Testimony

Testimony
By Anita Shreve
Library Standing: We have this in book form!

Four teenagers - one dead, three with their futures in tatters. This is the opening promise of Testimony, with two or more ruined marriages and a school's disgraced reputation thrown in.

All this drama spools out of a video cassette handed to Avery Academy's headmaster, Mike, which shows four students - three male, one female - engaged in sexual acts. The boys are aged between 17 and 19; the girl is 14, which makes the boys' actions sexual assault according to the laws of the State of Vermont.

Nothing in the tape suggests the girl is unwilling; if anything, she seems to be in control. This is not a story of a group of boys coercing a girl into sex. It is the story of how very young lives can be hurled off course - and in one case, ended - by an alcohol-fuelled evening of bad choices, immaturity and hormones.