Instant darkness. The excited yells of frantic girls could be heard across the Upper campus as Ojai Valley School experienced it’s first blackout of the year. Many of us did not know how to react. It was exciting for all-this chaotic, fortuitous occurrence meant that study hall was postponed.  A herd of girls began to stream out of the dorms, assembling into the blackhole, but they were soon told by the faculty that this was not a fire drill and that it was okay to be inside the dorms. We retreated. Back inside the black enclosures, people huddled together, walking to their rooms scouring drawers and closets for any source of light they could find: flashlights, cell phones, even laptops.

I was one of the few for whom this was a frightening experience. I have nyctophobia, meaning I am afraid of the dark. My first instinct was to grab my headlamp that had been so handy during dark nights camping out in the Eastern Sierras just two weeks back. It was just my luck when I snapped out of my frantic state and realized my headlamp was upstairs, in the storage room. It was a scary journey up but when the dorm parent on duty, Ms. Smith, opened up the room, I dashed in there to find the precious light source.

I walked back downstairs with a new sense of calm, the light from my headlamp illuminating the way back to my seat in the girls lounge. There, Mama asked passing girls where their flashlights and headlamps were. Apparently, we were supposed to keep them in our rooms, in case of emergency like this. Weird. In my four years at Ojai Valley School, this is the first blackout I have ever experienced. This was also the first time I have ever heard anybody tell me that I needed to keep an emergency headlamp just chilling in my room. The only girl I witnessed having a headlamp handy was Zooey. I guess we all didn’t get the memo.