Virginia is not one of the states that has passed specific teen-sexting laws, and so Major Lowe was looking, potentially, at hundreds of felonies. Every boy who had a photo on his phone, every girl who’d snapped one of herself—all could be prosecuted as felons and sex offenders. If Lowe made an arrest, the case would land with Rusty McGuire, the main prosecutor for Louisa County. McGuire wouldn’t talk with me about this situation specifically, but he expressed his concern more generally about nude pictures of minors landing in the wrong hands: “What do you do? Turn a blind eye? You’re letting teenagers incite the prurient interest of predators around the country,” fueling a demand that “can only be met by the actual abuse of real children.”

McGuire has successfully prosecuted several actual pedophiles over the years, including a local man who had posed as a teenage girl on Facebook and solicited young boys for sex, and another man—a trusted teacher—who had been part of a ring whose members offered up their own children to other members for sex. When he talks about the awful details of these crimes, it’s hard to get them out of your head. The Virginia legislature has long failed to pass a sexting law largely for fear of being soft on child porn, says Dave Albo, the chairman of the state Courts of Justice committee. Still, the absence of any obvious lesser alternative put Lowe in a difficult spot. “They’re not violent criminals,” he told me. “If these kids just made a dumb-ass mistake, we don’t want to ruin their future.”

“She’s a whore. I’ve totally heard that she’s a whore.”

That comment came quickly, from a senior girl whose style was generally more refined. “She” was Briana, a sophomore softball player who, in school lore, was the one who’d started all the trouble.

“I have to show you something.” Briana’s friend had stopped her between classes one day and showed her a picture on Instagram, the same morning Jennifer, Jasmine’s mom, contacted the police. It was a picture of a pair of breasts, and Briana, who is now a junior, recognized them as her own. Pretty much anyone at the high school would have. She was the only girl who had so many freckles going down her shoulders and arms, and it didn’t take too much imagination to guess where else. Briana went to a young teacher she trusted. “I said, ‘There’s this picture of me up on Instagram.’ ” The teacher informed the principal, who eventually called the police. No one at school knew that Jennifer had already reported the account that morning.

While police were calling kids into a makeshift interview room at the high school, one by one, a more unruly drama was unfolding in the hallways. Because the Instagram accounts had been up for only a short time, not everyone had seen them. Rumors spread about which girls had appeared in photos and what they’d been doing. One was supposedly making out with her sister (not true). Another was “messing with, like 10, 15 dudes” (also not true). A group of sociologists led by Elizabeth Armstrong has studied the class dynamics of the term slut as used by young college women. High-status women from affluent homes associate slut with women they call “trashy” and not “classy.” To women from working-class families, upper-class women are “rich bitches in sororities”—whom they also commonly think of as sluts. The girl who called Briana a whore is a potential future sorority-chapter president. She and several other more affluent students described everyone associated with the Instagram accounts to me as “ghetto,” which in this context had mild racial connotations but generally stands for “trashy” or “the lower crowd.” The role of ultimate, quintessential slut fell to a “redneck” girl who appeared on Instagram. In the post-sexting-scandal lore, she “supposedly slept with her brother” (surely not true).

To the elite girls, the girls on Instagram were sluts not necessarily because they were sleeping around but because of what they looked like or how they acted. “Let’s just say people have different body types,” one girl told me. Others, speaking about girls in the photos, said, “You obviously have a little too much confidence,” or just “Butter face” (as in: nice body, but her face … ). In their college study, Armstrong and her team identify this brand of sniping as a way girls police one another and establish a sort of moral superiority without denying themselves actual sex, and something similar seemed to be happening here. Well-off, popular girls were most certainly in the Instagram photos, but none would admit as much unless I knew otherwise. Briana was, in many ways, on the opposite end of the spectrum—she lacked that kind of standing, and, because she had gone to the principal, she was the girl most widely associated with the accounts, and therefore the main character in the morality tale that was being stitched together between classes.

I met Briana in early June, just after school had ended. She was in a summer program for geometry remediation because she’d gotten a C in math. She told me that she had ADD and took Adderall, and that she loved history but hated math with a passion. “I don’t know. I try hard. I’m just more into sports.” On the day we met, she wore a purple tank top and not-too-tight shorts, and her long hair was down. She had a sunburn on her shoulders that was bothering her a little. She told me she ran track and played volleyball and softball. Mostly she seemed nervous and eager to please—“No, ma’am.” “Yes, ma’am”—and to make me understand that she was not a bare-your-breasts kind of girl.

“Just let me see them, please?” She texted back, “No,” she told me. He was a junior, one year ahead of her. She didn’t consider him her boyfriend, just someone she talked with at school sometimes. Plus she felt “self-conscious.” Briana is tall and fit but doesn’t exude that sexy sheen some high-school girls do. He asked a dozen more times, in different ways, and one night the text came as she was getting out of the shower. “What are you doing?” he texted. “I just got out of the shower and I’m about to go to sleep.” “Send me a picture, PLEASE.” She caved. She sent it over Snapchat and said he had to let it erase right away. He said he did.

For days after the investigation began, Briana felt that people were staring at her, talking about her, blaming her for the fact that the high school seemed like a prison, or that they were being hauled into a police interview, or—worst of all—that they had to hide their phones or have them confiscated for God knows how long. “It was getting 10 times bigger,” she told me. “As each day went by, more phones were being taken. It all went really, really fast—way faster than I expected.” Sometimes her friends would tell her, “Hey, they were talking about you in second period.”

Briana was prepared for part of the reaction: that everyone would think “if I show my boobs then that means I would do anything.” But the worst part was “everyone calling me a snitch. Everybody, like, hated me because they knew I had told. It was so bad that I didn’t want to go to school.”

Briana and Jasmine are friends, and the day after the police arrived, Jasmine also wanted to stay home from school. She had sobbed and thrown up when she saw her photo on Instagram. But Jennifer wouldn’t let her stay home. In fact, she told her daughter she would be punished if she cried in school or showed in any way that she was upset: “They already got a piece of you,” Jennifer told her. “Don’t let them get any more.” So Jasmine stayed stone-faced, and nobody said a thing to her. The future sorority girl told me she’d caught Jasmine’s eye that first week and thought, “She must be thinking, You’ve seen me naked,” but she also noted that Jasmine didn’t betray anything. “She was just walking around the school as if nothing happened.”

Briana was not so lucky. The incident always seemed to be there, at school and at home. When she and her mother were watching TV and a romantic or sexual scene came on, her mother would leave the room. During arguments she’d say, “You have no reason to have an attitude after everything you’ve done.” One time, after her younger sister had misbehaved, her mom yelled, “Don’t end up like your sister!” while Briana stood close by. (Her mother later apologized.) Briana told me she has tried to make amends. She cleans up the kitchen every night after dinner, cleans the bathrooms. “Some days we’re okay, and some days I think it’s all she thinks about. She sent me a note: ‘I still think of you as my little girl.’ I understand where she’s coming from. But I’m not a little girl. I think she hasn’t accepted the fact that I’ve grown up yet.”

About a month after the investigation, Briana got into a fight with a boy on the bus. She was still “stressed out,” she said, and he kept singing a song she found annoying, and she asked him to please stop. He told her, “Nobody even wants you here” and called her a bitch, and she said, “I’m gonna beat the effing crap out of you,” and she hit him, and got suspended for three days. Those happened to be the days of softball tryouts, so she almost didn’t make the team. Then, when the coach did let her join the team, a teammate accused Briana of putting her college scholarship in jeopardy because her phone had been confiscated and maybe the school would rescind its offer. Briana used to babysit for one of the teacher’s kids, “but then his wife wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

Studies on high-school kids’ general attitudes about sexting turn up what you’d expect—that is, the practice inspires a maddening, ancient, crude double standard. Researchers from the University of Michigan recently surveyed a few dozen teenagers in urban areas. Boys reported receiving sexts from girls “I know I can get it from” and said that sexting is “common only for girls with slut reputations.” But the boys also said that girls who don’t sext are “stuck up” or “prude.” The boys themselves, on the other hand, were largely immune from criticism, whether they sexted or not.

Sometimes in Louisa County, between interviews, I hung out with a group of 15-year-old boys who went to the library after school. They seemed like good kids who studied, played football, and occasionally got into fights, but no more than most boys. They’d watch videos of rappers from the area and talk about rumors in the rap world, like the one that the Chicago rapper Chief Keef, a rival of D.C.’s Shy Glizzy, had gotten a middle-school girl pregnant. They’d order and split a pizza to pass the time while waiting for their parents to leave work and pick them up. I started to think of them as the high school’s Greek chorus because, while I recognized much of what they said as 15-year-old-boy swagger—designed to impress me and each other, and not necessarily true—they still channeled the local sentiment. This is how one of them described his game to me: “A lot of girls, they stubborn, so you gotta work on them. You say, ‘I’m trying to get serious with you.’ You call them beautiful. You say, ‘You know I love you.’ You think about it at night, and then you wake up in the morning and you got a picture in your phone.”

“You wake up a happy man,” his friend said.

“Yeah, a new man.”

“Yeah, I’m the man.”

How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.

“Super thots.”

“You can’t love those thots!”

“That’s right, you can’t love those hos.”

“Girls in Louisa are easy.”

And thus it was with Briana and her seducer: “He was a jerk. He didn’t talk to me anymore. And he just flirted with other girls.”