This article challenges mainstream discourses of girls' education during COVID-19 that sexualize girls in the Global South and reproduce racialized differences. We draw on a longitudinal cohort study of Malawian young women conducted from 2020 to 2023 to offer counternarratives of the intersecting risks to school retention. We argue that the pandemic was less a rupture for girls' status quo than an intensification of the conditions that already characterized school-going amidst "syndemic" conditions, including climate change, the transformation of relations of care, and the privatization of public education.