From the opening paragraphs, it’s clear that the narrator lacks adult independence. He is 19 years old, lives at home, and doesn’t have his own car but instead drives his mother’s. What would typically be a symbol of agency and mobility—the car itself—is therefore a symbol of the narrator’s naiveté. Driving his mother’s Bel Air around town with his friends allows the narrator to feel grown-up and “bad” while underscoring how sheltered he actually is.

The saga of the car keys consequently develops the theme of the Loss of Innocence. One of the first “mistakes” of the evening that the narrator identifies is his loss of the keys. This minor accident, he concludes, “opened the whole floodgate” and was “a tactical error […] damaging and irreversible” (9). Losing the ability to escape and return to the comfort of his home, the narrator and his friends must embrace the darkness of the night and its events. It is not until the boys have encountered real “badness” that the narrator recovers his keys, allowing him and his friends to return to the comfortable lives they were previously fleeing.