They are certainly the sort of people who learn from their own experience, i.e. from their own mistakes.
At the beginning of the story the main characters attempt to be what they are not. They do not want to be who they are supposed to be. They are kids, who always were protected by their parents; kids who were spoiled by their parents, kids who never knew a real life. They are teenagers in a period, "when courtesy and winning ways went out of style when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste." (Boyle 35). So, on this base the main characters create the image of cool guy, bad character, which usually is considered to be a very cool stereotype for youth. This attitude usually occurs in a group of youth, who have a problem with their intellect, who are empty-headed, or who just cannot become aware of themselves as individualities. This imaginary guy must drink alcohol, wear a leather jacket and a ear-ring, drive a car in the coolest way, and have bad manners. They sincerely think that they are bad, and they are cool as much as one could be. Boyle describes the main characters as, .
quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over a rutted and gutted blacktop road at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. They could lounge against a bank of booming speakers and trade "man"s with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.(35-36).
How long they can be bad? They think bad is cool until they run into a situation where they question, until they meet someone who are badder characters then they are, until they have to fight with real bad characters. What starts out as a harmless prank on the third night of their summer vacation turns into a situation where they get into a fight, attempt to rape a girl, find a dead body and see first hand the destruction a bad character can do to a car.
