school and helps out in the house. June is the complete opposite of Connie.Connie tends to lead a different life around her friends. When Connie is with her friends she likes to hang out in shopping malls, dressed to the nines, always looking for attention. Occasionally, Connie and her friends would sneak across the highway to a drive-in restaurant where the older kids hang out. At the restaurant, the girls flaunted themselves, looking for older guys that they can sneak off in the cars with. Connie seems to get a lot of attention from the older guys. They gawked and cat-called which gave her an obvious sense of flattery. At the restaurant, Connie encounters a “boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold”(581: 7). Connie glances at the boy, and there is a blunt sexual attraction to him. Arnold Friend is the pop culture fantasy of the times in this story.Connie comes into an encounter at her house with Arnold Friend. “After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. It was an open jalopy painted bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely” (582: 15). It was Arnold Friend coming to take Connie away from the world as she knew it. Arnold is very persistent about getting Connie into his car to take a ride with him. Although she feels flattered that an older man has an attraction to her, Connie is afraid of Arnold Friend and his persistence. Connie tries to call her family to protect her but never figures out how to use the phone. She always expects that she can fall back on her family life for support even though she is never there for them.Arnold Friend begins to threaten Connie. Arnold is wearing metallic mirrored sunglasses; this allows Connie to see herself in the reflection. Through her own eyes Connie can’t see reality. In her innocence, Connie plays tricks with Arnold not knowing the danger that it will lead to. Connie threatens to call the police if he doesn&#...
