Zack entered his final semester of college knowing it would probably be a stressful one.  As the first few weeks passed, as he spent more and more time secluded in the library, whittling away at this bastard of a course load, he could console himself with the thought of crossing the stage in May.  That was a long ways away, though.  Of more immediate relief was the weekend, and all the revelry it entailed:

This photo of Zack was taken at a Sunchase party on Friday, January 23rd.  According the partygoer who took the photo: “I pointed the camera at him and said ‘Hey, smile.’”  

The photo was posted on Facebook Sunday evening.  For someone in the midst of a turbulent semester, Zack looked to be quite the happy drunk — his head half-cocked, his mustache patchy, his smile dashing.  All things considered, life was good. 

And it would have stayed this way, had it not been for a few bored students who saw the picture that Sunday night and found that they could not look away from it, seeing in this photo a certain something, a sort of sublime subtext.  

They printed out the photo and made fifty copies at the library. That night, they proceeded to distribute them throughout campus — Wheeler, Hiner, Curry, Frazer, Wygal.  As they went about their campaign, Zack finished studying for his Monday classes and went to bed early.  

Not surprisingly, Zack’s initial reaction was “total confusion and general anger.”  Tests and quizes — these were things you could prepare for.  How do you prepare for something like this?  As he recounted:  ”What made it worse is that at first I couldn’t figure out who did it. I will admit to having ‘special’ friends, but this was a bit more weird than that.”  

Zack appealed to his so-called friends, trying to find out who the hell was responsible.  Their responses were vague, unhelpful, and a little on the giddy side.  By now, everyone knew what was going on — and they weren’t about to tell Zack.  Frustrated, he untagged himself from the photo on Facebook, and hoped that that would be the end of it.   

Monday night, a new batch of photocopies were distributed.  This time, they were placed in toilet stalls and slid under the doors of professors’ offices.  By Wednesday, people were asking Zack what was going on — even people he didn’t know:  ”People were asking me ‘why is your picture taped to the ceiling above the stalls in the women’s bathroom in the Rotunda?’”     

Worse, he had no idea what would happen next.  ”It got to be just something that you live with,” Zack said.  He went compared the experience to a bout with cancer:  ”It’s there, doing its thing, and probably isn’t going anywhere. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a course of treatment for this issues, so it just played out.”

And how!  Things took a turn for the surreal on Thursday night — when, after a pleasant evening at the bar, Zack returned to his apartment, logged onto Facebook, and saw this:   

His life had turned into a movie directed by the love child of David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock.  

Online, Zack was being asked to explain, once again, what the hell was going on.  And, once again, he had no clue.  What had he done to deserve this?  After cursing at his room mate and demanding an explanation — the room mate played dumb — Zack changed his status to “I’m just as confused as everyone else,” took a shot of José Cuervo, and went to bed.  

And that was how Zack became the face Longwood.  After the Facebook incident, life got a little more normal.  The picture stopped popping up in random places, for the most part. There was, of course, the time it made a startling appearance on a birthday cake for one of his friend’s twenty first birthday party.  By then, though, Zack had already found out who was behind the prank.  He could now go back to devoting all of his stress toward schoolwork, instead of the demonic whims of his bored friends.  

Zack made it through the semester with his mind intact.  He has very little bitterness about the whole ordeal.  Looking back, he describes the experience as enriching, an indelible final impression of his time spent at Longwood.

“It’s not at every college,” he said, “that you can have your picture put up everywhere and have people stop and ask ‘Are you THAT guy?’”