A fifteen-year-old girl spends her summer at the mall and the drive-in, perfecting the bright, flirtatious surface that teenage girlhood demands, until a stranger in a gold convertible pulls into her driveway and knows her name. Joyce Carol Oates's 1966 short story operates between realism and allegory: Arnold Friend, with his too-old eyes and shaky grasp of teenage slang, may be a predator, the devil, or the lethal underside of every romantic fantasy the culture has taught Connie to desire. The screen door is the only barrier. Oates renders the scene with unbearable precision, letting seduction and threat become indistinguishable. It is a story about the moment innocence recognizes, too late, the face of what has been courting it.