THE PLOT OF THE STORY

Connie, fifteen, is preoccupied with her appearance. Her mother scolds her for admiring herself in the mirror, but Connie ignores her mother’s criticisms. Connie’s mother urges her to be neat and responsible like her older sister, June. June, who is twenty-four and still lives at home, works as a secretary at Connie’s high school. 

Connie is grateful for June for setting one good precedent: June goes out with her girlfriends, so their mother allows Connie to go out as well, with her best friend.

One night, a boy named Eddie invites Connie to eat dinner with him, and Connie leaves her friend at the restaurant’s counter to go with him. As they walk through the parking lot, she sees a man in a gold convertible. He smiles at her and says, “Gonna get you, baby.” 

One Sunday, her parents and June leave her at home alone while they go to a family barbeque.From the window she sees that it’s a gold convertible, and she grows afraid.

He gets out of the car and points to the words painted on the door. His name, Arnold Friend, is written next to a picture of a round smiling face, which Connie thinks resembles a pumpkin with sunglasses. Connie tells Arnold he should leave, but he insists on taking her for a ride.Connie runs from the door and grabs the telephone. In a rushed, blurry scene, something happens: Connie is sweating and screaming for her mother; she can’t dial the phone; and Arnold is “stabbing her . . . again and again with no tenderness.”From the door, Arnold tells her to put the phone back on the hook, and she obeys.She feels as though she is watching herself walk toward the door, open it, and walk outside toward Arnold. He comments on her blue eyes, even though she has brown eyes. Connie looks out at the vast expanses of land behind him and knows that’s where she is going.