sensitive side and leaves Connie without the support a mother should give a teenage girl. She comes down on Connie because she has the beauty her mother ultimately wants to hold again. Connie’s father is unemotional and obviously unaware of Connie’s teenage needs. He is not there to support or encourage Connie and help her gain confidence in her transition through adolescence. Connie also looks down on her older sister June who is quiet and a bore. June is the perfect daughter; she lives at home, works in the 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 c...
