Chapter 4

The moment I turned around, the light in Jenny's room was turned on too.

Mom was already standing in the doorway. I had no idea how long she had been there. Her expression was dark, and none of her usual gentleness remained. The noise woke Jenny. She stared at the pills scattered across the floor, then leaped out of bed in a rage.

"Shannon, who gave you permission to touch my things?!" She carefully wiped each pill clean and counted them to make sure none were missing. Only then did she return them to the bottle.

Her nervous reaction made me even more certain that the pills were the key to her weight loss. I asked, "Jenny, what kind of medicine is this?"

She looked away and put the bottle into the back of a cabinet. She then said, "It's none of your business! I'm the one who should be asking the questions. Why did you sneak into my room in the middle of the night?!"

Mom stepped closer, and her displeasure was clear in her tone. "Shannon, did you find something?"

They closed in on me, studying me with strange expressions that sent a chill through my body. Even my voice was starting to shake as I said, "It… It's just that I noticed how much weight Jenny had lost, so I wanted to see if she was taking diet pills! I didn't find anything else!"

Mom's tense expression softened. She then pulled a medical report from her pocket. "Shannon, Jenny lost weight too quickly and became a little malnourished. Those are just multivitamins her doctor prescribed. The soap in the bathroom is also just ordinary medicated soap."

I stood there, confused. Something still felt wrong.

When Mom saw me doubting her, she went to her room and returned with a new bar of medicated soap and an unopened bottle of pills. "Try them yourself if you don't believe me."

She then sighed and walked away.

Jenny also shoved me out and slammed the door behind me. I stood alone in the dark living room, feeling as though everyone had abandoned me.

From then on, I bathed with the medicated soap for two hours every day and took one vitamin every night. Still, my weight did not drop, and it climbed even faster. The fat cells throughout my body multiplied so quickly that I could feel my skin stretching until it was going to split.

My weight broke every scale in the house. Whenever I stood in front of the mirror, I could almost see myself growing by the second.

My blood pressure had climbed to two hundred and twenty. The skin between some of my folds began to break down and smell because I could no longer clean it properly. Every time I used the bathroom, Mom had to support and wash me.

My company then called and told me not to come back, and my boyfriend sent me a message saying the sight of me disgusted him.

Even the neighbors pointed at me and whispered. "That young woman is so gluttonous! Her poor mother has to stay home and care for her all day!"

I stopped eating, clinging to one last hope. Maybe if I ate nothing, I would stop gaining weight.

Mom knelt in the living room and begged me through her tears to get gastric sleeve surgery.

I lay in bed, struggling to breathe. "I won't go."

I did not want to die from an infection after surgery as I had in my previous life.

I closed my eyes in despair. If I were to die anyway, I wanted to choose how it happened.

That evening, I wrote a suicide note and took a taxi alone to the outskirts of town. There was a wide, deep river running beneath a bridge there. I stood at the edge in a daze.

God, if you gave me another life, why did you let it end the same way?

I did not want to die, but the pain had made living unbearable.

Rain began to fall.

It was at this time that an older man who was passing by noticed me. He held on to my clothes and yelled, "Young lady! Get down from there right now! There's nothing worth committing suicide over!"

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

Rain struck my bare back, and a sharp sting spread across my body.

My mind cleared in that instant, and I subconsciously cried out, "I know what's happening now!"