And that’s all there is to the story: nothing happened to Amy or her friend, and only the stranger knows just what he was up to. The point is that nowadays, even in Willowbrook, to run like hell from a suspicious stranger is the right thing for a kid to do. Amy and her 12-year-old sister, Kirsten, aren’t allowed to play in their own front yard without a parent around. They recently began baby-sitting in the neighborhood–after a course from the local police on how to lock up, how to answer the phone without letting it slip that the grown-ups are out, how to get help. Their parents, Mark and Nancy Fraser, teach them how to fend off sexual assault, how not to get abducted and to hit the dirt at the sound of gunfire. “We’re constantly reminding them what to do and what not to do,” says Nancy. “They don’t have a chance to be kids.”
Have the Frasers just been watching too much tabloid TV and making their children neurotic in the process? If only. Willowbrook, a sprawl of spacious, leafy subdivisions 20 miles from Chicago, used to be considered ideal for kids: close enough to the city for field trips, far enough away for safety. Yet last fall a 15-year-old student at the high school the Fraser girls will attend shot and killed a schoolmate in an apparent gang dispute. And a janitor at the girls’ elementary school, who’d befriended pupils by giving out candy and showing them his trained pigeons, was arrested a couple of years ago in Chicago for aggravated sexual assault on a minor. “He was a nice guy, and all of a sudden he does something very bad,” says Kirsten. “That makes me suspicious of nice people.”
Families in inner-city Chicago would gladly swap woes with folks in Willowbrook. But to the Frasers, the loss of suburban innocence comes hard. “I get so angry,” says Nancy. “They can’t experience the stuff I did. They can’t go out and play flashlight tag, can’t walk alone for hours. They’re not free to play like children.” Kirsten, in turn, chafes at going to the mall under parental escort. “I wanted more freedom,” she says, “but I couldn’t have it because of the things that could happen.”
Amy and Kirsten prefer to talk about their cheerleading squad, their swim team or Mariah Carey and En Vogue. Enough’s enough: in school, they get videos on AIDS “When I date or something,” says Kirsten, “I’m afraid of what will happen”) and discuss last fall’s shooting; at home, the possibility of attack or abduction seems to circumscribe their every move. “We talk about the now because we don’t want to think about the problems we’ll have in the future,” says Amy. “We’re afraid of the guns, the shootings, the gangs and dying. If it’s so bad now, it’s going to spread out in the future.” This isn’t the way their parents’ generation grew up feeling about the future–but it’s the way many parents feel today. And little pitchers have big ears.
