SANTA CLARITA, Calif. – Getting up, getting dressed, and wandering into her garage, Saugus High School senior Dallas Andrews has just one question on her mind, 'What do I do now?'
She sets up her softball cage, steps up to bat, and lets it fly, and still the question remains top of mind. 'What do I do now?'
It lingers because she, like millions of high school seniors across the country, is dealing with a deep sense of uncertainty. Schools are shutdown nationwide due to the coronavirus crisis.
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“At first it was like, this isn’t real, this isn’t happening, and we thought, it’s gonna be over quickly so don’t worry about it," she explained.
Rather, she is now uncertain of whether or not her school will reopen by the end of the semester and is now facing the reality that her senior year will not end as she once imagined.
“It’s like, what about, not just my sport, but all the other things I’m going to miss out on like prom or graduation," she said. "It starts to hit you and you start to regret things, so I’m like what do I do now?”
There's the question once more. She comes back to it again and again, slowly realizing that it's not the first time she's felt this way.
During the fall semester of her senior year, Andrews thought deeply about the question when dealing with the impact of a school shooting on her campus.
“When what first happened with everything that happened at Saugus, it was like what are the chances of this actually happening? How could this happen?" she said. "Then we had another shooting scare, a bomb threat was made, and we thought could this school year get any worse?”
What she never imagined was that a new virus would force her and her classmates to remain at home, that her senior softball season would be canceled, and that she would be forced to reevaluate the way she sees herself and her future.
“You just have to sit there and remind yourself that you’re just a teenager that’s gone through a little bit more than everyone else has," she said. "We’re not victims, we’re just people who have gone through a little bit extra.”
While there are still plenty of questions surrounding what's to come, she is confident in what she's learned throughout this year.
“Don’t take things for granted and we learned that early on and this just kinda reinstalled that,” she said.
And that's why what she does now is take it day by day, swing by swing.