My Mom’s Low-Cal Meals Killed Me In My Past Life Chapter 04

My Mom’s Low-Cal Meals Killed Me In My Past Life Chapter 04

The moment I turned around, the room lights snapped on.

Mom stood in the doorway. I had no idea how long she had been there. Her face was dark, and there was no trace of her usual gentleness in her eyes.

Serena woke up too. When she saw the pills scattered across the floor, she froze for a second before exploding out of bed in fury.

“Elaina Mercer, who told you that you could touch my things?”

She carefully wiped each pill clean, one by one, then counted them to make sure none were missing before putting them back into the bottle.

Her sheer desperation made me even more certain that those pills were the key to losing weight.

“Serena, what exactly are those pills?”

Her eyes darted away. She shoved the bottle into the deepest part of her cabinet.

“None of your business. I should be asking you why you were sneaking into my room in the middle of the night.”

Mom took a few steps toward me too, displeasure written across her face. “Lainey, did you find something?”

They stood on either side of me, trapping me between them, studying me with a strange Gothic intensity that sent a chill across my skin.

My voice began to shake.

“I just thought Serena had lost weight, so I wanted to see if she was taking some kind of diet pill. I didn’t find anything else.”

Mom’s tightly furrowed brow relaxed, and her expression returned to its usual softness. She pulled a medical report from her pocket.

“Lainey, Serena lost weight too quickly, and her body is a little malnourished. Those are just multivitamins her doctor prescribed.”

“And that body bar in the bathroom is only a regular medicated body bar.”

I stood there frozen, still feeling like something was wrong.

Seeing the doubt on my face, Mom went back to her room and returned with a brand-new medicated body bar and an unopened bottle of pills.

“If you don’t believe me, try them yourself,” Mom said with a sigh, then left the room, her shoulders slumped in mock exhaustion.

Serena shoved me out too and slammed the door hard behind me.

I stood alone in the dark living room like a ghost haunting my own home.

From that day on, I used the medicated body bar for two hours every day, and every night, I took one of the “vitamins.”

But my weight did not go down. Instead, it rose even faster than before.

The fat cells in my body seemed to multiply at a speed visible to the naked eye.

I could almost feel them stretching my skin wider and wider until the agonizing tension threatened to tear me apart.

I broke every scale in the apartment.

Standing in front of the mirror, I could feel myself swelling like a monster out of a horror film.

My blood pressure reached 220. Some folds of my skin began to rot and stink because I could no longer clean them properly.

Every day, I needed Mom to help me use the bathroom and wash afterward.

My company called and told me not to come in anymore.

My boyfriend sent me a message too, saying the sight of me made him sick.

The neighbors pointed at me and whispered, “That girl is way too greedy. Poor Denise has to stay home all day taking care of her.”

I started starving myself, clinging to the last bit of hope in my heart.

Maybe if I stopped eating, I would stop gaining weight.

Mom collapsed in the living room, sobbing and begging me to go to the hospital for gastric sleeve surgery.

I lay in bed, struggling for every breath.

“I’m not going.”

I did not want to die from a post-surgical infection like I had in my last life.

I closed my eyes in despair.

If I had to die, then I wanted to choose a more dignified way.

That night, I wrote my suicide note and managed to drag myself out of the house while they slept.

There was a wide, deep river there.

I stood on the bridge in a daze.

God, if you gave me a second chance, why did you still let me end up like this?

I did not want to leave this world, but the pain in my body had already made living worse than death.

Then it began to rain. An older man passing by noticed me.

He grabbed my clothes tightly. “Girl, whatever’s going on, get down from there right now.”

As we struggled, a large piece of my shirt tore away.

The icy downpour fell onto my exposed back, and a sharp sting spread across my skin. That sting slowly traveled through my entire body.

In an instant, my mind cleared completely.

The words slipped out before I could stop them.

“I know what’s happening.”