The epistolary narrative opens the novel, featuring a news article from 1966 reporting on a rain of stones that fell upon Carrie White’s home.

The third-person limited omniscient narrator then takes over, focusing on Carrie, a perpetually bullied girl, as she stands in the showers of her school locker room feeling like “a frog among swans” (5). When her classmates notice menstrual blood dripping down Carrie’s leg, Chris Hargensen—one of the popular girls—incites Sue Snell and the rest of the girls into teasing Carrie and pelting her with tampons and sanitary napkins. Carrie, who has grown up in a cloistered religious home, is unaware of menstruation and believes she is bleeding to death. Miss Desjardin, the gym teacher, finally halts the attack.

Excerpts explain that later experts agree the initiation of Carrie’s menstruation also enabled finer control and awareness of her telekinetic powers. Miss Desjardin convinces the assistant principal to allow Carrie to return home from school, but not before an anxious Carrie inadvertently shatters an overhead light and knocks over an ashtray with her powers. These events perplex Miss Desjardin, but she doesn’t suspect anything further.