wrong sort of people. Such people do, in fact, materialize in the form of two men.

Connie goes off with the two men in the story's conclusion despite her misgivings about these two strangers who seem to know a great deal about her. Why would she do such a dangerous thing? Perhaps because Connie, like many teenage girls, suffers from low self-esteem, and the attention Arnold Friend lavishes on her, complimenting her looks and expressing an intense interest in her, plays to Connie's insecurities. It's an old and sad story, really, and in reality is directly linked to the problem of human trafficking within the United States. Connie goes with the strange men because her home life is bad and she is desperate for positive attention. One could logically speculate about her fate--kidnapped, raped, murdered--but there is a certain underlying truth to Oates's story, and it explains why this 15-year-old girl would leave with two strange males.

In part, Connie agrees to go with Arnold at the end of the story because he threatens her and her family, telling her that if she doesn't come out of the house, he is going to hurt her family when they come home. She leaves the house with Arnold to prevent her family from getting hurt. In addition, it seems as though Arnold has a strange hold over her mind and convinces her that she and her past do not exist anymore. She thinks about her life "that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside his body that wasn’t really hers either." Arnold has a mesmerizing kind of effect on her, and he tells her that her family doesn't really know her and never did. She watches herself leave the house as if she has been transported out of her body. She observes herself as if she is a double and does not recognize the part of herself leaving the house. In the end, she goes out with Arnold into a land that she doesn't even recognize because he has mesmerized and changed her so completely. 

I think that the meeting point between Arnold and Connie is significant for a couple of reasons.  When their eyes meet at the restaurant, Connie is "in her element" and feels completely good about being out on the town, seeing to be seen.  At the same time, she is rather disinterested with Eddy, a boy of her own age who is content spinning on the chairs at the diner.  Her boredom causes her to meet eyes with Arnold and then flirt with him from a distance.  Oates is insightful enough to construct Connie's meeting with Arnold as the result of boredom or a sense of disenchantment with her environment.  This is a significant part of Connie's character in that she does not feel comfortable in her setting at home, causing her to seek validation outside of it.  When she finds Arnold and is intrigued by him, it is because of a certain type of alienation in her own setting.  In this, the meeting between Connie and Arnold is only possible because of a division between Connie and her own setting.  The first meeting between them takes place from a distance, with Arnold waving his finger and saying, "Going to get you, baby."  In this, Connie sees harmless flirting and a situation in which she perceives that she is in control.  It is a point where Connie's own independence and freedom is going to sadly disappear, making their first moment of meeting the apex and decline of Connie's state of autonomous being in the world.

Connie is a fairly average fifteen year old. She is motivated by trying to discover her sense if individuality, and she finds it by being "the pretty one" in her family, and she spends a lot of time checking her appearance to make sure it meets her standards, In a similar vein, she also feels motivated by romance, though not so motivated that she doesn't think Arnold's pretty creepy.

Arnold, on the other hand, is motivated by the possibility of exerting power and control over targets he considers weak. After he first meets Connie, he seeks out information about her, gaining a sense of power over her life by knowing about it, and uses this power to intimidate her. Once Connie is successfully intimidated, he uses this emotion to try to control her actions.