“My little sister gave away all her lunch money to buy a severely ill boy a birthday cake — the next morning, we found a black balloon in the center attached to a red box. Its contents made me go pale.
I’ve raised my little sister, Della, 8, alone since I was nineteen. Our parents got lost while hiking and were never found.
So it was just the two of us. It was a one-bedroom house and whatever I could scrape together working two jobs. Della never complained. She saved her lunch money in an old mint tin—coins, mostly, the occasional crumpled dollar—and never told me why. I thought she wanted to buy a doll who could cry and pee; everyone in her class had one, except for her.
But it turned out to be something completely different.
There’s a hospital two blocks from her school. Every day on her walk home, she passed a window on the third floor where a little boy sat, pale, hooked up to an IV pole, watching kids walk by.
Della started waving to him. Then talking to him. Then learning his name—Tobias. Then learning it was his 11th birthday coming up, and that nobody was going to celebrate it because his parents had given him up.
She spent two weeks’ worth of saved lunch money—eleven dollars and forty cents, every coin she had—on a small cake and a stuffed dinosaur from the dollar store.
Last Thursday, she passed it to him through a nurse and sang “”Happy Birthday”” through the window.
I cried when she told me.
The next day, I woke up to find our entire front lawn covered.
Balloons—each one tied to a brick to keep it from floating away. Dozens of them, every color, planted across the grass.
In the exact center stood one enormous black balloon, taller than the rest, tethered to a red box sitting in the grass.
My stomach dropped.
I walked toward it slowly, Della trailing behind me, gripping the back of my shirt.
My hands were shaking as I detached a small handwritten note stuck to the lid. It was a child’s handwriting.
“”You came to my window every day. Nobody else did. And nobody knew ONE SECRET about me. Please, open it.””
My hands went cold. What could it be? HOW COULD A SICK, LONELY CHILD DO THIS?!
I lifted the lid.
And the second I saw WHAT was inside, I dropped to my knees, tears streaming down my face. ⬇️”