Online Safety Contest
Occurence Report
For Emma Samson, all it takes for life in Grade 8 to go from sorta boring to totally out of control is one shared password, one vindictive friend, and one weekend with her parents out of town.
The clues that something weird is going on start emerging on a Thursday evening – the evening before her parents fly to Phoenix for a weekend getaway. Out at the mall with her mother, she passes a trio of boys from the local high school who greet her with catcalls and whistles. A little later, while browsing the racks in The Gap, a girl she recognizes from Grade 9 turns to her friends and loudly announces, “That’s the one. Such a little tramp.”
On Friday at school, people Emma doesn’t even know (for reasons she simply can’t fathom) approach her and say “I’ll be there” or “See you tonight.” One of the boys on the senior basketball team sneaks up from behind and whispers in her ear, “Me and the team are looking forward to it, Emma.”
She also gets a menacing text message from Breanna Baxter, the school’s most notorious bully. Her cryptic message reads, “Actually, Samson, you’re the one who’d better watch her back.”
Emma finally meets up with one of her friends, who provides a clue: “Your Facebook profile, Emma. What the heck...were you on drugs or something?” Emma has no idea what she means, but a quick visit to the computer lab sheds ample light.
It seems someone has hijacked and tampered with Emma’s Facebook profile. Her status says, “Emma has a crush on the entire senior boys basketball team!” On her Wall is a taunting message to the school bully: “I’ve had enough of you, Breanna Baxter. You’d better watch your back.” To Emma’s photo albums, someone has added a number of mortifying pictures of Emma that her former friend Erin Wong took ‘just for fun’ during a slumber party several months earlier, when the girls dolled themselves up with lipstick and mascara and pretended to be swimsuit models. And to top it all off, whoever hijacked her account sent an invitation to who knows how many people: “My parents are out of town all weekend and I’ll be home all alone – just me, an empty house and my Dad’s big liquor cabinet. Come by any time after 7. The more the merrier! 432 Oak Avenue. BTOBS!”
As her parents have already left for their weekend away, Emma decides that she’ll try to manage the situation on her own. But when evening arrives and dozens of people descend on her house – schoolmates, kids from the local high school, Erin Wong and her latest BFF, and a large contingent of total strangers – the party grows quickly out of control.
When the dust settles, the house is a disastrous mess. But that’s not the worst of it: when Emma’s parents get home, her father discovers that his coin collection, which included a set of Olympic medals valued at over $20,000, has gone missing from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in his den. The police are called back, the scene of the theft is examined, and Constable Cy Berkopp goes to work on yet another ‘Whodunnit?’.