I’m pretty sure that when my husband sees that it is Goth Day, he will assume it’s a celebration of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe. But that’s not why we’re here.

I was the right age for this particular subculture, but I never embraced the lifestyle; I hung out on the fringes. I never dyed my hair or painted my fingernails black, I never dressed like Lydia Deetz, I was much too Germanically ruddy to rock that makeup. I liked most of the bands, but I also didn’t really go for the whole “black is how I feel on the inside” thing. My mom kept me too busy pulling weeds and chasing dogs for that to take hold.

I did, however, have a good friend who was deeply into the Whole Megillah. Andrea and I had been best friends in fifth and sixth grade, but then I moved to Florida. So when I was 15, I was back in Illinois for a family event, and Andrea’s dad drove her the three hours down to where I was for a visit. There I am in small-town Illinois in my T-shirt and jean shorts and sandals, hair probably in a pony tail because I was supposed to be helping clean the house, polish silver, watch my cousins, etc. Andrea arrives in half-regalia: Doc Martens, a black flannel shirt, spiky black hair shaved up the sides, and eyeliner to make Cleopatra jealous.

We were banished from the house and the kitchen, so we walked four blocks to the town square and had pizza for lunch (back when the town square had a pizza parlor). We got a few looks, but nobody said anything to us except the waitress, who simply asked what we wanted to drink and handed us a bill. So we ate, drank a few sodas, laughed at stories about people we both knew, talked about bands, just the usual friends catching up thing. Then we walked home, hung out another hour or so, and her dad came and got her. End of story, or so I thought.

The next day, a neighbor came over asking me who my friend was that had caused all the fuss in town the day before. What fuss? The girl with the hair and makeup. She sure caught EVERYONE’S attention! She did? Of course she did! Nothing that interesting looking has come around here in a decade! Then, a week later, we went to dinner at another relative’s house. I was sitting there chatting with an older cousin of mine who was visiting while on summer break from Berkeley, and he goes, “Oh, that was you with the wild girl in town? Where’d you find her? What did you get up to?” The idea that Andrea was even remotely “wild” just tickled the hell out of me. Eating pizza and talking about James Bond movies—life on the edge! I think he was a little disappointed when he heard that the worst infraction we had committed was cutting across someone’s lawn to get out of the sun. That wasn’t nearly as scandalous as the co-ed bathrooms in his dorm at school!

Andrea and I kept in touch for several years after that; she even saw photos of my kid as a toddler. It’s only in the past decade or so that she went radio silent. I tried finding her when we moved back to Illinois, and it makes me sad that I haven’t been able to raise her. I’d love to put on a repeat pizza performance in the small town where I now live, although I still don’t own any Doc Martens.