Paper bones

CHAPTER 1: PAPER HOUSE

Hi, my name is Lindsay Winters. We’re going to start this story with a paper house—the kind that looks completely solid from the outside, but is fragile enough to collapse the second a harsh wind blows through it.

It was a warm morning when I woke up. Sunlight was stretching across my bedroom floor, and everything felt blissfully, entirely normal. I got dressed, grabbed my backpack, and headed out the door. My mom dropped me off right by the curb near the school entrance, giving me her usual quick smile from the driver’s seat as I stepped out. I swung the passenger door shut, watched her car pull back into traffic, and walked toward the front doors.

Nothing felt off. Little did I know what I was going to find out that day.

Inside, the school was bustling with the usual morning chatter. It was Terry Fox Day, which meant our normal routine was traded for cancer awareness assemblies and classroom discussions. We all took our seats, and our teacher stood at the front of the room, reading off an informational sheet in a steady, measured voice. Definitions. Statistics. Symptoms.

As we were learning about cancer, my brain started moving. I sat at my desk, staring down at my pencil, putting the pieces together like I was solving a terrible puzzle.

Unexplained fatigue. I thought of how my mom had been going to bed earlier and earlier, looking exhausted down to her bones.

Trouble breathing and persistent sickness.

As the teacher kept reading off the list, a cold wave of realization washed over me. My mom has this. The diagnosis wasn't spoken out loud in a doctor's office—it landed on me right there in the middle of a brightly lit elementary classroom. What hit me next was pure pain, sadness, and an overwhelming fear. Those exact feelings would follow me for the rest of my life.

The rest of the school day was a complete blur, but the nightmare truly started when I finally made it home.

I pushed the front door open, expecting the quiet warmth of our house. Instead, I found my mom standing over the bathroom sink, coughing up blood and struggling to pull air into her lungs. The panic in her eyes was suffocating. Within minutes, the sound of sirens echoed down our street, and the ambulance showed up, casting flashing red and blue lights across our living room walls.

I sat there and cried for three hours straight. I cried because, deep down, I knew exactly what was going on—and at the same time, I didn't understand it at all. Heading

And I woke up and thought nothing was going to be different little did I know what I would find out that day. As were learning. About cancer I started putting the pieces together like I was solving a puzzle. But as the teacher kept on reading off symptoms I felt my mom had this and it was called cancer. And what hit me was pain and sadness and fear. Those feelings followed me for the rest of my life. And I went home and I found my mom coughing blood in the sink and having trouble breathing. And then the ambulance showed up. And i cried for 3 hours because I knew what was going on but I didn’t at the same time.