Before the web, I’d stay up all night in my dorm computer lab telnetting; talking to people online.
At dawn, a girl came into the lab and said the stairwell was full of smoke. We checked, and it was. She thought she should pull the fire alarm, but she was afraid of getting into trouble. I told her it would likely go off on its own. A minute later, it did.
It was dead of winter in Minnesota. We piled onto the snowbanks. Coming back inside, we saw that the paper decorations and notices on the men’s side were all ash. Someone had tried to burn the building down, but it had refused to catch. We lived in a converted convent entirely made of stone and had metal doors.
I hoped the arsonist would be caught, for our safety, but at the same time, I felt I understood the impulse.