At First Glance//(Harry Styles FanFic)

1. Changes PART ONE

Bea's POV

Today was a day almost all middle school kids looked forward to; and that was the first day of high school.

I was 14 now but I could remember being excited for this day at 11 years old, in just the 6th grade. My sister, Shannon, was three years older than me, and I remember how jealous I was that she was starting high school when I was only starting middle school.

So to be standing here now, seeing all the older boys and girls walking around me in a parking lot full of cars had me nearly starstruck. I knew a lot of them because of my sister, or some of them were my friends older siblings. But still, to be here now was such a surreal moment for me.

Only this year was different than most. In the small town we lived in in Ohio, there was only two high schools. And they basically split up the sides of town that were financially stable, and the side that struggled.

I lived on the side of town that had decent money, we were called the Towneys. We were middle class, in now way rich compared to some other families who lived on this side. But my parents jobs paid well and we didn't ever worry about having food on our table, clothes on our backs, or if we'd have heat in the brutal winter time.

The other side though? Purely poor. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm snobby or too good, it was just the truth. Every house on that side looked like it would fall apart in our next big storm, or they lived in a mobile home of some sort. They were called the downeys.

I could count on one hand how many times I had been on that side of town. It looked like a ghost town compared to the my town side, and it was sometimes startling to see such a stark difference in our sides when we were only 20 minutes away from each other. Most of the people on the downeys side rode bikes or drove a car that was new fifteen years ago, or longer.

We each had our own high school too, until now. A month before school was supposed to start back, someone burned down the high school on the downeys side of town. The town council took weeks to come up with a compromised decision, and they finally agreed on merging the other school students with us.

To say there had been an uproar would be an understatement. Parents lined the streets outside the town council and held up signs in protest. They didn't think the Downeys were good enough to go to the same school as us Towneys.

But the council hadn't been swayed, and so the decision stuck that we would be spending this school year together while the other high school was being rebuilt. They said arsen was the cause of the school burning down, but they had yet to catch who did it, and no one had come forward with any information.

My parents had gave my sister and I a long talk today about how different this year might be. They didn't hate the people who lived on the Downey side like some people did, but they were definitely cautious about them.

Hence the speech they gave us about locking the car up and never letting our purses far from our sight. Shannon and I both agreed but neither one of us were really too concerned about it.

We weren't terrified of the Downeys side of town, and I think we were both kinda excited about the change that would be taking place. It constantly felt like our lives were repeat, and nothing exciting ever happened to us. This was something different, and no one really knew what to expect.

What I didn't expect to see was the mass separation of the crowds in the parking lot. The buses dropped off most of the Downey kids, but a few had old cars that they drove to school. They parked as far away from us Towneys as possible, and the cliques were easily distinguishable.