It’s 1996. The Whitewater scandal is raging but Bill Clinton still recaptures the White House. Jon Benet-Ramsey is murdered, the Macarena sweeps the nation and Tom Cruise shows millions of people the money.

And in suburban South Florida, Cecily Patricia Albertelli faces the most important moment of her 10-year-old life. This was the Super Bowl of suburbia, the finals of the Broward County AYSO 10 and Under Girls Soccer Tournament.

With the game still deadlocked after 90 minutes of cheap shots, sliding tackles and yellow flags, the coach called out Albertelli’s name. She would be the one taking the final penalty kick. The season rested on her right foot. She lined up for the kick, paced off 10 feet from the ball… and then, a strange thing happened: Her heart started to thump. As she strode to the ball, the thumping increased. She struck the ball, watched it fly to the net… and then watched it fly past.

The ball had gone right of the crossbar. Her team lost. She crumpled to the ground and started to cry. “It was one of those situations where you could be the hero or loser — and I was the loser!” she says. “I never quite recovered. I could never kick penalty kicks again.”

Eleven years later, Jon Benet-Ramsey’s murder is still unsolved, the Macarena is a painful memory, Tom Cruise has gone from lovable to loony and a different Clinton is gunning for the White House. And Albertelli has to do everything to stop from crumpling to the ground again.

This is different than the penalty kick, worse. The stakes are higher, the failure more complete. This could be the difference between the Ivy League and Illinois State, between a $160,000 starting salary or half that much. This is the Law School Admissions Test. And Albertelli thinks she’s gone more than a few feet right. She feels as if she’s missed the ball altogether.

The LSAT has long been a gateway to the upper middle class for working class college students. Much has been written about the challenges these students face: Application fees cost hundreds of dollars, test prep courses cost thousands, and studies show standardized tests are biased against lower-income students.

Less has been written about their upper middle class counterparts.

The unprecedented success of the baby boomer generation has come at a price for their children. After the thousands spent on private school, test prep courses and college tuition, are you a failure if you don’t earn as much as your parents?

As the children of boomers graduate from college, it is this question they find themselves asking. As a result, many are turning to law school. Since 1997, the number of people taking the LSAT has increased by 30 percent, from 100,000 to about 135,000. More than 370 Emory seniors and recent alums applied to law school this year, according to pre-law advisor Rodia Vance. Vance, who can rattle off statistics on law school applicants without even looking them up, says the number of students applying to law school is closely tied to the economy. When the economy is bad, more students apply because they are fewer job opportunities. As the economy heads for a downturn — a scenario many economists predict — Vance says she expects the number of students applying to law school to increase. This doesn’t mean law school is an easy choice for students. Vance said many of the students who come into her office aren’t sure they want to pursue law. She says some are pushed toward law by their parents, and others are searching for the easiest way to earn six figures.”

If this sounds as if it strikes close to home, it’s because it does. I recently took the LSAT and am struggling to decide if I want to work for love (journalism) or money (law).

Many of the students I interviewed expressed similar concerns, but didn’t want to make them public. As one student explained to me, “Who wants to complain about being rich? You’re just going to sound spoiled.” So I turned to a more familiar source: my friends.

Two of my three closest friends at Emory are applying to law school. Whether it is because they’re unusually open about their lives or willing to talk to me because I’m a friend, they spoke candidly about the decisions they’re struggling to make.

For Jacob Lee Houmand (“rhymes with almond,” as he loves to tell people) the meaning of life could be summed up in two words: “the deal.” So could school, alcohol or the opposite sex. Any noun, really. Houmand, who is a blond, blue-eyed, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking Mormon (in other words, not a very good one), uses the word “deal” frequently enough to earn work as a used car salesman. “What’s the deal?” “Are you coming to the deal?” “What time is the deal?” are all phrases that leave his mouth with regularity.

On this particular morning — 7 a.m. on an overcast Saturday — “the deal” refers to the exam looming hours ahead: The LSAT. Every decision at the breakfast table — “How much of the deal (coffee) should I drink?” “Will eating too much of the deals (hash browns) make me tired?” — is driven by the test, as have most of his decisions for the past few months.

This is his second shot at the test and, for all intents and purposes, it is also his last. Law schools frown on students taking the test more than twice. The first time he took the LSAT, four months earlier, he scored a 157. Scores range from 120 to 180 — 150 is the national average (at Emory the average is 157). This places him in the top third of people who take the test. For Houmand, that isn’t good enough. Even with a 3.7 GPA (3.47 is the average for Emory seniors), he will be fortunate to get into a top-25 school.

As we try to soothe our frayed nerves with bagels and lox, we avoid the question: Is it worth it? Of all my friends, Houmand is the most gung ho about law school. His father, a dentist frustrated by the high cost of insurance, has always pushed him toward law. His brother is one of the top students at Wake Forest Law School, and Houmand is fond of quoting the “Godfather” line, “A lawyer can steal more money with his briefcase than a gangster can with guns.”

We don’t talk about it at breakfast that morning, but other times the topic comes up: Is this really what we want to do with our lives? “I’ll probably hate law,” he says. Then he reconsiders. “You know, they say money can’t but you happiness. But it can buy you all the things that make you happy.”

As Cecily Albertelli reached for the envelope, she thought back on the day of the LSAT. Nothing had gone right. She had to fly back home to take the test because there were no spots available in Atlanta. On the morning of the test, her apartment leasing office called. They claimed she and her roommate owed the office $1,100, and threatened to evict them if they didn’t pay. (The office had mixed up her paperwork with someone else’s, she would later find out.) Worse still, the LSAT started with Albertelli’s least favorite section, logic games.

“I just panicked, which is completely unlike me to do,” she says. As she struggled with the logic games, her panic spread to other sections. By the end of the exam four hours later, she wondered if she should cancel her score. She had a week to decide. Hope beat out reason — she didn’t cancel the score. But her worst fears were realized when she opened the letter. “I was devastated when I saw the score,” she says. “I could feel my heart sinking.” (Albertelli didn’t want to give out her score.)

As we speak, Albertelli folds and refolds her clothes, shuffling back and forth between the closet and the bed. A caravan of Banana Republic and GAP march from the floor to the comforter, pausing only to be folded along the way. If the creases in the folds aren’t department-store perfect, she shakes out the offending article and starts again. Forty minutes after she starts — an interview isn’t going to distract her from the task at hand — the clothes have completed their invasion of the bed. “Thanks for doing this,” she says. “You gave me an excuse to clean my room.”

As she folds the clothes, Albertelli is aware of the intricacies of class at a school like Emory (“There’s a specific type of person that’s a rich south Floridian. They all look the same — tan and dyed blond — and all wear the same outfits. Drugs and alcohol are big. Cocaine is huge. Plastic surgery is huge. The rich person at Emory is a little bit more worldly, more cosmopolitan.”) She knows, for example, that the clothes that she is folding aren’t just clothes. The striped Polo, or the faded Lucky’s, are symbols of her class and background. In Albertelli’s case, this background is solidly upper middle class, but less so than some of her Emory peers. “In the context of the average U.S. citizen, I’m probably upper middle class. In context of this school, I’m probably in the middle,” she says.

It isn’t just about the money, Albertelli says. Her dad is French, her mom Italian, meaning that healthy arguments were a way of life in her family. One time, when her parents took away her prized doll, “Doi” (this is what doll sounded like when she pronounced it), she was able to convince them to give it back (she does admit that some tears were invovled). She won that first argument, and has been hooked ever since.

Her parents’ success — particularly her father’s — weighs heavily on her decision to enter law. Her dad and mom met at a pizza shop in the Northeast. Her mom was a waitress and her dad a recent immigrant who could barely speak English. They moved to Florida and became successful in the pharmaceutical industry. Plaques and posters reflecting their success, along with a signed basketball from Magic Johnson, dot the office in their Ft. Lauderdale home.

As she likes to point out, her parents lived the American Dream. And, although she wasn’t reflecting on all of this the morning she retook the LSAT, the reason she’s applying to law school is an extension of this dream. Building on your parents’ success and maybe even doing a little better.

The stakes the second time she took the test were higher. So, it turned out, was her score. Most students’ scores increase by two points. Albertelli’s jumped by eight. She celebrated with a glass of cider at Brickstore. Then she started working on her law school applications.

A chalkboard on the wall lists her agenda for the day. On the day I interview her in her room, the line at the top of the agenda, which is underlined and circled, reads: “Finish Law School Applications!” She will cross off the line in a few hours.

Then, like Houmand, she will wait.