie ever made and you are the idiot in the audience screaming don't go in there except you are the idiot who is going in there."

"Fine... just one look and I'll be gone."

I dropped down on the other side of the fence and walked into the trees.

The forest closed around me within thirty feet, the sounds of the school and the road fading behind me. I moved deeper, scanning the bushes, my enhanced vision picking up details in the shadows that I never would have seen before. Scratches on a tree trunk, four parallel gouges in the bark at about shoulder height, deep enough to show the pale wood beneath. A patch of disturbed soil where something heavy had landed and pushed off again. A branch snapped cleanly at a height of about seven feet, the break fresh, the sap still wet.

"Hello?" I called, feeling stupid even as the word left my mouth. "Is someone out here?"

Silence. Not even birdsong, I realized, the forest had gone completely quiet around me in a way that raised every hair on the back of my neck.

"Yeah, this is fine," I muttered. "This is totally fine. Nothing bad has ever happened in a silent forest. Silence in nature is perfectly normal and not at all a sign that every living thing in the area has fled from a predator."

I was about to call out again when I heard it. A guttural breathing from somewhere above me, the sound of lungs much larger than any human.

I sighed. 

"You know James you deserve this..."

It hit me before I even saw it.

Something massive dropped from the canopy directly above me. I registered claws first, long, curved, black as obsidian, and they raked across my chest in a diagonal slash that tore through my shirt and the skin beneath it in four parallel lines. The force of the blow spun me sideways and before I could even begin to process the pain something heavy slammed into the side of my head and sent me crashing face-first into the trunk of the nearest tree hard enough to crack the bark.

I bounced off and hit the ground on my back, and then it was on top of me.

It was humanoid but wrong, massively muscled and hairless with greyish-blue skin that looked like it had been stretched too tight over a frame that was too large, and its face was a nightmare of big eyes and a wide mouth full of teeth that were somewhere between human and shark.

It pinned me to the forest floor with one enormous clawed hand on my chest, the talons puncturing through my shirt and into the muscle beneath, and then it started tearing.

The first swipe opened my left arm from shoulder to elbow in a spray of blood that hit the trees three feet away. The second carved across my stomach and I felt things shift inside me that were not supposed to shift. The third took a chunk out of my right thigh that I heard more than felt, a wet ripping sound that was followed by a gush of warmth down my leg.

I tried to fight back, tried to bring my arms up, tried to absorb the wood near me, but it was too fast and too heavy, every time I moved it slammed me back down with another swipe that opened a new wound. I got one hand on the dirt and started to pull, felt the earth begin to flow into my palm, and then the thing bit down on my forearm with those shark teeth and twisted, and the scream that came out of me scattered birds from trees a quarter mile away.

My vision started to grey at the edges. The pain had crossed some threshold where it stopped being bad and became a dull, all-encompassing pain that pressed me down into the earth like my body was five times as heavy.

The creature reared back one final time and brought both clawed hands down across my chest in a crossing slash that I felt hit bone, and the world tilted sideways and the grey rushed in from every direction at once, the last thing I saw before the darkness took me was the pale eyes staring down at me without a flicker of recognition or remorse.

Then nothing.

(AN: And James finally runs into something he wasn't remotely prepared for. Despite his abilities he can just be overwhelmed. He has been acting a little cocky hopefully this'll serve as a wake up call.)