THEY WERE WHITE, BLACK, AND HISPANIC--AND THE BEST OF FRIENDS.

• Author: LEWIN, TAMAR
• Position: High school friends

But when they hit high school, something changed

Back in eighth grade, Kelly Regan, Aqeelah Mateen, and Johanna Perez-Fox spent New Year's Eve at Johanna's house, swing-dancing until they fell down laughing, banging pots and pans, watching the midnight fireworks over the trees in the park at the center of town.

They had been a tight threesome all through Maplewood, New Jersey, Middle School--Kelly, tall, coltish Irish Catholic; Aqeelah, small, earnest African-American Muslim; and Johanna, light coffee-colored, half Jewish and half Puerto Rican, and famous for knowing just about everyone.

It had been a great night, they agreed, a whole lot simpler than Johanna's birthday party three nights before. Johanna had invited all their friends, black and white. But they didn't mix much.

"The black kids stayed down in the basement and danced, and the white kids went outside on the stoop and talked," Johanna says. "I went out and said, `Why don't you guys come downstairs?' and they said they didn't want to, that they just wanted to talk out there. It was just split up, like two parties."

The same thing had happened when Kelly held a back-to-school party a few months earlier. "It was so stressful," Kelly remembers. "There I was, the hostess, and I couldn't get everybody together."

This year, the girls started high school, and with the difficulty of mixing their black and white friends, none of the three even tried a birthday party.

It happens everywhere, in the confusion of adolescence and the yearning for identity, when the most important thing in life is choosing a group and fitting in: Black kids and white kids come apart. They move into separate worlds. Friendships ebb and end.

It happens everywhere, but what is striking is that it happens even here. In a nation where most schools are increasingly segregated, the South Orange-Maplewood district is extraordinarily mixed. Half black and half white, it is the kind of place where people of both races talk a lot about the virtues of diversity and worry a lot about white flight, where hundreds turn out to discuss the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

But even here, as if pulled by internal magnets, black and white children begin to separate at sixth grade. These are kids who walked to school together, learned to read together, slept over at each other's houses. Despite all the personal history, all the community goodwill, race divides them as they grow up. As racial consciousness develops--and the practice of grouping students by perceived ability sends them on diverging academic paths--a racial fault line defines their world.

When they began high school, Kelly, Johanna, and Aqeelah had managed to be exceptions, sticking together even as the world around them divided along racial lines. But where their friendship would go was hard to predict.

DIFFERENT BUT INSEPARABLE

On her first day at Columbia High School, Kelly took a seat in homeroom and introduced herself to the black student at the next desk.

"I was trying to be friendly," she explains. "But he answered in like one word, and looked away. I think he just thought I was a normal white person, and that's all he saw."

She certainly looks like a normal white person, with her pale skin and straight brown hair. But in middle school, she had joined Aqeelah and Johanna at Martin Luther King Association meetings; there had been only a handful of white girls. Kelly never felt out of place. "Some people say I'm ghetto," she says, shrugging. "I don't care."

Kelly always had a mixed group of friends, and since the middle of eighth grade, she had been dating a mixed-race classmate, Jared Watts. But she knew it would be harder to make black friends once she entered ninth grade. "It's not because of the person I am," she says, "it's just how it is."

Johanna is intensely sociable. As she sees it, her mixed background gives her a choice of racial identity and access to everybody. "I like that I can go both ways," she says. Johanna carries a certain otherness among her black friends. "If they say something about white people, they'll always say, `Oh, sorry, Johanna,'" she says. "I think it's good. It makes them more aware of their stereotypes."

Still, she was put off when a new black friend asked what race she was: "I told him I'm half white and half Puerto Rican, and he said, `But you act black.' I told him you can't act like a race, I hate that idea. He defended it, though. He said I would have a point...