It was a Thursday night.

Thursday the 7th, to be exact. Thursday, May 7, 2020. I was sitting next to my father on the new reclining sofas he and my mom had purchased only a few months prior, trying my best to focus on a book while the TV played and he scrolled rigorously on his iPad, helping me search for good deals on cheap, used stand-up paddleboards. After having finished my final exam for the Spring semester, I had spent the rest of the day with my dad: We went to Academy (where he bought two fishing poles—one for me, one for him), ate dinner at Cheddar’s (he got to try their croissants for the first time), and then worked out together at Clear Lake Park. He had asked me to make him two grilled cheese sandwiches the way his mom (my grandma) used to make them—a request he had never asked of me before, but one to which I happily obliged—and now we were watching Patrick Swayze and his rag-tag team of guerrilla-fighting 30-year old high schoolers single-handedly defeat the Soviet Union in 1984’s Red Dawn. The movie had started while I was still in the shower after my run (I had run back home from the park), but he had rewound it so that I could see the whole thing. Me being my typical multi-tasking self, I was trying to read J.M Barrier’s classic Peter Pan while watching Red Dawn. The book was about a child who never had to grow up; the movie was about children who were forced to grow up in extreme circumstances.