Older Girl Character Analysis

The morning after the boys’ fateful night at Greasy Lake, as they clean up the narrator’s mother’s car and prepare to leave, two girls pull up in a Mustang. They both wear “tight jeans, stiletto heels, [and have] hair like frozen fur.” The older one looks about 25 and seems to be strung out on something, though whether it’s drugs or alcohol, the narrator is unsure. She tells the boys she is looking for “Al,” whom the narrator believes to be the dead body he stumbled upon down at the lake’s edge, and she tells the boys that they “look like some pretty bad characters” and offers them a handful of pills, which they refuse. The older girl is exactly the kind of girl that the narrator had hoped to meet on his way up to Greasy Lake the previous night; in the light of day, though, it’s clear that her “badness” is unglamorous, pathetic, and destructive.