A friend of Mays’s named Anthony Craig had also been talking to the girl that summer. She’d been “talking to him,” a porous term that teen-agers use to refer to a romantic relationship that is unlikely to be exclusive, and can involve spending time together or just courting through social media. She brought a bottle of vodka with her, and she used it to spike a slushy that she bought at a gas station on the way to their destination, in a town called Steubenville.Īt the party, she met up with a sixteen-year-old named Trent Mays, a good-looking, dark-haired football player with whom she’d been flirting by text and tweet. One Saturday last August, a sixteen year-old girl in West Virginia did something that teen-agers do: she told her parents that she was sleeping at another girl’s house, across the Ohio River, and then, after her mother dropped her off there, she and a few friends headed into the hot summer night to a party. Anonymous posted that it wouldn’t let “young men who turn to rape as a game or sport get the pass,” adding, “This is a call to arms.” Illustration by Noma Bar
