Macy Dungan is tall enough to be mistaken for an adult. She wears glasses, has brown hair with subtle blonde highlights and broad shoulders. The seasons in her 17-year-old life are punctuated by extracurriculars: cheerleading for the high school football team in the fall; vying for class president in the winter, and starting as pitcher on the softball team in the spring. Most Kentucky high school seniors like Macy began their school years virtually, deprived of the typical fanfare that accompanies the start of that liminal space between childhood and adulthood.

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.

The first time Macy Dungan chatted with her friends in a crowded hallway between classes at Frankfort High School, most of her senior year had lapsed. Masked, huddled together for a quick moment, the three gabbed. It was almost normal. Like many of her peers around the state, Macy had not actually attended a class inside her high school since March 17, 2020. As a result, the 17-year-old watched as many ritualistic social events she’d anticipated since she was a freshman come and go without much fanfare, diluted by a pandemic that pushed people apart, not together: fall and winter homecomings, senior night, and the much-anticipated first day of in-person school. Instead of brushing shoulders in hallways, scribbling notes in class, and taking their seats in the cafeteria next to friends, students opened their laptops alone from bedrooms, couches and kitchen tables.

From Macy Dungan’s vantage point on the pitcher’s mound, COVID-19 dissolved into a distant memory, if only for a moment. The opposing team’s player in front of her, holding her bat aloft, was maskless. Macy could turn to look at any of her teammates dotting the softball diamond — none with masks, all fully preoccupied with beating Franklin County. Shouts from a blur of fans beyond the field lights ratcheted up the energy of the first Frankfort High School home softball game of the season. It was easy to keep selective focus on the ball in her hand and the next pitch, without glancing beyond the fence behind home plate to see rows of parents and friends, masked and sitting apart, or to eye either dugout, where players were rattling the chain link fences, jumping and screaming through their masks.

In a white sequined dress paired with hot pink Crocs instead of high heels, wedged between her date and a group of friends, Macy Dungan posed for senior prom pictures. Droves of Frankfort High School prom-goers were clustered behind the Kentucky Capitol this Saturday night in mid-May, trailed by gaggles of friends and family members clutching cameras and talking over each other. No one wore masks, people breathed in each other’s faces, and social distancing was a far-off, hazy memory. It was a sight that, even a few months ago, would’ve been inconceivable. When COVID-19 first roiled Kentucky in March of 2020 and the state began enacting restrictions to keep people apart in order to blunt wildfire-like spread of the virus, Macy avoided seeing others outside her family. Friends became radioactive, and when she was around them, she tried to keep her distance; all of them carried germs and some, she later found out, coronavirus.

In a stuffy, humid hallway at Frankfort High School, Macy Dungan, 17, dabbed sweat from her forehead, untangled the graduation cords draped over her neck and straightened her cap. In block​cursive letters on top, she’d taped the words, “Onto the next chapter,” but the “e” in the “the” had slipped off. One of her friends noticed and helped her reapply it. Macy stood in an alphabetized line, along with the rest of the graduating seniors, waiting for her cue. The cue that meant their in-person graduation ceremony, in jeopardy for so many months because of COVID-19, was finally starting. Guidance counselor Jessica Harley checked her watch. “You all got nine minutes. Are you ready?” she asked, reminding them, “Tassels on the right!”