Free Meaner Things by David Anderson Page A

school yearbooks. I quickly located the two or three that I was most interested in and went to work, studying the lists of students, each one with a head-and-shoulders colour picture. I reckoned that people don’t change much in three years or so.
    Well, except Emma Virtanen. Without too much trouble I soon found her name in the relevant yearbook. Trouble was, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
    I wouldn’t call this Emma Virtanen exactly plain or mousy, but she was obviously a little overweight and had a bad case of acne. And when I held the book up close to my eyes I could see thin red lines on the bridge of her nose and under her eyes, where glasses had just been removed for the photograph. My Emma, as I knew only too well, was slim-limbed, had perfect honey skin and twenty-twenty vision. The girl in the school photo had blonde hair alright, and a Nordic or Scandinavian look that might have indicated Finnish ethnicity, but the nose, mouth, chin – everything – were different from those of the Emma Virtanen I knew. It was the difference between the girl next door and a fashion model.
    I sat back in the library booth and tried to figure it out. Unless she’d had the world’s biggest, quickest and most successful makeover, this was an entirely different individual. Actually, the more I thought about it, not even plastic surgery could have made them the same person. Which meant that the Emma Virtanen I knew must be somebody else. I searched the yearbook again, but there was no head-and-shoulders picture of my Emma.
    There was a blank space at the end of the long columns of photos, with a short list of names in it. I decided she must have been off sick the day the photographer came to the school. It took quite a bit more searching through the yearbook, page by boring page, but I eventually found her in the volleyball team. She was standing in the back row. Same smooth forehead, high cheekbones, sticky-up nose, wide mouth and strong, tapering chin. Same ash blonde hair, worn in her distinctive ‘Mongol’ style – probably the only girl in the entire pile of yearbooks who wore it that way.
    The name underneath the photograph was Agneta Nurmi.
    *
    I Googled both names, of course. It didn’t take me long to find Emma Virtanen. Her sad story came up on screen, front page news in the Victoria Times Colonist for a whole day. Just a couple of weeks after her high school graduation, Emma, the real one, had been the victim of a hit and run accident. Under the banner ‘Oak Bay Girl Dies Following Hit-And-Run Accident’ there was another, somewhat more flattering, head and shoulders photo and brief, but gory, details.
    Just before 9 o'clock Tuesday evening on Smythe Ave . north of Strathcona Park , eighteen year old Emma Virtanen was walking home with a school friend when a Jeep came speeding by , mounted the curb and knocked Ms . Virtanen to the ground .
    Witnesses say the recent high school graduate was bleeding profusely from the head but managed to rise to her feet again before falling over once more . The injury was so severe that Ms . Virtanen was dead by the time an ambulance arrived . A spokesperson from Royal Jubilee Hospital confirmed that the victim died from head injuries and massive internal bleeding .
    The hit - and - run vehicle is described as a dark , older Jeep Grand Cherokee with damage on the passenger side . Anyone with information should call . . .
    Blah, blah, blah. It made depressing reading, even now. Out of respect for the real Emma I printed up a copy of the news article and searched for any subsequent updates about the tragedy. The perpetrator, as far as I could tell, was never identified.
    I Googled until I was sick of looking at the screen and had a headache coming on, but nothing came up for Agneta Nurmi. All I discovered was that it too was a Finnish name.
    So what was going on here? The two girls must have known each other. Did they hang out together? Share a table in the school café? It seemed