The Graveyard Shift

By Nitesh Srivastava

At 4 a.m., a maintenance worker casually vacuumed the carpet outside the Louis Room even as students walked past him, dressed in any and every combination of collared shirts, jeans, sweats, t-shirts, bandanas, lingerie and baseball caps.

At this ungodly hour, Norris was otherwise quiet, except for a heavy bass that penetrated the stone walls and multiple floors of the building.

The students typically passed the janitor on their way to the bathroom. Once their business was through, they shuffled back into the Louis Room, which had all the appearance of a high school dance from the '90s, but with a better budget and more enthusiasm.

One or two dozen Marathoners stayed on the fringe of the dancing crowd inside, where they could stand, talk and take pictures. But the rest of the students stayed together in a tight mass near the stage and the projector screen, their heads bobbing in loose unison and their feet moving in time to the music.

Around 4:20 a.m., "Everybody Dance Now" came on and the tempo of the dancing picked up. Shortly afterward, trays of sandwiches could be seen making their way around above the wave of heads. They quickly disappeared.

The students showed few signs of fatigue from their continuous night of dancing, even though sunrise would be in a few hours.

Songs by the Backstreet Boys followed, along with a mini-marathon of early Britney Spears music around 5 a.m.