Missing Milestones: Weeks of quarantine, an online homecoming and one in-person class
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Missing Milestones
An occasional series on how COVID-19 is changing life for one Kentucky High School senior.
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Editor’s Note: This is the second story in an occasional series on how COVID-19 is changing life for one Kentucky High School senior.
Speaking from behind her closed front door, Macy Dungan couldn’t remember exactly how many days she’d been in quarantine the second time.
“To be honest, I really don’t know what day of quarantine it is. I’ve kind of lost track of the number,” the Frankfort High School senior said on Oct. 30. But, “I know when I get out.”
Macy, like nearly 38,000 other Kentucky students, was forced to quarantine for two weeks after several people she’s close to got sick with COVID-19. It was her second bout with the practice, which she says is “awful.” She was released the first Friday in November, which also happened to be her first day of in-person classes, though that was short lived.
Her dad was the first to test positive in mid October. Everyone else followed, including her two siblings, her dad’s girlfriend, and two of Macy’s close friends who’d recently spent time with her family. Macy, expecting the worst, spiked a low-grade fever about a week before Halloween after she’d tested negative twice.
Because of prolonged direct exposure, she was advised by her doctor to act as if she had the virus and to go ahead and isolate.
Despite her symptoms, though, Macy continued to test negative, and so did her mom. Relieved, the pair heeded public health advice and stayed indoors for two weeks with Macy’s grandparents, both of whom also tested negative, at their house on a hill at the edge of town.
When I talked to Macy on Oct. 30, it was through her Granna’s glass-paned front door. She’d been confined to these four walls for at least a week, but she couldn’t remember how long, exactly; all the days were melting together. She sat in a kitchen chair in the foyer against the door with the expression of someone at their wit’s end, and Herald-Leader photographer Ryan Hermens and I stood on the porch, talking to her on my cell phone.
“I’ve been getting school work done really quickly because now I don’t have anything else to go do because I’ve just kind of been like, let’s get it done so I can watch Netflix,” she admitted. She’d just finished “The Vampire Diaries.”
A virtual homecoming, alone
At the apex of her senior cheer season and with midterms approaching, the end of October is typically a bustling time of year for Macy, whose after-school schedule brims with work and practice and homework. Any extra time is given to her friends and her boyfriend, Nate.
But she’s only seen him once in more than a month. A few weeks after this interview, she and Nate mutually called it quits. Such has been the fate of her friend’s relationships, too. “I was upset, but then I was just kind of like, you can’t really be upset about this because we can’t see each other, anyway,” she said. “You can’t go on dates, you can’t hang out all the time. I’m already stuck at home. I don’t want to be more sad stuck at home because I can’t go see somebody.”
She’s learned to steel herself against the expectation that anything will play out the way she wants it to during her final teenage year. Her senior year football homecoming, for instance, took place a week earlier, while she was in quarantine. A cheerleader, she’d been able to cheer in person on the sidelines of football games before then, but another earlier coronavirus scare had temporarily halted her cheer season’s momentum. The actual football homecoming game wasn’t even the night of the dance; it had been rescheduled because, like with everything else, the coronavirus interfered.
So, on the night of the would-be dance, Macy watched a grid of her classmates on Google hangouts dance together to “Blinding Lights,” by The Weeknd — some in small groups wearing masks, others alone in their rooms, like her — another memorable night of her late teens reduced to two dimensions.
Those on the homecoming court had been filmed individually ahead of time, to avoid contact with each other. Each candidate wore a mask and their image was superimposed, along with other court members, in a horseshoe shape against a grainy image of FHS’ football field, where they would normally stand in front of stands full of people during halftime.
Each guy and girl had one of their elbows extended toward the other, so their images could be manipulated to make it look like they were linking arms. Computer fireworks erupted when the king and queen were announced and the celebratory screams from students through their computers became shrill white noise. It was hard not to see it as a disappointment.
Plowing through puzzles
The pace of Macy’s teenage life has been almost comically slow. But unlike a lot of teenagers, that hollow schedule doesn’t compel her to procrastinate.
After she whizzes through school work, if she’s not watching Netflix or “just sitting there” thumbing through TikToks (her phone battery dies by noon these days from overuse), she’s been plowing through puzzles.
A quarantine night owl, Macy spends her evenings padding around her room, cluttering different surfaces with giant, complicated puzzles, 500 pieces or more.
“I’ve completed six,” she said over speaker phone, sighing. “One was of Rupp Arena, which took me like three days. And I called my aunt and told her, and she was like, um Macy, that took us three months; you have way too much time on your hands.”
Despite being 17, Macy continues to be a realist. “I have a really bad feeling that once everyone starts going back to school, someone’s going to get it and then the whole school’s going to have to quarantine, and it’s going to be a big, hectic mess,” she said in late October.
In a way, she was right. A week after she was released, and after physically attending just one class inside her school, FHS Principal Tyler Reed announced the school would be hitting pause on all in-person classes, in light of the growing prevalence of the virus in the state’s capital city.
Just before Thanksgiving, with the virus spreading across the commonwealth like wildfire through a matchstick forest, Gov. Andy Beshear told all public and private schools they needed to stay virtual until at least early January. By that point, Macy’s senior year will be more than halfway over.
To Be Continued: Our Missing Milestones series will continue with occasional installments throughout the 2020-21 school year.
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 11:20 AM.
