Boyle’s narrator relates an incident from either only a few months ago or from a couple of years. At the time of the interview that the narrator seemed not like who he was at the time of the story and he is not so far removed to be able to laugh at himself although that may always be difficult for him since he almost committed murder and rape. “We were all dangerous characters then”(294) and When we wheeled our parents’ whining station wagons out onto the street we left patches of rubber half a block long” (294) Their actions, up until the night of the story, were more mischievous than seriously dangerous throwing eggs, for instance, at mailboxes and hitchhikers. To the narrator and his friends, bad is no more than a fashion statement or a trend, a pose taken from movies and books rather than a driving impulse or authentic outrage. To be bad, to the narrator and his friends, is to wear leather jackets, have a toothpick in your mouth, sniff glue and specious cocaine, and to keep a tire iron ready for a fight although the narrator says that he has not had a fight since sixth grade. What happens in the story is that their “bad” posturing leads to a traumatic and almost tragic occurrence. The narrator and his friends “cruised the strip sixty-seven times” and nothing notable happened. However, a prank turns traumatic when they mistake the car of a “bad greasy character,” a truly bad character, as their friend’s car. The discovery of the dead body, and the wrecked car lead to an epiphany for the narrator. His views of nature and his response to the girls at the end reveal that the narrator and his friends have come to realize that they are not truly the “bad characters” the girls take them for. In fact, they seem to feel ashamed as their bad
