-8-

I AM like Carrie White.

-8-

Like most things El did, she discovered the hit movie, Carrie by chance. When she found out it was about a young girl with telekinetic powers, she was intrigued. When you hung around someone like Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas, you picked up on popular culture. Dungeons and Dragons being the most obvious, given how the quartet had been fighting campaigns for a long time, and some of the monsters of the Upside Down were named after them.

El preferred to leave Dungeons and Dragons to the experts; she preferred movies, really, and books compared to games once she had become much better at reading them, and now Hopper couldn't hide her away, she'd gained more teachers in the shape of Joyce, Nancy, Steve, Max, Lucas, Mike, and Dustin, and her skill had only grown as she read increasingly longer and more complex novels.

That hadn't changed because she'd joined the Byers in California (maybe soon, someday in the future, El would muster the effort to ask Joyce how she'd managed to persuade Dr Owens to let them leave Hawkins behind after that massive mess with the Russians and their machine which drilled that gate into the Upside Down before Hopper sacrificed himself; but because of what happened to her adoptive father, she doubted she would ever do it, not until she was old enough to have let it go).

While she was still reeling from the loss of her powers and Hopper, she had the Byers around her to give her company and comfort, but ever since Eleven had started school and was bullied by Angela, who hated her for reasons she couldn't work out, Eleven found herself missing her powers.

It was weird, right?

Missing her powers, the same things which had resulted in her mother chasing after her for so long, fighting a never-ending battle against the Lab and against Brenner, before she'd had enough and stormed the lab with a gun..only to have her brain turned to mush and forced to relive the same last few hours of her life, the powers which resulted in her being hunted down and experimented on whenever Brenner had the chance, it was odd.

But in the private recesses of her mind, Eleven had to admit did miss her powers. They had been a part of her and without them she felt lost, worried. She might like living normally, having a normal life and having a family without constantly looking over her shoulder all the time, but Eleven did wish she could have her powers back since she could use them right now.

One day, during one of the visits to the video store, El came across a video box titled 'Carrie.'

Usually, El would pick out some of the movies at random, read what they were about from what she found on the backs, and then either take a few to the front desk or put them back. Carrie was one of those movies she took out, once she found out what it was about. The moment she read the back of the video box, she felt her heart skip a couple of beats.

A telekinetic, like her?

Intrigued, Eleven took the movie with her back home, and she watched it. She watched every single moment of it, feeling herself becoming more and more transfixed by the lead character, and feeling sorry for her every step of the way, how her home life was an abusive nightmare, to her school career where she was shivering in utter fear…and all the time, there were moments when she would lash out with telekinetic violence.

All of it, all of that pain, hurt, and fury was unleashed at last during that fateful prom where her beautiful dress was covered with pig's blood (how could anybody do such a terrible thing, Eleven couldn't even begin to imagine; she did make a mental note, to avoid all proms in case Angela got it into her nasty, twisted little skull to do something as nastily similar - she wouldn't put it past the school's Queen Bee, either) before Carrie's fury exploded and a humiliating experience transformed into a blood bath.

When it was over - she wasn't sure if she could take watching the movie again, not after that - Eleven was left thinking.

There were too many similarities between herself and Carrie for her to ignore, and she did suddenly remember Max commenting on the similarities a year before, but the other girl had then become vague, and now Eleven had a theory of why that was.

Both of them were telekinetics, but where her powers had only manifested because of Papa's experiments on her mother, who was pregnant at the time, Carrie's seemed natural.

There was also no sign of any Bad Men, or anyone similar; the only bad people in the movie were Carries' enemies, which included her fanatically religious mother (not for the first time, Eleven wondered if God would have wanted people to live that way), and all of those people at school who'd bullied and tormented her.

Like Carrie, she'd had a fanatical parental figure who was trying to keep her down, but in Hopper's case, it wasn't because of religious reasons that were twisted out of context. Hopper had genuinely been frightened for her wellbeing, and her safety, not to mention everyone else involved; it had taken her a while to realise that if anyone had stepped out of line with their agreements, Brenner's people would have killed them, even if Owens was more reasonable.

But El had lost her temper, and caused her powers to explode around her, violently too; like Carrie, she knew what it felt like to be persecuted by everybody around her, to great costs.

While she knew she wasn't entirely like Carrie, Eleven couldn't hide from the dozens of similarities between them. Just because she didn't have her powers anymore didn't mean they weren't still there, somewhere, in the back of her mind.

She only wondered if there would be a time when she would lash out, like Carrie had, and hurt everyone she loved.