Excerpt:

I’ve never had troubles with breathing. When I was a kid and all of my cousins were sneezing and coughing, gasping for air as they were diagnosed with asthma or allergies, I breathed easily. Activity, pollen, stress: they were no match for me and my hearty lungs.
A few nights after my accidental eavesdropping, however, I woke up in the middle of night, gasping for air. My childhood invincibility: gone. My labored breathing soon slowed, but the feeling of suffocation remained.
Something wasn’t right.
The fan above me: its blades were motionless. The constant, soothing hum I was accustomed to was absent.
Swinging my legs out of bed, I walked blindly across the room. I reached for the light switch and flipped it on. Nothing happened.
It had finally come: the first blackout of the summer.
I was a little surprised it hadn’t happened before, to be honest. The first summer blackout usually occurred a few days into the summer. Not even waiting for school to end and exhilarated students to flood the streets, the system would overload --- taxed by the demands caused by the sweltering days and sweating residents kicking up the air conditioning ---blacking out entire neighborhoods, causing the aforementioned students to groan in despair. How would they finish their last-minute studying and homework caused by their inevitable teenage procrastination. Their teachers, needless to say, never accepted their pleas: “But the power went out” or “It’s almost summer”. So it was strange, almost unheard of, for the first blackout to hold out until the last week of June.
But the summer had been anything but ordinary so far.