Beginning

She walked into the bar in Wayne, PA, knowing she was the first of her friends to arrive, yet scanning the front looking for them. She navigated through the crowd to the back startled by their WASPyness. It had been some time since she had gone out in the deep suburbs and she wasn't used to the whiteness, the homogeneity of the upper middle class crowd. Overwhelmed, she walked back to the front, texting her girlfriend as she went. "Where the funk are you?" The phone had chosen a more polite adjective than the one she intended.



"Robin,"she heard her name. She looked up relieved when she saw her old friend from high school, Stu Dwyer sitting with a group at a Table up front. She recognized John Goodman, but not the rest of the group.

"Hey Stu, what are you doing out here?" She knew he lived in Philadelphia, he was out of context in the Upper Main Line.

"Halfway point, did you know Harley Shames in High School? He pointed to a curly haired man with an expensive looking cashmere v-neck and updated John Lennon glasses.

"No, but remember I switched to friends school in 10th grade."

"Oh yeah, Harely didn't go to middle school with us,"Stu said.

"I went to Welsh Valley, but my parent's made me go to LM instead of Harriton where all my friends were," Harley piped in.

"Ah, you lived in the Walk Zone," Robin smiled.

"Yeah, I lived on Gypsy and my parent's made me walk to LM. All my friends went to Harriton, it sucked having to start over in 9th grade. How'd you know about the walk zone?"

"I live a few blocks from Gypsy, on Broad Acres, my kids go to Penn Valley. LM is redistricting because of the new High Schools," she explained leaning over Stu towards Harley.



The Lower Merion school District, one of the best in the country was currently undergoing a heated re-districting. The district was re-building its two high schools, tearing them to the ground and starting fresh to the tune of 700 million dollars. Historically, Harriton had a smaller student body being in the less populated part of the district, but the new plan called for an equal number of student at each school. The problem being with bulk of the population lived near Lower Merion High School, most parents wanted their kids to attend LM. They didn't wanted to drive the extra 15 minutes out to Harriton HS in Bryn Mawr, with its lack of diversity and wealthier families. While most of the district was upper middle class, the group closest to City Line Avenue felt they were more liberal, more diverse, working to make ends meet, somehow less elitist, but actually more elitist in their reverse discrimination of their wealthier neighbors to the west.