She didn’t have any yearbooks. She and Susso had vandalised theirs. Writing nicknames, established and made up. Drawing devil’s horns. Goatees and Hitler moustaches. Boils and warts with hairs growing out of them. Big, flappy ears. Speech bubbles full of obscenities. Anna Hedlund and Carina Aaro’s faces had been overlaid with so much ink the paper had ripped. They had drawn a sombrero on Jerry Brynerfors, who was so inbred he looked Mexican and who they therefore called Diego, and next to Odd Enoksson, who was a head taller than everyone else in his class, including the teacher, she had written ‘PATHETICALLY TALL’, and level with the top of his head she had drawn a stickman with round specs and an arrow and written ‘Robert Pershing Wadlow’. He was the world’s tallest man. Eight feet eleven inches he’d been. He hadn’t stopped growing until he died. If he hadn’t died, he might have hit nine feet. Maybe ten. At least that’s what Susso had claimed. She had read about him in The Guinness Book of World Records. There hadn’t been a lot of books in the freezing little flat where she lived alone like Pippi Longstocking, but she did have The Guinness Book of World Records, several editions even; they had been lined up on the shelf where she kept her CDs and video cassettes as well. Every year, her dad had given her that book for Christmas up at Riksgränsen and now, thinking about it, it struck her how depressing that was. How paltry. He bought his abandoned daughter one book and one book only, and that was the one he picked. The Guinness Book of World Records. Diana had read the books too, but hadn’t found anything to support Susso’s claims that Robert Pershing Wadlow could have reached ten feet. She had not been convinced a person could grow that tall. Probably not even nine feet. For the same reasons trees had to stop growing eventually. There were limits. Gravitation imposed limits. But she had never disputed Susso’s claims. She always kept her doubts to herself. She never called Susso on anything, and that had been a prerequisite for their friendship. It had been built on the fact that she never called Susso on anything.