Teenage boys come to my door, knock, politely call me "Ma'am." They try to sell me magazine subscriptions so they can win valuable prizes and college scholarships, shucking and looking at their feet. They want work, lawn-mowing and weed-pulling. They want friends -- not me. I visit my own friends and talk to their teenage sons, who must be courteous to me, and I grill them about new movies and changing mores and how they feel about the president's personal life. Young men unfold their long limbs and climb out of their roughly idling old cars patched with rust and lift the seat forward so my just-grown sons can say their hearty hail-fellows and leap up the steps, two at a time.

Teenage boys with pimples and careful haircuts sell me slices of pizza, reams of paper, cups of tea, light bulbs, a line of goods. The whole world, and certainly the coffee bar counter, feels too big and looks too small for them. They crowd doorways and sidewalks and school desks. Even football fields shrink when a half-dozen teenage boys are running across them, shouting.

Sallie Tisdale Sallie Tisdale's column appears on the Mothers Who Think site every other Thursday. + Biography + Archives Love Sallie Tisdale? Read more at BARNES & NOBLE

I have a girl just entering her own teenage years. "Cute" has always been a word she reserved for puppies and newborns. Suddenly, it's popping out all over -- alternating with complaints. She was supposed to write a story last week about a "pest" in her life.

"How about the boys at school?" I asked. "They pester you."

"Boys aren't pests," she said. "They're enemies."

A few days ago, I was at the mall with said teenage girl, who needed an invisible haircut right away. She never used to need these things. I left her in the $10 walk-in salon to wait her turn and ran up to the ATM on the third floor, the one near the food court and the fly-by-night jewelry booths. This is something like the watering hole for the herds of teenagers who prowl these stores; they mill around in groups, alert, dipping their heads now and then while they watch for predators, and prey.

There was a big crowd around the Piercing Pagoda, which was selling a lot of gold chains on discount -- even then, at $119, $139 each, far more than I can afford for jewelry. A dozen young men lined the glass cases in hunger. All wore low-slung fat pants and roomy shirts, all had their left ears pierced with gold hoops. Several wore red or black scarves tightly wound around their heads, and when they moved, they moved with a sullen, bouncy step, arms flung wide. They were a mob designed to clear a path through any mall, to throw the other shoppers into a faint. Steer clear, these big clothes and bobbing heads cried. Pay attention, shouted the giant athletic shoes and gold rings. ("Wish fulfillment," one teenage friend of mine called those clothes -- wishes of getting bigger someday, filling out.)

And people steered clear, making wide arcs around the Piercing Pagoda. An armed security guard leaned on the rail nearby. The boys were perfectly well-behaved, waiting their turn, not even raising their voices to get the salesclerk's attention. But that wasn't the point. They had that look, expensive and carefully cultivated, that prowling, dangerous look.

Next page | Are teenage boys our children, our hope or just a menace?