Friend Game.(Megan Meier's suicide)

Just past suppertime on a starry night in November, several unfamiliar cars pulled up outside 251 Waterford Crystal Drive, in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, where news vans had been parked for weeks to cover a tragedy that came to be known, in the bluff shorthand of the morning shows, as the MySpace Suicide Hoax. A well-combed man in a blue suit, a correspondent for "Good Morning America," stood on the front lawn yelling into his BlackBerry. Two ornamental angels loomed from an upstairs window of the house, a two-story Colonial with white siding. Inside, much of the furniture had been removed from the living room, making way for a large picture, propped on an easel, of Megan Meier.

A year earlier, Megan had committed suicide after an exchange of hostile messages with a boy who had befriended her on MySpace. She was thirteen, a volleyball player and a Chihuahua maniac. "M is for Modern, E is for Enthusiastic, G is for Goofy, A is for Alluring, N is for Neglected," she had written in an acrostic poem that accompanied her MySpace profile. The "MySpace Suicide Hoax" tagline that appeared on the broadcasts and in the chat rooms was, however, a misnomer. Megan's suicide--for anyone who had not already heard, or been forwarded, the story (often with a stunned "OMG")--had not been a hoax; rather, it was precipitated by a hoax, involving a boy named Josh Evans. Josh Evans was a fake, a cyber-character created by neighbors of the Meiers.

In the picture, Megan was wearing a rhinestone tiara. Her eyes were rimmed with black eyeliner, her brows plucked into the shape of birds' wings, her brown hair prettily lifted off her face in layers. She stared directly at the camera, screwing her lips into the half-sulky, half-silly, exactingly lip-glossed pout that--whether designed to suggest vampiness or simply to mask the indignities of orthodontia--is a ubiquitous affectation of American teen-age girldom.

Megan--Megan Babi was her Internet handle--had used a similar photograph to illustrate her MySpace profile. It was just a casual snapshot, but something about it seemed to embody both the sadness and the exhilaration of female adolescence. Megan loved Pink, a loungewear line by Victoria's Secret, which is popular for the inclusion of a free toy "mini-dog" with many purchases. Like Pink, the photograph represented a tender contradiction: the girl who wants both a stuffed animal and a Miracle Bra. "Oh, god. Poor baby. How could she think she was ugly?" someone wrote on Jezebel, a blog aimed at women in their twenties, reading that Megan hated the way she looked. The pictures reminded one how costly an expression a smile can be for a girl of thirteen. It was safer, Megan's pose suggested, to strike wary airs than to convey an earnestness that could be exploited by her enemies at school or, worse, on the Internet.

Like many teen-agers, Megan and her peers carried on an online social life that was more mercurial, and perhaps more crucial to their sense of status and acceptance, than the one they inhabited in the flesh. On MySpace, and on other social-networking sites, such as Friendster and Facebook, a person can project a larger, more confident self, a nervy collection of favorite music, books, quotations, pleasures, and complaints. He or she, able to play with different personas, is released from some of the petty humiliations of being a middle-schooler--all it takes to be a Ludacris fan is a couple of keystrokes.

But trying on identities is, in the fluid environment of the Internet, a riskier experiment than raiding Mom's makeup bag. Squabbles that would take days to percolate in person can within seconds explode into full-blown wars. Disputes can also become painfully public. Sites allow users to rank their "Top Friends," so that the ever-shifting alliances of a clique are posted, for all to see, in a sort of popularity ledger. Likewise, polling applications enable a person to pose a question--Is Caitlin hot or not?--to his or her network of acquaintances, who can follow the results in real time, via a brightly colored thermometer icon (as can Caitlin).

Teen-age identities mutate so quickly online, and can be masked so easily, that by the morning after Megan was pronounced dead Josh Evans had vanished from MySpace. It wasn't until a month after her death that a neighbor named Michele Mulford told the Meiers that Curt and Lori Drew, who lived four houses down, had created "Josh" in concert with their thirteen-year-old daughter, a longtime friend of Megan's. (An eighteen-year-old girl who worked for the Drews was also involved.) The two thirteen-year-olds had recently quarrelled. Mulford's own daughter, also thirteen, had been given the password to the account, and had sent at least one unkind message to Megan in Josh's name. Megan had accompanied the Drews on several vacations, and they knew that she was taking medication.