Pat Myaz (yes, pronounced exactly how you think) clawed her way out of Gross, Nebraska, a town so tiny it’s practically a whisper. Growing up, her only escape was blasting My Chemical Romance on a thrift-store CD player while practicing eyeliner wings sharp enough to pierce the Great Plains wind.

Her first big break came not with Pillow Sins but at the Speedee Mart in Spencer, Nebraska, where she learned the art of restocking Slim Jims and dodging men who thought “goth” meant “up for grabs.” With enough shifts mislabeled as “part time,” she scraped together $74.99 for a Glamour Shots session at the Norfolk mall. Those boudoir-style photos (turtleneck, teased bangs, one hand on cheek like a Sears catalog siren) secured her entry into the infamous “Miss New Braska” contest.

Though the pageant had 15 entrants, Pat somehow placed 20th, a ranking so illogical it impressed Pillow Sins enough to offer her a spread. The editors claimed they’d “never seen so much eyeliner in black-and-white photography before.”

Now she’s graduated from Gross to Spencer—where she works full time for part-time pay, proving you can leave your hometown but you can’t leave capitalism. She insists she’ll move on to bigger places, but for now her throne is a squeaky barstool at Lucky’s Tavern, where she chain-drinks Dr. Pepper and explains Bauhaus lyrics to men who just came in for pull tabs.

Pat holds the unofficial record for “Most Black Lipstick Applied During a Tornado Warning” in Boyd County, and once nearly set Gross on the map by proposing a goth-corn maze, though funding fell through when the town council said: “We only have three people. Who would even get lost?”