Chapter 1: Locked Out
The fluorescent light buzzed like an angry insect directly above Melissa’s head. It flickered once, casting a jump-scare shadow down the narrow hallway before settling back into its sickly, humming glow. The floor tiles were sticky under her sneakers. She could smell it all: the sharp ammonia bleach fighting a losing war against decades of spilled coffee, old urine, and the metallic tang of the pipes groaning inside the walls.
Her bladder was a hot, painful fist clenched low in her belly.
“No, no, no, no,” she chanted under her breath, her voice a tight wire of panic. She practically skidded the last few feet to the only single-stall bathroom on this side of the philosophy building. Her hand, already fumbling with the button of her blue jeggings, shot out for the handle.
It was locked.
A faded, coffee-stained piece of printer paper was taped to the door. ‘Out of Order’ was scribbled in hasty blue ballpoint, the ink smeared. She stared at it, the words not computing. Her body was screaming. She’d held it through the entire review session, through Professor Aldridge’s rambling final instructions, through the agonizingly slow walk here where every pebble on the path seemed to jolt directly into her abdomen.
“You have got to be kidding me.” The whisper was raw. She jiggled the handle. It rattled with a cheap, hollow sound. She jiggled it harder, putting her weight into it, a small, desperate hop escaping her. The movement sent a fresh tsunami of pressure through her, and she froze, squeezing every muscle she had.
Her bright yellow t-shirt felt too tight. As she leaned against the door in defeat, the neckline gaped. She glanced down. Of course. Her red bra strap had slipped off her shoulder, a slash of violence against the yellow cotton. It matched the red of her panties, she knew, a dumb, optimistic choice she’d made that morning while thinking ‘power colors’ for her final exam. Now it just felt like a cruel joke.
A low, pained groan escaped her. She pressed her forehead against the cool, graffiti-scratched metal of the door. Think. The main bathrooms were a three-minute sprint away, down two flights of stairs and across the bustling main hall. Three minutes was an eternity. She would never make it. Her legs were already trembling.
Her eyes, darting wildly like a trapped animal’s, landed on the janitor’s closet door. It was just ten feet away. A dull gray metal door with a simple lock.
No. Absolutely not.
Her bladder throbbed in agreement with the ‘no’. It was a deep, insistent pulse. A warning. She had maybe ninety seconds before systems failed. The image of standing in a puddle in the hallway, in her yellow shirt and red underwear, in front of the entire pre-exam crowd, flashed behind her eyes. Humiliation, hot and complete, washed over her.
Another pipe groaned in the wall, a sound like a dying beast. The light flickered again.
“Okay,” she breathed to the empty, grimy hallway. “Okay. Just… assess.”
The closet. It would have a sink, right? For mop water. It would have a drain in the floor. It was a utility space. It was technically a solution. A disgusting, morally questionable, possibly expulsion-worthy solution, but a physical solution.
Her body made the decision for her. She was moving before her mind could fully veto it. She reached the closet door, her hand slick with sweat. She turned the knob.
Locked.
A sound halfway between a sob and a laugh hiccupped out of her. Of course it was locked. Why would anything be easy? Why would the universe, which had clearly marked today for her total annihilation, offer a single mercy?
She looked at the lock. It was a simple push-button thing on the knob. A basic privacy lock. You could probably open it with a butter knife. Or a credit card.
Her hands flew to her pockets. Empty. Her student ID and credit card were in her phone case. Her phone was in her backpack, which she’d left with her friend Chloe in the exam hall as a placeholder. Chloe, who was probably wondering where she was.
“Think, Missy, think!” she hissed, her nickname tasting like failure in her mouth.
Her eyes scanned the floor. A paperclip. A hairpin. Nothing. Just dusty, sticky tiles and a faded gum wrapper. The pressure was beyond urgent now. It was a live wire. She was doing a small, constant dance, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, her thighs pressed together.
The bra strap slipped further. She ignored it.
There was a fire extinguisher case on the wall. With a little metal hammer. Behind glass.
She stared at it. Breaking the glass would set off an alarm, probably. A very loud, campus-wide alarm. During finals. She would be the girl who pulled the fire alarm to pee in a closet. They’d put that on her permanent record.
A new idea, desperate and ridiculous, formed. She looked down at her sneakers. The laces. She could maybe… thread one through the gap in the doorframe? No, that was for deadbolts. She was losing it.
A door slammed down the hall. Voices echoed, getting closer. A group of students, laughing, on their way to the exam. Her exam. In four minutes.
Panic sealed her fate. She couldn’t be seen here. She couldn’t explain the pacing, the pained expression, the way she was basically hugging herself. They’d know. They’d see it on her face.
With a final, surrendering whimper, she turned back to the bathroom door. The ‘Out of Order’ sign seemed to smirk at her. She grabbed the edge of the paper and tore it off in one swift, angry motion. She crumpled it into a ball and shoved it into her pocket. Then, driven by a primal instinct that overrode all dignity, she balled her hand into a fist and pounded on the metal door.
“Hey!” she yelled, her voice cracking. “Anyone in there? I’m dying out here!”
Silence. Then, the distinct, horrifying sound of a toilet flushing.
The lock clicked.
The door swung inward, and a guy stepped out. He was tall, lanky, wiping his hands on his jeans. He had earbuds in, the tinny thump of bass leaking out. He blinked at her, pulled one bud out. “Oh. Sorry. Sign fell off earlier. It’s all yours.”
He sidestepped her and ambled away, the scent of vaped mango trailing behind him.
Missy stood frozen, the reality crashing down. The bathroom had been free. The sign was a lie. She had just almost broken into a janitor’s closet for nothing.
The relief was so profound it felt like a blow. She stumbled into the tiny room, slammed the door, locked it, and fumbled with her jeggings with trembling, clumsy fingers. The process was agonizing, a race against her own failing muscles.
She made it. Just.
As she sat there, head in her hands, listening to the drip of the faucet and the frantic hammering of her own heart, the delayed humiliation arrived. It settled over her like a cold, wet blanket. The janitor’s closet. She had seriously considered the janitor’s closet. Her red bra strap was now fully hanging off her arm. She had a crumpled ‘Out of Order’ sign in her pocket. And her final exam on Kantian ethics started in approximately two minutes.
She took a deep, shuddering breath that smelled of bleach and despair. She fixed her strap. She flushed. She washed her hands, avoiding her own wide, stunned eyes in the cracked mirror.
When she emerged, the hallway was empty. The fluorescent light buzzed its same, indifferent song. She started to run, her sneakers squeaking on the sticky tiles, the stolen sign a guilty lump in her pocket, knowing with absolute certainty that this was only the first disaster of the day.
She started to run, her sneakers squeaking on the sticky tiles, the stolen sign a guilty lump in her pocket, knowing with absolute certainty that this was only the first disaster of the day.
The philosophy lecture hall was a tomb of frantic last-minute review. The air smelled of old books, nervous sweat, and pencil shavings. Rows of stadium seats were filling with students whose faces were pale under the relentless fluorescent lights. Missy’s eyes scanned the crowd, finding Chloe’s familiar blonde ponytail three rows from the front. She slid into the seat next to her, heart pounding from the sprint.
“Cutting it close, Miss,” Chloe whispered, not looking up from her highlighted notes. “Aldridge is in a mood. He already collected phones.”
“You have no idea,” Missy breathed, fumbling in her backpack for her lucky pen. Her fingers were still unsteady. The relief from the bathroom was already a distant memory, overshadowed by the crushing weight of the exam booklet Professor Aldridge was now solemnly placing facedown on each desk.
The pressure in her bladder, which had retreated to a dull ache, gave a sharp, vengeful twinge.
No. Not now. It was psychological. It had to be.
Professor Aldridge, a man built like a disappointed penguin, reached the podium. He adjusted his glasses. “You have two hours. Begin… now.”
The rustle of fifty booklets turning over was the only sound. Missy stared at the first question. Critique the ontological argument for the existence of God with specific reference to Gaunilo’s ‘Lost Island’ analogy. The words blurred. She blinked. They swam back into focus.
Another twinge, lower, hotter. A genuine demand.
She shifted in the hard plastic seat, crossing her ankles tightly. It was just nerves. She’d been fine a minute ago. She focused, her pen scratching out a first sentence. Gaunilo’s reductio ad absurdum suggests that Anselm’s logic could prove the existence of any perfect—
A cramp seized her lower abdomen, a deep, urgent clench. She sucked in a breath, her grip on the pen turning her knuckles white. She uncrossed her legs, pressing her knees together under the desk. The movement was subtle. She glanced left, then right. Everyone was scribbling, brows furrowed. Chloe was already on the back page.
She tried to breathe, the four-four-eight pattern her therapist taught her. In for four, hold for four, out for eight. Her body wasn’t listening. It had its own frantic, single-minded rhythm. The initial relief in the bathroom had been a trap, she realized. It had fooled her system into letting its guard down. Now the floodgates were trembling, seriously threatened.
Define ‘philosophical zombie’ in the context of Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness.
She could feel a warm trickle. A warning. Panic, cold and metallic, flooded her mouth. She was sweating. A droplet traced a path from her temple down to her jaw. She clenched every muscle she could identify, a full-system lockdown. The pen dug into the paper, leaving a jagged rip.
Five minutes had passed. One hundred and fifteen to go.
She couldn’t. There was no way. She had to ask to be excused. But Aldridge had been clear. No one leaves in the first hour. No exceptions. It was in the syllabus. He’d already glared at a guy who’d coughed too loudly.
The warmth was spreading, a shameful heat against her skin. It wasn’t a trickle anymore. It was a pressurized leak, held back only by a thread of willpower thinner than a spider’s silk. She was rocking, just barely, a tiny, agonized oscillation.
“Is there a problem, Ms. Evans?” Aldridge’s voice cut through the quiet like a scalpel.
All motion in the row ceased. Pens stopped. Missy froze, mid-rock. She felt the blood drain from her face, then flood back in a burning wave. “No. No problem, Professor.”
“Then please refrain from fidgeting. You are distracting others.”
A low, sympathetic laugh rippled from a guy behind her. Missy wanted to dissolve into the floor. The humiliation was a physical weight, crushing her. The combined force of it—the scrutiny, the mocking laughter, the impossible physical urgency—was too much.
The thread snapped.
It wasn’t a decision. It was a total systems failure. A sigh, soft and defeated, escaped her lips a fraction of a second before the hot, shocking rush flooded her jeans. It was a torrent, a surrender, pouring relentless heat that quickly saturated the blue fabric, creating a dark, spreading stain across her lap. The sound was horrifically loud in the silent room—a steady, hissing patter against the chair and the floor beneath her.
Time stopped. The warmth turned to a pervasive, uncomfortable wetness, cooling rapidly in the air-conditioned room. A puddle pooled under her chair, a tiny, terrible lake reflecting the fluorescent lights.
She didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her world had shrunk to the sensation of damp denim clinging to her thighs, the chill on her skin, the utter, absolute silence that had fallen over the entire lecture hall. Every eye was on her. She could feel them, like physical pins. The smell, faintly ammoniacal and unmistakable, began to rise.
Professor Aldridge stared, his mouth a tight, disapproving line. Chloe was rigid beside her, staring straight ahead, pretending with all her might to be somewhere else.
Missy looked down at the exam booklet. The words philosophical zombie swam in a watery blur. A single, fat tear plopped onto the paper, smudging the ink. Then another. She wasn’t sobbing. She was just silently emptying, from the inside out.
She was just silently emptying, from the inside out.
The silence that followed was the most complete and terrible sound she had ever heard. It was a vacuum, sucking all the oxygen from the room. Fifty people holding their breath. The only movement was the slow, dark spread on the floor beneath her chair.
Professor Aldridge cleared his throat. The sound was like a gunshot. “The examination will proceed,” he stated, his voice clipped and brittle. He did not look at her. He looked at the wall above her head, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Focus on your own work, please.”
It was the kind of mercy that felt like a knife twist. He wasn’t going to acknowledge it. He was going to make everyone else not acknowledge it. The pretense was more degrading than any outburst.
Missy looked down. Her hands were shaking. She picked up her pen. The wet denim was cold, a shocking contrast to the heat of her shame. She placed the tip of the pen on the next line.
Compare and contrast utilitarianism and deontological ethics in a contemporary medical dilemma.
She wrote a word. Then another. The letters were childish, unsteady. She could feel the dampness seeping through the yellow cotton of her shirt where it met the waistband of her jeggings. The chair was soaked. She was sitting in a cold, personal swamp. Every minute was an eternity of acute, hyper-sensory hell. The rustle of a page turning was a roar. A dropped pencil was a seismic event. She was a grotesque exhibit, a malfunctioning object of pity and revulsion.
Chloe, beside her, never looked over. Her friend’s entire body was angled away, a study in rigid, polite dissociation. Missy understood.
Missy understood. The pen kept moving. It scratched out half-remembered phrases, quotes she’d memorized, arguments that felt as thin and insubstantial as tissue paper. She constructed sentences like a machine, one word bolted to the next, while her mind floated somewhere near the buzzing ceiling lights. She was a ship taking on water, slowly listing, and the only way to stay afloat was to keep bailing with the tiny cup of this exam.
The clock ticked.
A droplet fell from the edge of the desk onto her knee. She watched it hit, a dark star on the dark wet denim.
Someone sneezed. The sound made her flinch, a full-body jolt that sloshed the awful, cold reality she was sitting in. She heard a stifled giggle, quickly choked. Her face burned. She kept writing. Kant’s categorical imperative necessitates treating humanity as an end in itself—
She filled two booklets. Her handwriting grew progressively wilder, the letters sprawling as if trying to escape the page. She didn’t read it back. She just filled the space, a frantic wall of ink against the void of what was happening in her chair.
When Professor Aldridge finally said, “Pens down,” his voice was a lifeline thrown into a stormy sea.
The rustle of papers being collected was a sweet, collective agony. The TA, a pale graduate student with pitying eyes, approached her row. He paused at her desk. He didn’t look at her face. He looked at the soaked booklets she was holding out, the corners damp and darkened. He took them between thumb and forefinger, his expression carefully neutral, and placed them on the bottom of the pile.
The exodus began. Chairs scraped. Backpacks zipped. Conversations erupted, a release of pent-up tension that didn’t include her. People flowed toward the aisles, giving her seat a wide, deliberate berth. The path they took around her was unmistakable, a current parting around a rock.
She didn’t move.
Chloe stood, slinging her bag over one shoulder. She hesitated, her knuckles white on the strap. “Miss,” she said, the nickname sounding foreign.
“Go ahead,” Missy said. Her voice was a rasp, unused for two hours.
“I can wait.”
“Just go. Please.”
Chloe lingered for another second, then melted into the stream of students. Missy watched her go. The lecture hall emptied. The TA and Professor Aldridge left, the professor not glancing back. The heavy door swung shut with a final, echoing thud.
Alone.
She looked at the chair. At the small, shining pool on the scarred linoleum. The room still hummed with the ghost of her disgrace. She pushed herself up. The sound was wet. The fabric clung to her, cold and heavy. She walked stiffly, each step a soggy, whispering reminder, down the stairs and out into the bright, ordinary hallway.
Students milled about, celebrating, commiserating. No one noticed her. She was invisible, a ghost in wet blue jeans. She found her legs carrying her toward the main exit, her body on autopilot.
“Missy.”
Chloe was there, leaning against a sun-drenched brick wall just outside the doors. She was pretending to check her phone. “Hey.”
“You didn’t have to wait.”
“I know.” Chloe pushed off the wall. She fell into step beside her, keeping a careful foot of distance. “Your place or mine?”
“Mine is closer.” Missy’s words were monosyllabic stones dropped between them.
They walked. The spring afternoon was cruel in its beauty. Sunshine dappled through new leaves. Birds chirped. People laughed on the quad. The normalcy was a satire. Every sense was heightened. The squelch of her sneakers. The rough chafe of denim against her thighs. The smell—sharp and organic—that she carried with her like a cloud.
They crossed a street.
“So,” Chloe said, the word hanging in the air for a block. “That was… something.”
Missy snorted. It was an ugly sound. “Yeah. Something.”
“Are you… I mean, physically, are you okay?”
“I’m peachy, Chlo. Never better.” The sarcasm dripped, corrosive.
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what? What exactly would you like me to be like?” Missy stopped walking. She turned to face her friend. “Sunny? Philosophical about it? ‘Oh, just a little human hydrology mishap, let’s analyze the Kantian implications’?”
Chloe held up her hands. “I’m just trying to—”
“You’re trying to manage it. You’re trying to find the script for what to say to the girl who pissed herself in front of God and Kant. There isn’t one.”
Chloe’s face hardened. “I waited for you. I’m walking with you.”
“And you haven’t looked me in the eye since it happened.” The truth of it hung there. Chloe’s gaze was fixed on Missy’s shoulder, her chin, the tree behind her. Anywhere but her eyes.
Chloe flushed. “It’s awkward.”
“No shit.”
They resumed walking, the silence now charged, brittle. The last stretch to Missy’s apartment building was a gauntlet. She felt every passerby’s potential glance like a physical touch.
“What are you going to do?” Chloe finally asked as they reached the cracked concrete steps leading to Missy’s front door.
“Shower. Burn these clothes. Change my identity. Move to Peru. The usual.” Missy fished her keys from her still-dry backpack. The mundane action felt absurd.
“I mean about… everything. The exam. The… people.”
Missy turned the key. The lock clicked with a definitive sound. “The exam is soaked in urine, Chloe. Literally. I think that ship has sailed.” She pushed the door open, the damp back of her jeans pulling uncomfortably. She didn’t go in. She stood in the threshold. “Thanks for the walk.”
It was a dismissal. Chloe heard it. She shifted her weight, her expression a turmoil of guilt and relief. “Call me, okay? If you need anything.”
“Sure.”
Missy stepped inside and closed the door. She leaned against it, listening to Chloe’s footsteps retreat down the steps. The apartment was quiet, dark, and smelled of stale popcorn and lemon cleaner. She slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor, finally alone, in the cold, dark wet.