At 12 years old, Ashley Wadsworth didn't yet have a smartphone. She didn't need one, figured her mother, with a close-knit community of family and friends in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley. But she did use the family laptop to see what her friends were posting to social media. Among her peers, it wasn't seen as bold to add friends of friends on a whim, or to message a cute stranger to say hi. Wadsworth and her friends mingled confidently online the way previous generations might have at the mall. That's how, in 2015, Wadsworth became Facebook friends with a 16-year-old English teenager named Jack Sepple, after spotting him on a mutual acquaintance's page. Wadsworth had always been curious about the wider world, and Sepple offered a window onto faraway places-even if that place was only Chelmsford, a city of about 180,000 people in Essex, an hour northeast of London.
Wadsworth was bright and gregarious. She played ringette, tennis and the clarinet. At school, she went out of her way to befriend international students, knowing they might feel lonely, so far away from home. Sepple, by contrast, was withdrawn. He didn't have a thriving social life, and his biggest hobby seemed to be social media, but Wadsworth liked his scrappy charm. Their three-and-a-half-year age gap was mitigated by distance, and the fact that Sepple also lived at home with his family.
At first the pair were more like pen pals, confidantes whose daily exchanges refreshed the scenery of each other's lives. Within a few months, Wadsworth began mentioning Sepple to her mother, Christy Gendron, as well as her sister, Hailey, and her father, Kenneth, who lived nearby with his wife. Gendron was cautious about the burgeoning relationship, but felt more comfortable after Sepple sent photos of himself. They seemed to prove he was who he said he was: a bored teenager who, like so many of his generation, socialized largely online.
This story is from the July 2023 edition of Maclean's.
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This story is from the July 2023 edition of Maclean's.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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