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was possible to see that from New Orleans,” Casey said.

    “I don’t know. All the geeks and Star Wars nerds are talking about it. I heard some of them this morning. They’re all excited about it, saying it was caused by the sun or something from outer space.”
    “Great. So when exactly can we expect AT&T and all the rest of the cell companies to get their signals fixed? There’s no telling how many texts I’ve missed this morning. And now the power is out in Dinwiddie Hall. Or do you think it’s all over campus?”
    “I don’t know. I was just heading over to the library to find out if the lights are still on there when you asked. I sure hope so. I’ve got a ton of research to do.”
    “Well, thanks,” Casey said. “I guess I freaked out for no reason over being late for Anthro.”
    Casey walked back out to the sidewalk and glanced back at St. Charles Avenue out front. The entire street was still like one big parking lot. No vehicles were moving, not even the streetcar that was still stopped on the tracks right where it had been when she had entered the campus. Most of the cars in the street had their hoods raised now, their owners standing around looking helpless. Casey wondered if the strange power outage had anything to do with all these apparently stalled cars, but she couldn’t think of any reason why it would.
    She turned and walked down the shaded sidewalks of Gibson Quad. Its park-like expanse was crowded with groups of students talking about the power outage and the strange lights during the night. Looking at the other
surrounding buildings, she realized that the power probably was out all over campus. No one was in class, it seemed.
    She decided to keep walking to the breezeway at the other end of the complex and see if PJ’s Coffee was open. She knew Jessica had a nine o’clock class and would normally be stopping by there about this time to get her morning caffeine fix first. Casey thought Jessica might have seen the lights if she and Joey had been out that late, but when she got there, despite her hopes that it would somehow not have been affected, PJ’s was closed. She sat on a park bench across the breezeway and opened her backpack to get out her MacBook. Usually, on the rare days she had time to stop for a vanilla latte, she would sit in the café and check her e-mail or post something to her Facebook wall. She didn’t really expect the campus WiFi to be working with everything else shut down the way it was, but the laptop was fully charged and she could think of no reason why it shouldn’t come out of hibernation when she opened it up. She pushed the power button repeatedly with no effect, and then noticed that the little green light that indicated that the battery was charged was not lit. It was just one more WTF moment in a morning that seemed to hold no end of new surprises.
    “Hey, Casey!”
    She looked up to see Grant Dyer walking her way at a brisk pace. His wavy blond hair was even more disheveled than usual this morning, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. But like every other time he was near, she felt something come over her that was hard to describe, something
between nervousness and excitement. She had met him only last semester, when she went on a field trip for extra credit in a freshman cultural anthropology class. A graduate student, he had been assisting her professor on a visit to an ancient Native American village site near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From the first day she met him she had experienced the same reaction when he spoke to her. Today was no different, and as she turned to greet him she felt herself blush a little.
    “Hi, Grant! I didn’t see you in Dinwiddie Hall, but I was late getting there. I guess you left when the lights went out, huh?”
    “Yeah, I wondered where you were this morning, Casey. I figured there was no use hanging around when I saw the whole building was shut down.”
    “I overslept. My roommate was supposed to