We were minutes away from leaving when Claire finally asked the question we’d all been avoiding.

“What are we supposed to do about coats?” she asked. Lisa and I averted our eyes. The question stressed us out.

The three of us had spent days, possibly even weeks, agonizing over our outfits—sifting through the clothing racks of Hot Topics, thrift stores, and South Street boutiques, searching for just the right pieces that had the perfect amount of darkness and sex appeal without trying too hard.

We’d each spent about a week’s worth of income on lacy little black dresses, so we had no money left to buy elegant outerwear. None of us owned capelets or brocade trench coats. We didn’t even have velvet gloves.

I glanced at the pile of coats heaped in the corner of Claire’s cramped, dimly lit dorm room. Between Lisa’s red wool peacoat, my down-stuffed puffer coat, and the hand-knit rainbow scarf that peeked out from the bottom of the pile, the answer was obvious.

“Nothing,” I snapped. “We can’t wear those to a goth club. We all need to go without coats.”

Middle of January be damned, we were three 17-year-old girls preparing for our first Dracula’s Ball, and there was no way we were going to take any chances that could result in social suicide. Granted, Dracula’s Ball was held four times a year, but who wanted to go to a vampire-themed party all sweaty in the middle of summer? Attending in the dead of winter made perfect sense on all levels. And did goth parties have coat checks? I didn’t know. I’d never seen a goth in a puffer coat, especially not one with a big fuzzy hood. I assumed all goths mastered the art of layering, or maybe they’d just learned to defy the weather. The bottom line was that my friends and I were determined to do whatever it took to make sure we didn’t stick out like a bunch of newbies or, worse, mall goths.

But, of course, we did. We were a trio of scared-looking girls, shivering uncontrollably as we waited in line for an hour, wearing skimpy black party dresses that, despite all our efforts, looked like they came from JCPenney. A bald, middle-aged man with a neck tattoo, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a bulky purple coat turned to us and said, “You guys are crazy! Aren’t you cold?”

“No,” I sneered through chattering teeth. I made sure to avoid all eye contact until we’d stepped inside and passed the coat check.

The venue itself was a boxy, nondescript building tucked away in a part of South Philly you’d never go to without good reason, but the inside was far more enticing in a sort of “what happens in a goth club, stays in a goth club” sort of way. Lighting was sparse, greetings were kept to a minimum, and the man we followed into the main hall was wearing goggles and bulbous pantaloons.

As someone who’d idolized everything about the goth scene from a young age, making my first trip to Dracula’s Ball was my life’s pinnacle. I viewed all elder goths as my mentors and would have accepted anything they had to offer. If I’d walked in and they’d all been sitting around a large table sipping ghost soup while wearing nothing but leather diapers and cobwebs, I’d have jumped right in.

While the actual event involved neither soup nor leather diapers, it did look something like the vampire dance scene from the movie Blade. That is, if you removed that whole part where blood spurts from the ceiling and replaced all the vampire partygoers with a cast that looked like a superhero team assembled by Tim Burton.

Once we approached the dance floor, we were smacked in the face by blaring industrial music (think gears and cogs plus techno) and a blazing green laser light show. Energetic dark pixie girls owned the space, taking giant strides in their sky-high platform boots and whipping their plastic mesh locks to the side with each jagged move. A nearly 7-foot-tall picture of elegant androgyny writhed across the floor, their delicate features encased in a gas mask and their long, straight black hair spreading around them like tendrils. We could have stood in front of that dance floor for hours, frozen in awe, had a man with chiseled abs wearing nothing but vinyl bondage pants not asked us to get out of his way.

After being scared away from the dance floor, we planted ourselves by the bar. Too young to enter the 21+ section and stock up on liquid courage, we each nursed a water as we took turns practicing our best “I don’t even care, I see this all the time” faces. Much to our surprise, we’d ended up right across from the dark belly dance room, where two undead sexy nurse twins gyrated to a pulsating beat. My wide eyes and gaping mouth aside, I thought I did a good job feigning disinterest. We managed to keep up our cool, casual people-watching schtick for maybe a half hour before our silent stoicism was interrupted by Lisa’s bladder.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Lisa said.

Claire and I looked at her, bewildered. We’d just started to feel comfortable at the bar, and to move anywhere else was to open us up to a slew of new confusions and discomforts.

“I seriously need to use the bathroom,” Lisa repeated, her eyes pleading.

I pretended not to hear her and fiddled with my dress while Claire became suddenly engrossed in the ice at the bottom of her drink. It didn’t take long for Lisa to take the hint. As I watched her descend into a sea of black frocks in the next room, I felt a brief pang of guilt.

After Lisa had been gone for about five minutes, we thought nothing of it. After 10, we figured there must have been a long line. But once she’d been gone for what seemed to be 15, 20 minutes, we started to worry.

To be honest, we weren’t even sure what exactly we should worry about. Just processing what was in front of us was hard enough, never mind what lurked beyond. Maybe there was trouble in the belly dance room. We heard there would be a snake dancer, and Lisa always freaked out around snakes. Or maybe there was a fight. Lisa always had a way of staring at people, but what was actually deep admiration often came across as fierce judgment. The possibilities for what could be happening in the other room were endless.

“We have to find her,” I told Claire, clutching her wrist and pulling her behind me. The two of us pushed through the crowd with the ferocity of two terrified mice.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” I whispered, pushing through the sea of eyeliner and vinyl.

When we’d finally made our way into the next room, the first things we noticed were how unexpectedly spacious it was and how the walls were painted a surprising shade of baby blue. In the center was a large fountain, like one you’d find in a public square or garden courtyard, with small groups of people milling around it, speaking in hushed tones. Off to one side of the fountain, we found Lisa, her eyes darting around and her complexion paler than usual.

“There you are!” I yelled as Claire and I ran to her. Lisa stayed silent, her face painted with unease.

“What’s wrong? Did you already go to the bathroom?” Claire asked. “We were worried about you.”

“I couldn’t go,” Lisa said, her voice cracking. I shrugged, confused.

“They don’t—they don’t have a real bathroom,” Lisa explained. “I looked everywhere, and there’s nothing. I think this is like…a communal one.”

“What?” I asked.

“I think I’m supposed to pee in this fountain.”

What Lisa said sounded like nonsense, but at the same time…did it? We couldn’t be certain. There were only four sections to the club—bar, dance floor, belly dance space, and the eerie indoor courtyard, and we’d seen firsthand that none of the other places had bathrooms. I looked all around us, but there was nothing—just solid blue walls, no signage or anything. Then I looked to the center of the room, to the fountain, to see if I could decipher anything to confirm or disprove Lisa’s claim.

No one was using the fountain as a toilet, but at the same time, no one wasn’t. The way people were hovering around it, they could have been preparing to use the bathroom, or else they could have just finished up.

“Maybe we should just ask someone,” Claire chimed in.

Lisa and I looked at Claire as if she were speaking a foreign language. There was no way in hell we were going to ask someone. Perhaps Claire didn’t care about our social standing, but I’d be damned if I’d let her make us look like total fools in this building of goth royalty.

I put my arm around Lisa and guided her toward the fountain.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Let’s just get this over with. Just do it quickly, and don’t make a big thing of it.”

Lisa nodded. She took a deep breath in, fighting back a pool of tears that threatened to spill out at any moment. Claire and I stood on either side of her, doing our best to create a small wall of privacy.

As Lisa slowly drew her trembling hands to the hem of her dress, we each held our breath in terrified anticipation.

“I guess I’ll just sit and pee over the edge,” she said, as her voice quivered and her eyes begged for validation.

I shot her a thumbs-up and a forced smile.

Right as Lisa began to slide her black pantyhose down her thighs, I noticed someone staring in our direction. He was slender and pale, wearing a tailored burgundy suit and a black ruffled ascot. At any other time, he could have been the love of my life, but in that particular moment, all I could focus on was his rudeness. God, why won’t he let us pee in peace?

Except, it wasn’t just him. I glanced around the room and noticed we’d caught the attention of a few others. A cluster of women in sinister burlesque costumes gave us uneasy looks from a distant corner while a burly man to our right in a cutoff Bauhaus tee slowly inched away, his face quizzical and concerned. I closed my eyes and prayed for a swift end.

Moments later, a voice cried out, its pained tone echoing off the walls. “Noooo!”

I opened my eyes to see Claire, wide-eyed and frantic, pointing across the room. As my gaze followed the trail of her finger, I spotted it—a powder-blue door that was barely visible in the center of the monochrome room, marked with a small, handwritten sign: “Women’s Restroom.”

————

Marissa Phillips is a writer, artist, and zinester. Her poetry has appeared in Somos en escrito and she regularly contributes to Gothic Beauty Magazine. You can find more of her writing and creative work here: https://linktr.ee/rissvandal