Post by SKYE on Feb 26, 2008 19:12:14 GMT -5
Thousand Ways to Smile
Welcome to Fortress Point, Maryland, located just fifty miles from Washington and bounded by Chesapeake Bay. It’s where city and coast life meet getting as close as possible to paradise. But who said life in paradise would be easy? Fortress Point is the home to amazing places, killer parties, and whole load of drama. The kids here know how to party like no other, always trying to make the best of their youth, and the parents here are as clueless as they come, always letting their jobs blind them to everything else around. The city isn't small, it's rather big actually, but sometimes that’s how it feels and seems. And secrets don't remain a secret for very long, if something happened in the morning, at night it won’t be hard to find someone who already heard about it yet. Every week, every month and year something new seems to happen, making the lives of Fortress Point citizens anything but boring.
Here you will find one of the highest median household income of the country, granting Fortress Point a nice spot on Forbes list of the richest cities in the US. Even the not so big houses are rather expensive here and as many have come to realize, even if you were considered rich where you previously lived, there is no way to know if the same will happen here. If it happens, your family will probably be known as one of the DARLING families, living at the Darling Terrace, a gated community for the powerful and rich, those who have money then they would ever be able to spend, their kids as spoiled as they could get, thinking the world circles them. But most likely you will only get to King's Place, which isn't too bad either. But even in a rich town like Fortress Point we have low income families, with dead beat dads and mothers with three works just so their family can have the basics, their kids holding their heads high when the rich kids try to bring them down. And then there are those families that stand right in the middle, they're not too rich, but they couldn't be considered poor either, just hard working people trying to maintain their life styles.
Some of the families living here have done so for generations, and act as if the town was theirs, some aren't really fond in new arrivals. Others have just gotten here, having just gotten a job around the area, or maybe just expecting to find a better life here. You might even find politicians around the city, those who commute from Fortress, where their families live, to DC.
You can try and imagine how life here is and you can hear it from others, but there is only one way to know what really happens in the city, and that is living here. Those who do so have long realized that although there are THOUSAND WAYS TO SMILE, there is only one to be happy, you just need to find out what is yours.