The Brown & White

Campus police had to forcefully remove a student from Linderman Library after she refused to leave while studying for four o'clock exams.

The scene occurred Wednesday at 3:47 a.m. Student J had slipped under the radar of Linderman employees for the previous 40 hours. During that time, she studied, ate out of Lucy's Café and slept in a bathroom stall.

Tuesday evening, friends of J called campus police, reporting her missing. J's friends explained that J was involved in only a few organizations on campus and did not have a boyfriend, so much of her time was devoted to studying. They first started worrying about J's whereabouts after she stopped returning their text messages. J's only connection to the world is her cell phone. "If there was an operation that could surgically attach it to her hand, J would be the first one to receive it," one of J's friends said.

Police first searched J's dorm. It was easy to see something was just not right. There was no note describing her possible whereabouts, but all of J's books were missing and a trail of pencil shavings led out the door. J's bed was crisply made and in comparison to her roommate's side of the room, J's side looked as if it had never been lived in. J's roommate said she had not seen J since the weekend. Her roommate told the police that J never drank, so the possibility J was passed out somewhere in an alcohol-induced coma could immediately be ruled out.

J was a workaholic in every sense of the term. An anonymous tip next led police to Taylor Gym. J had not flown off a treadmill or gotten lost watching the men lift weights. Some of the gym regulars were questioned. Most said they recognized student J, but had not seen her lately. It appeared as if they had reached a dead end, when a piece of evidence was found wedged beneath an elliptical machine. It was J's schedule from Monday:

Class 7:55 - 12:00

Lunch 12:00 - 12:10

Class 12:10 - 1:00

Gym 1:00 - 2:00

Library 2:00 - ?

Police ran to the library. By the time they arrived it was just about to close. As the clock struck two, librarians flung open Linderman's doors as they shooed students down the stairs. Police had to wade their way through the flood of exhausted students. It was an odd scene, because usually police followed a crowd of staggering students. Instead, they continued to walk the opposite way.

In the midst of four o'clocks, the library was a disaster. Chairs were overturned. All the printers were empty. Trash cans overflowed. The desks and tables glistened with students' sweat and tears. It seemed as if police had reached a stop, when they heard someone scream in the bathroom. The custodial worker ran out, saying a monster started growling at her from last stall.

J was found carving calculus equations across the bathroom walls. Her hair was frizzed and dark circles lied under her bloodshot eyes. When police asked her what she was doing, she claimed she had run out of paper. Police asked her to leave the library, but she only clung to the toilet. After each officer attempted to loosen her grasp, they had to call in the Jaws of Life to separate the girl from the porcelain. Once removed from the stall, she started chanting psychology definitions in Spanish and chemical compounds, despite the fact she had never taken chemistry.

J was taken to the Health and Wellness Center and placed in solitary confinement until she snapped out of her trance. Once J returned back to Earth, she explained she started studying in Linderman on Monday afternoon, but after five hours, she felt like all of the books were judging her and the walls were closing in around her. So she went down to the café to get some dinner. When she returned, every surface in the library was either covered with a person, their books or a computer. She was forced to take her food and work and hide in the handicap stall of the bathroom. She had been in there since Monday evening, only leaving to get more sushi or coffee.

Yet somehow after all of her work, she still failed two out of her three exams.