Five Total Strangers

The missing items are a motif illustrating both the stalker’s manipulation and the distrust and fear that develops between Mira and her companions. When Harper’s wallet goes missing, it appears to be an easily explained inconvenience. However, this changes when Josh claims his book is missing and when Mira’s phone goes missing. The pattern of behavior culminates with Kayla losing her drugs and Brecken losing the backup battery for his phone. Each time something goes missing, trust is further damaged, and the companions begin to question one another. Josh’s book turns up in Brecken’s bag, allowing the stalker to manipulate everyone into thinking that Brecken committed the thefts. This causes Mira to grow closer to Josh, unaware that he is the real stalker.

The missing items also develop the theme of isolation. The items include phones, phone batteries, and a paper map—things without which it is impossible for the companions to reach out to outsiders or seek help. They cannot even navigate their route accurately, creating the possibility that they will further isolate themselves by becoming lost.

The man in the yellow hat is a symbol of Mira’s fear of her Unexplored Grief. Like her grief, he is omnipresent, showing up everywhere Mira and her companions stop. He also smells of the same disinfectants with which Mira associates the death of her aunt. Because she associates the man with the worst day of her life, she feels overwhelming anxiety each time she sees him. Mira is afraid of him just as she is afraid to look into her own feelings around the death of her aunt, and she projects that fear into an unjustified feeling of physical danger.

The presence of the man in the yellow hat ratches up the sense of peril that is woven throughout the book, giving the sense of Mira being stalked before Mira knows that she actually is the subject of an obsession. The novel nudges the reader to share Mira’s feeling that this man is a threat only to reveal that the true danger is inside the car in the form of Josh. In the end, the man in the yellow hat is only a hitchhiker trying to make it to Pittsburg, just like Mira and her companions. He transforms into a savior when he happens upon Mira and her companions at the moment of confrontation with Josh. Just as confronting her grief will save Mira from projection, anxiety, and confusion, interacting with the man in the yellow hat saves Mira and her friends from harm.