It’s not often that the story of an amateur fashion model makes it onto the front page and it’s even more rare for that story to be picked up by the Associated Press and rerun in papers all across the county, but this was no typical story or typical model.

Zaria McDonald had an ache in her knee since she was a kid and they told her it was growing pains. It was cancer. That would have been devastating for anyone, but she had just earned a modeling contract, she was specializing in dance at a school for the arts and she had plans like any soon-to-graduate high school student. Everything changed, but she didn’t.

She lost her hair and decided to rock her bald look. She ended up becoming a viral internet sensation. Read the full story and see the internet post that went viral here:

St. Louis teen fighting cancer embraces baldness and continues modeling