A bright light filtering through the thin violet curtains of Stephanie's room pulled her out of her deep sleep. It had been a long time since the young girl had slept so well. Like a cat on a laser, she jumped up as soon as she opened her eyes on her phone lying nearby on her pillow and realized with great disappointment that it still refused to turn on. Her fingers closed around the small device with such force that she thought if she didn't release the pressure, she would crush it.
She threw it violently onto the soft mattress to release the overflow of emotion and stared at it angrily, tears in her eyes.
Damn it! Shit! Fuck! It still doesn't work! Why? Why?!
Stephanie screamed internally with frustration and pounded her poor mattress for a few moments before calming down. She then realized that nothing had been fixed overnight.
Without a phone and without an alarm clock, it was impossible for her to know what time it was exactly. She suddenly felt terribly late. Despite her lack of motivation, she decided to leave her bed and go to the living room.
She found her father, looking worried, hurriedly putting on his brown jacket. A piece of bread covered in strawberry jam in his mouth, unshaven, and visibly in a very bad mood, he grabbed his bag containing his notebooks, papers, and tools for this new day of work that promised to be particularly complicated.
"Good morning, sweetheart! Sorry, but I have to go! I don't know what time it is, but I have to be at the high school as soon as possible! Marie has already left."
Stephanie, whose wild hair made it look like she had been electrocuted, watched her father finish getting ready without even bothering to reply. She made a small noise, almost a bear's growl, which could be translated as "okay, Dad, see you later."
Xavier left the house in a fury, but not without kissing his wife on the mouth.
Stephanie's mother, although she had finished getting ready, didn't look very proud. She had jumped out of bed upon seeing that it was daylight to find that the fridge, microwave, and coffee maker were still not working, and she couldn't even take a nice hot shower. All the conditions to make her particularly grumpy were present, especially since she had spent a dreadful night punctuated by fireworks.
Stephanie was the last one still in pajamas. Hers was actually a warm gray hooded jumpsuit with two eyes, a big black nose, and small soft ears, all of which inevitably made one think of a koala. Painfully, she walked to the large dining table, pulled out a chair, and sat down, only to get up thirty seconds later to fetch a bowl, chocolate powder, and milk.
Oh, right... No electricity, so no microwave to heat up my hot chocolate. This is really starting to annoy me.
She decided to take out the cereal box that was stored in the drawer above the oven and microwave before returning to her seat at the table.
"Did you sleep well?" Christine asked her daughter, whose reflection she could see in the small mirror in front of which she stood to check her makeup.
"Yeah. Hey, Mom, do we really have to go to school? Without electricity, the teachers won't be able to teach."
"No choice, honey. Your father went, and your teachers are making the effort to go. No reason for you not to go."
The young girl let out a deep sigh as she filled her bowl with chocolate cereal to the brim. She was very hungry that morning because of the light meal from the night before. She then poured milk and started to eat.
The milk is lukewarm, not a good sign...
Even she, who had always lived through screens, understood that everything in the fridge and freezer would be lost if the electricity didn't come back very quickly. In just a few bites, a piece of milk bread disappeared as well as the contents of her small midnight blue bowl.
"Ah, I really don't want to go," Christine said before deciding to step out the front door. "I feel like it's going to be horrible. Well, see you tonight, sweetheart. I love you!"
Her mother left for work, leaving the teenager alone at home. As she was finishing, there was a knock at the door. It was her friend Morgane, who had taken to meeting her outside her house to walk to school together. Not surprisingly, she didn't have her usual cheerful demeanor.
"Oh, hi, Morgane, what's up?" Stephanie said, although she had a pretty good idea of the response she would get.
"Hey, Steph! Well, kinda. If you forget that there's still no electricity and my phone's still dead."
"Yeah, it sucks," she said with helplessness and understanding. "Hey, you know what time it is?"
"It was eight o'clock when I left the apartment, so it must be quarter past eight at most. We're good. Ain't starting till nine today."
"Ah, phew! thought we were late."
"I bet there won't even be classes, but my dad told me to go anyway."
"My mom said the same thing. My dad left for school ten minutes ago. Oh? You brought your bike?"
"Yes!" the girl said, tapping the handlebars of her little bike. "I didn't feel like walking. Yesterday was enough for me!"
"Totally! I'm going to take mine too. I think Dad took his. Mom couldn't 'cause tires were flat, and and she didn't have time to pump 'em up."
Thanks to their bikes, Stephanie and Morgane arrived at the school gates in just fifteen minutes. On the way, they noticed their bus hadn't moved an inch since yesterday, just like the other cars. All the vehicles had remained overnight where they had broken down, except for the two-wheelers, which could be more easily moved. They were all damaged to some extent, especially the windows. There was glass everywhere on the asphalt, yet the two girls had no doubt that most of the damage had been caused overnight.
Indeed, while most Parisians were asleep, thugs had come out to have fun by breaking windshields, scratching bodies, and smashing windows. Several, as they had observed, had been carefully looted and even set on fire. They had seen a shop specializing in multimedia completely blackened by fire, a fire that had spread to the upper floors and neighboring buildings. The firefighters couldn't do anything, not even get there. Seeing this, the two brightly colored-haired girls had hoped there were no victims. They had seen the faces of the neighborhood residents: all looked desperate and tired. They had spent the entire night trying to extinguish the flames using water from the canal.
They had heard in passing that a young boy who couldn't have been older than eighteen had had the courage to climb the facade to try to save the occupants of the apartments above the shop and had rescued two people, including a child. He had then continued to help by carrying buckets of water until there was no flame left. Hearing that, Stephanie felt an immense sense of regret wash over her. She really wanted to film the scene. As for the perpetrators of the fire, they had disappeared, probably taking with them powerful computers, modern TVs, and bulky Hi-Fi systems.
This shop hadn't been the only one to be vandalized like this, far from it. The only difference from what Stephanie had seen before, especially during protests, was that there hadn't been a single police officer, not a single firefighter to prevent these destructions and thefts. It was as if they had never existed. The delinquents had therefore taken full advantage of it all night long. Stephanie didn't like the police, as she had heard many sordid stories about them. For her, you had to be twisted to want to join their ranks. Yet, faced with so much destruction, she couldn't help but have a little pang in her heart.
But where's the police? They're never there when you need them! What a bunch of lazy bums!
There were traces of havoc right up to Stephanie and Morgane's high school. Fortunately, no one had tried to break in and set it on fire.
Instead of sitting in their seats and taking out their things, the two girls joined the other students who had formed a large circle in the center of the classroom. Each one recounted what they had seen and heard, what they had done, and expressed their sometimes bizarre theories about what had happened. What was certain was that everyone hoped for a quick restoration of electricity.
Their math teacher, Mr. Thépôt, wasn't in the room at the moment. Stephanie noted the absence of a large number of students, more than half of them.
"I heard they're all in the teachers' lounge with the principal and the school counselor," one of the students said.
"They must be talking about the power outage," another supposed.
"Are they going to tell us to go home?"
"Maybe. There are a lot of people missing. Can they even have class without electricity and without internet? Don't think so!"
"Hey, Steph, your dad's a teacher. What do you think?"
"Well, don't really know," Stephanie replied, shrugging. "He came earlier to find out what to do. He said yesterday that he had a lot of photocopies to make, but he couldn't 'cause of the blackout. So, no teacher can make photocopies at the moment or go on Pronote."
"Ah."
It was then that a handsome young man in jeans and a gray T-shirt entered the room, a brown bag in hand.
"Good morning, everyone. Sorry for being late," he began, heading towards his desk. "Take your seats. I see there are some missing. Do you know if they're coming? Well, given the situation, there will be no tardy or absent notes. What a mess! Anyway, thank you for coming. I'm sure it wasn't easy. We talked for a long time with the other teachers and the principal, and we decided to have class anyway, but in a different way."
"Oooooh!" all the students exclaimed with disappointment.
"It won't be as good as what we usually do, but we'll make do for now. Um... Where do I start? I'll take attendance first; it'll be quicker."
The roll call was done faster than ever with the list of students in the class that Mr. Thépôt always had on him. He was a fairly young man who could pass for the older brother of most of the students in this class. It was his second year as a teacher, and from what the young girl had understood, he had a girlfriend who hadn't accompanied him to Paris when he got the job.
His large leather bag contained many documents, including a previous assessment that he returned with a brief comment for each student before proceeding to the correction. The whole thing took no more than twenty minutes, theoretically leaving him twenty-five minutes to teach.
Out of habit, the teacher glanced at the clock at the back of the room, still frozen at the time Paris had stopped. Fortunately, the principal had given clear instructions on how to manage the situation. With the help of the supervisors, he had to use cymbals and other instruments borrowed from the music room to signal the end of the class hour. The problem was that the principal himself didn't know what time it was and therefore when they should make noise. He had to estimate the time constantly, which was exhausting for him as well as for the teachers. Mr. Thépôt couldn't know how much time he had left to teach his students. His doubts couldn't be hidden, and like sharks with the smell of blood, the students were sensitive to them.
When a supervisor passed in the hallway with a cymbal to signify that it was ten o'clock or thereabouts, the teacher's students vanished on the way to their next class, leaving the teacher alone with his thoughts.
"Damn, that was a mess..." he murmured, taking his face in his hands.
No one could hear him, but those same words were spoken by the entire teaching staff.
Instead of wasting their time in an improvised class, Stephanie and Morgane decided to leave the high school to do what they did best after taking selfies: protest.
Stephanie was a regular at protests. There was no shortage of just causes: the fight against climate change, government corruption, taxes, high prices, low wages, the fight against deforestation, any project that would harm the environment, animal rights, women's rights, transgender, lesbian, gay, and other rights, in support of a people oppressed by a government as distant as it was cruel, etc. For her, to be indignant in the face of injustice, whatever its origin, was a duty. Not doing so was tantamount to being complicit.
Despite the breakdown of social media and other communication networks, she had no trouble finding a group of disgruntled people who wanted to be heard. They hadn't waited for the day after the outage to take to the streets of Paris. The two fiery-eyed girls quickly joined the angry crowd. They quickly estimated that two or three hundred people had gathered, all demanding the restoration of water, gas, electricity, and internet. The list of demands was long and echoed what the two young girls felt.
Despite the electric atmosphere in the procession, Stephanie's face, framed by rebellious navy blue streaks, betrayed all her excitement. Seeing so much determination delighted her because she felt that all these people understood her emotions. Every step she took alongside these strangers was imbued with an unshakable determination to defend her beliefs and fight for the defense of her most basic rights.
She quickly noticed that this procession was mainly made up of young people, but men and women from the previous generation were also very mobilized, which pleased the young high school student.
Very few had signs, and compared to previous protests, it looked a bit pitiful, but fortunately, there were a lot of people in the street. The microphones and speakers not working, they had to raise their voices. The slogan was repeated in a loop, allowing everyone to make it resonate throughout the Saint-Denis neighborhood.
Stephanie and Morgane shouted with the other protesters until their vocal cords were raw, but they smiled. Their demand was simple: that water, gas, electricity, and everything that had stopped working the day before be returned to them.
However, she noted two great absentees that morning. The first was the press. Usually, journalists came in fairly large numbers to take pictures and film the protest, even giving interviews, but that wasn't the case here. It was as if their legitimate fight interested only them. The second absentee was the law enforcement. There wasn't a single police officer, not a single gendarme in sight. No one to shout at because they represented and defended the system, certainly responsible for this major crisis.
Stephanie, and she certainly wasn't the only one, found it vexing. It was as if, in an important match, the opposing team didn't show up.
But it also meant that the protesters were free to move as they wished. Those at the head of the procession took advantage of this. They led the protesters through the Porte de la Chapelle, then the Palais Garnier via Rue La Fayette, pushed on to the Place de la Concorde, and since there was still not the slightest hint of a riot shield, the decision was made to march to the Élysée Palace.
Stephanie was delighted. She felt that anything was possible and that she was experiencing a historic day. She felt like an actor in history, and at that moment, she saw herself as a revolutionary!