In high school her sardonic attitude was at its most acute, as high school has a special way of distilling away everything comforting and cooperative in otherwise rational human beings. In her junior year, she decided to take on the goths, though it wasn't clear if she wanted to destroy them, or heal them, or simply make fun of them for awhile until something more amusing came along. That was right after the summer when my sister discovered summer dresses, freckles, and long straight hair. She was such an icon of what goth kids aren't, I'm sure they must have felt like the Japanese running from Godzilla when she approached them, in the hallway close enough to shop to disguise herb cigarettes smoked between open locker doors.

She started off innocently enough. She talked to this one or that one until she found the talkative goth, you know, the political one who probably tries to write poems but ends up on web forums putting more energy into explaining the pathetic little things than he ever did into the poem itself. The intellectual goth, to put it nicely. She got him to explain what being goth means: to recognize that life is just a process of slowly dying, that all things are dead, really, and that they choose a lifestyle which mourns this constant death. My sister was very good. She said that, she, too, felt this way, and she said it with such wide-eyed innocence, they probably even believed her. The way she saw it, the only way to be truly alive is to get right up as close to death as possible, to embrace all things dead and deadly, and in that way the stark juxtaposition necessarily meant she was alive. The goths ate it up. Yes! That's it exactly! In the final analysis, the dark eye makeup and pasty skin was not about doom and gloom, it was about masking the dead parts so that the parts that where actual living, breathing, pumping blood back through blue veins could be felt with each pulse.

And so, she explained to them, the one person most dead in the word, would be the one who strove so hard to ignore this ultimate truth that she showed no inkling of understanding it in the least. The one who was so stereotypically "happy" that you could use her photograph for the front of a Summer's Eve box. My sister wore summer dresses and went to the tanning salon to keep her freckles fresh, she explained, because to her, people who did this in earnest where the true walking dead. And she embraced that death so she could feel alive.

Laugh at them now, but recall, these where high school kids. The goths ate it up. It was tough at first for some of them, but they started shedding the trappings of traditional goth wear, or neo-goth as they called it. This was Born-Again-Goth. Black trenchcoats where dropped for sweaters with patches on the elbows. Black-dyed hair was washed out and feathered. Black eyeliner was wiped away and touched up with mascara straight out of the seventies. Some of them wanted to keep the fingernail polish, just so they wouldn't accidentally blend in the with the real "corpses" wandering around school. But my sister showed them how to get rid of even that, to be so "dead" that even the dead looked alive by comparison. Girls who had never worn anything but battered fatigues skipped denim jeans altogether and went straight to poodle skirts.

The only thing they never got rid of were their dark expressions. Before, seeing them in the halls, they were only slightly creepy, the way anyone with too much eyeliner who never blinks is slightly creepy. Now, with the corduroy pants and dickeys and sensible shoes, they where damned frightening, even cultish. And the whole time, as I said, I couldn't tell if my sister was being serious with them, or just mocking them with the intensity that is so often confused with worship as to make the difference meaningless.

But it all came to a head around Halloween. In two months of school she had changed the goths from being a slightly amusing feature of the hallways into the most feared pack of hormones to stalk the classroom corridors. But Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, Samhain absconded by the Catholics and supplanted with Saint worship? An ironic holiday for the goths, as traditionally, the normals turn to deadly things and the goths accidentally do blend in for a day, actually dying on the day the world considers death as a celebration of life. Before, they shrugged their shoulders, played up their non-conformity by not dressing up any differently, and then got drunk and chucked eggs at houses in an unwitting camaraderie with future frat-boys everywhere. But now that they were Born-Again-Goths, what? Should they, on Halloween, play along, don innocuous costumes, and mock the mockery? They where obviously very confused. Some of them came to school in their old goth clothes, and you could tell they missed the fabrics. Others dressed up like princess, cowboys, astronauts and simply as members of the opposite sex, since for many Halloween is just a nostalgic nod to childhood fantasies.

But my sister had either had enough, had gone too far, or was finally ready to stage her final act. She showed up as a "naughty nurse," which for a high school girl meant only that the skirt was a bit shorter than a nurse would wear, with a little more makeup than a nurse would wear, and tights that where perhaps a little more glittery than a real nurse would wear. Her outfit was pumpkin orange with black details and stitching, her lipstick was thick and orange, her eyelids orange and her eyelashes long and black. And the traditional medical cross on her orange nurse's hat was black, the top stroke slightly longer than the bottom stroke. She was utterly completely and totally beautiful.

The goths saw this, and they pounced. That's an inverted crucifix! That belongs to the old neo-goth way! That's not Born-Again-Goth, it's retro mockery! She was a fraud! I'm no such thing, she explained. I'm a naughty nurse. A slutty nurse. A seductive nurse. And all seduction is evil, just as all evil is seductive. Have you people completely lost touch? Are you going to shout the same epithets your detractors shouted before? Death and evil are not synonymous, are they? Being goth is embracing death, not embracing evil. My outfit has nothing to do with death, but everything to do with evil, which is not the domain of the goths, no matter what the normal people say about you when they're at home eating coffee cake and sipping chai lattes and waiting for their arteries to slowly harden so they can, finally, thank God, shuffle this mortal coil.

But it was that word. "You." She didn't say "what the normal people say about us." She said, "what the normal people say about you." And the jig was up. I still don't know if it was on purpose. But over the next few weeks, as November picked itself up out of October's bedclothes and straightened its tie before introducing itself to December, the goth slowly went back to their old gothish ways. It was cold, so the trench coats came back. The black t-shirts. The combat boots. They had never gotten rid of their black-rimmed glasses, but some re-embraced retro-neo-gothism by wearing sunglasses indoors all day long.

A few of them, though, couldn't give up the new ways. I think they where never really goths, but had maybe been drawn into it by a friend from junior high, someone who's personality was more assertive. We all just want to fit in, and we tend to go where our friends go. By Thanksgiving, things where as they had been in early September, and through it all, my sister never changed, not once.