Review Of Vanessa Veselka's Essay 'Highway Of Lost Girls'

Invisible Women It is common for our society to prejudge the worth or value of something or someone by their outward appearance alone. In the essay entitled “Highway of Lost Girls” Vanessa Veselka returns back to the scene of her fugitive youth searching for clues, particularly that horrifying experience one night on I-95 when she hitched a ride from a stranger. Her essay also successfully exposes the struggle of invisible girls that were victimized and lost their lives to the hands of the serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades. Veselka’s use of suspense, pace and setting makes her essay very compelling. Veselka says, “People don’t leave home because things are going well; they leave because they feel they have to, and right or wrong, that’s how I felt”(41). This suggests that not all hitchhikers leave home in search of fun and adventure, some run away in hope of better future.
She validates her story by returning back to the sites of each scene, particularly of that one incident when a body of a young women was pulled from a truck stop dumpster while Veselka’s sitting at a nearby truck somewhere near Martinsburg Pennsylvania, “I remember it could be me, since I was also a teenage hitchhiker” (Veselka38). Interestingly, no one seems to remember about the event. Her dad’s confirmation of the existence of the Martinsburg truck stop is a relief. She says, “My body relaxed, my memory may have been bent by sleep deprivation, but I was not crazy. There was a Martinsburg truck stop somewhere in my story, and there was a dead seventeen-year old hitchhiker and if it happened, she could be found. It was just a matter of looking harder”(45). Veselka’s willpower invites the readers to follow her in investigating the death of the