In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," Connie ignores several warning signs that Arnold Friend is trouble. Although these signs arouse her fear instinct, she brushes them aside before she realizes that Arnold is truly malevolent.
First, when she spots Arnold leering at her from his gold-painted jalopy, she senses that he is no good but cannot help but peek at him twice.
Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn't help glancing back and there he was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, "Gonna get you, baby," and Connie turned away again.
Later, when she is alone at home and hears a strange car travel up the long driveway, she rushes to look outside. Although she does not immediately recognize the car, something about it causes an automatic physiological response:
Her heart began to pound and her fingers...
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snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered, "Christ. Christ," wondering how bad she looked.
Connie ignores her reaction to danger and allows vanity to override her apprehension.
Another sign is how Arnold addresses her; he drives right up to her house’s side door and sharply taps the horn four times to signal her attention. Connie reacts with cautious curiosity.
She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door.
But instead of heeding her obvious misgivings, she acts coy and plays hard to get, ostensibly to flirt but perhaps unconsciously to cover up anxiety.
Arnold’s radio eerily plays the same music that her radio in the house plays. Like a stalker, he has metaphorically invaded her private home, but Connie just continues to flirt with him. His mirrored glasses are another warning sign:
Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what this boy was looking at. She couldn't decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't come down or go back inside.
Her blushing caused by discomfort of their power difference (he can see her but she cannot see him) is another clue that she disregards. Other warning signs that she ignores include the smashed left fender and scrawled note around it:
DONE BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that.
She even finds his look haunting and predatory but trivializes this thought.
His face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn't shaved for a day or two, and the nose long and hawk-like, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.
By the time Connie listens to her fear instinct and realizes that Arnold is dangerous, she is in too deep. She becomes suspicious that he knows her name without her telling him. Then she asks him his age, and his
smile faded. She could see then that he wasn't a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.
Her earlier automatic physiological reaction of fear returns as she now acknowledges danger. A second, different physiological reaction occurs when she sees that Arnold’s friend Ellie also is a grown man. She
felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again.
Connie weakly musters up some courage to ask the men to leave, but it is too late. Instead, Arnold’s refusal to leave and movement make her feel "another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her."
Arnold and her world become surreal as she loses her bearings. When she finally realizes that Arnold plans to rape her, she feels that her "heart was almost too big now for her chest and its pumping made sweat break out all over her."