Short Story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

The short story “Where are you going, Where have you been?,” by Joyce Carol Oates, is a tale about a teenage girl making the journey from her known world into something she has never experienced before. The main character lives the normal teenage life listening to the latest music and going out with her friends to the mall. “They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk” (753). One night with her friends changes her life forever. Someone that notices her at the restaurant would eventually become the person that makes her leave everything she knows and enter a world she has never seen before as “she watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway” (764).
Connie knew she was pretty, and that’s why she had a “giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right” (752). Her beauty brought power over boys. She chose to talk to only the ones that she thought were cute or popular, and she made a point of ignoring the more common ones. “It was just a boy from high school they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him” (753). The narrator observes that the world she lived in was a familiar one. Everything was safe, but one single day made her it all