Blood Orange Soda: Paranormal Romance (11 page)

“No, I was only curious about my dad’s transformation,” I say, feeling the warm glow of my buzz as I smile for no particular reason. “This is gonna be great.”

By midnight I’m in the basement, on my bed, curled up with my laptop and Facebook. I accept Shelby’s invitation to her Halloween Transformation Party, along with thirty other people. Reading the older newsfeed posts from this weekend, many of them are about my fight with Bao, and I watch several videos. But, it’s getting old now, and buried by a flood of other school gossip. The more recent Twitter chatter is about the gangs knocking off blood banks. Some guys claim they know who the gangs are, and others deny they know anything about them.

Those gangs could be reselling clean blood to whoever bottles Blood Orange Soda. Jack wouldn’t deal with thugs like that, but it’s very possible he has a middleman who could obtain blood to help my mom. I’ll have to ask about it.

My guilty pleasure on Facebook is surfing my dad’s page. Even though he’s deceased, my mom created a memorial page for him. Friends and relatives occasionally post comments and photos to his wall on special occasions, such as his birthday. Mom, Kira, and I always post a family photo on the anniversary of his death, which is August 10.

My mom created my dad’s photo album. My parents captured many images of Kira and me at that time my dad was a Normal. He was a tall man with long, sandy-brown hair that he sometimes wore down to his shoulders. He was a rock ‘n’ roller, and always wore ripped jeans and T-shirts. In many photos he’s holding a guitar, or there’s a guitar somewhere in the background. Music was his full-time passion and part-time job, and his day job was carpentry.

Scrolling forward in time, there are photos where my dad’s appearance starts to change. I’ve seen these dozens of times before, but they have new meaning to me now. He looks more muscular, and his hair is darker. These must be photos documenting his transformation. He has a series where he’s in the kitchen, in front of the refrigerator, as if he and my mom are documenting his transformation with a consistent background. I’ll be transforming like he did, but at a much more rapid pace because of the Soda. It’s too bad we couldn’t have gone through the transformation together, father and son becoming Vampires. That would’ve been cool.

Some days he seems happy and playful, and other days he seems tired and full of sadness. How much of this were the highs and lows of life, and how much of his mood was affected by the transformation? I have no way of knowing. In his later stages of transformation, he has a more intense look in his eyes. He has a hungry, longing stare. There isn’t much detail to his photo captions. Sometimes my mom wrote things like “Feeling strong!” and other times it’s nothing more than a comment about how far he was in the transformation, such as “Day 75.”

My mom has a Facebook page too, but I almost never go there because her posts are pretty boring, like pictures of Kira and me, which I quickly un-tag myself from. Tonight I’m curious about her old boyfriend Jonathan, and I scroll through her friends to see if she’s linked to him. She mentioned he’s married and has two children, so how would she know that if she wasn’t in contact with him, or with somebody who knows him? Mom only has 212 Facebook friends, and I scroll through the list quickly to a dead end. There’s no Jonathan in her list of friends. There’s a Johnny and I click on his profile, but he’s too young, and must be a friend of hers from work. She’s not directly linked to Jonathan, but a college friend might follow him on Facebook.

One by one I click on her friend photos to see who has listed my parents’ school, the University of North Dakota, as their college. Once I isolate those people, I can creep on their pages to find a link to Jonathan. Of course, anyone who’s linked to him might not have updated their profiles with their alma mater, so this will be more challenging than surfing online. I remember that my mom’s generation had yearbooks, like printed versions of Facebook, and all her memorabilia is stored here in the basement, in the closet underneath the staircase.

Hopping out of bed, I jump over my guitar amp, and open the closet door. Flicking on the dim light, I find cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another. A person who has lived as long as my mom has a lot of history to go through. She hasn’t labeled anything, so I begin pulling boxes out of the closet and onto the floor to organize my search for her yearbooks. Some boxes are very light, with nothing more than baby toys from my childhood. Why she keeps this stuff is a mystery to me. Other boxes are heavy with glassware and china that my mom only uses during the holidays. Within a half-hour, I’ve searched through everything, and found no yearbooks.

Sitting on the cold basement floor, I listen to the sound of my mom’s footsteps as she crosses through the kitchen above me. If I stay up any longer she’ll hear me, so I close up each box and quietly place all of them back into the closet, then go back to bed.

Am I crazy?

Could I really find Jonathan and ask him to change his entire life to save my mom’s life? Wouldn’t he want to at least know about his former girlfriend, Virginia? Or maybe he already knows and simply doesn’t care.

Three doses into my journey from Goth to Vampire and I feel the same, with few side effects. Too bad Blood Orange Soda doesn’t come with instructions, like those maternity books that tell women what to expect during each trimester of their pregnancies. I Googled it, and found a few blogs that include photos of kids transforming, but not much else.

The one side effect I have noticed, besides the temporary buzz, is the wicked headache I have every morning when I wake up. Mom says it’s a hangover from the Soda, and that the extra blood flowing through my veins raises my blood pressure. The remedy is taking medication each morning, so I guess I’m back to popping pills; but instead of the Reds, I swallow two white aspirin, dry, as usual.

My bruised eye looks almost completely healed today. This surprises me, because a few days ago it was still shades of black and green. This is disappointing in a way, because I liked the attention this new tough-guy face brought me.

Today I shower with Death Cab for Cutie’s “No Sunlight” echoing in the bathroom, and I’m dressed and in the kitchen just as my sister hugs my mom at the kitchen door. Kira hears me and turns, looking back in my direction.

“Notice anything different today?” she asks, checking on my progress.

“Other than this, no,” I say, pointing to my eye.

Mom walks over and inspects my face, gently touching my eyebrow. “You’re almost completely healed; even the stitches are almost completely dissolved.”

“Wow, that’s cool,” Kira says.

“Because of the Soda, right?” I ask my mom.

“Yes, it’s working. You’re healing faster, just like a Vampire.”

“Gotta go—bye, Mom, bye, Darius,” Kira says.

She’s been friendlier lately, and I’ve been nicer to her as well. Either the Soda has a calming effect on me, or Kira sees me through new eyes. She knows I’m growing up and that I’m maturing at a faster pace. Maybe she’s always needed a father figure instead of a know-it-all older brother. I have to remember that she looks up to me, and will need me more and more as Mom declines.

“You worked last night?” I ask her, as I sit at the table and pour myself a bowl of Corn Flakes.

She grabs her coffee mug from the counter and sits with me. “The last couple of nights I felt pretty good. Some nights I know I can’t do it.”

“I have a thirty-day supply of Reds, and if we don’t refill the prescription, they’ll cut off my subsidy,” I remind her. For us, the subsidy also pays for groceries. “I can get a job after school.”

“Not right away; we have money,” Mom says.

“We don’t have
enough
money. I’ve seen your bank account,” I say gently.

“That’s my checking account, but I have other savings,” she says. “When your father died, we received money from his life insurance.”

“He left us money? How much?”

“Enough to make up for our loss of your Reds subsidy,” she says. “I knew if you chose to live as a Normal, once you turn eighteen there’s no money. And if you chose to become a Vampire before eighteen, that money runs out. I’ve always assumed you’d become a Vampire before you became an adult.”

“You’ve prepared for this day?”

She nods. “And for the day when I too will pass away. I have a life insurance policy that will give you and Kira enough money to get through high school, and most of college.”

Another relief, but I reach over to her, holding her hand in mine. “Mom, you could live longer. You’ll see both Kira and me graduate from high—”

“I doubt that I’ll live that long,” Mom says, with tears welling up in her eyes. She’s searching my face, soaking in every detail of her Goth son, as if she’s afraid she’ll forget what I look like after she passes.

“Let’s try another blood transfusion. Jack can get clean blood,” I say.

She smiles to fight back the tears. “More blood won’t save me.”

“Let’s try,” I say, my voice cracking. “See if blood buys us time.”

“Buys us time for what?”

It’s too early to tell her about my bigger plan to find Jonathan, because I know she’ll try to stop me. Hell, I’m not sure I can even find him, much less convince him to help. At this point, I need her to agree to a blood transfusion to buy me time to figure this out.

“Clean blood will buy Kira and me more time with
you
, Mom.” And I lose it right there at the table. My emotions rise from my chest into my throat and I choke on my words. Her eyes light up and she takes a deep breath, like she’s caught a second wind that will carry her further.

“Honey, I know this is hard on you. We’ll try one more time!” she says, squeezing my hand as if she’ll never let me go.

Silent, I hold my mom’s hand as I drip tears into my cereal. I’ve always been moody, but never like this before. God, I’m like an Emo!

Either the stress of watching her slowly die or the Blood Orange Soda is triggering this new part of my personality. Funny thing is, I’m not embarrassed by my emotions anymore. They’re a sign that I’m human, or at least a human Vampire.

“You remind me so much of your father,” she says. “Before you go to school, I’d like to ask you a favor.”

“Sure, anything,” I tell her.

Mom stands and walks over to the counter and grabs her phone. “I’d like to take your picture.”

“Okay, yeah, no problem,” I say wiping tears and smudged black guyliner.

“Let’s take a new photo every few days to document your transformation,” she says. “Stand by the refrigerator.”

She has me stand and walk over to the refrigerator, and I realize what she’s doing. She’s recreating the same photos she took of my dad while he transformed. Almost all of his transformation photos were in the exact same spot, him standing by the refrigerator, transforming over time.

“How about we take one together?” I suggest. “Stand next to me.”

“Oh, no, I look terrible,” she says.

“Come on, let’s take one photo. If you don’t like it, you can always un-tag yourself on Facebook.”

We pose shoulder to shoulder and I hold up my phone, my arm stretched out as far as it will go. We review it together and I see both of us smiling, but I also notice something different about our eyes. In hers there’s sadness—in mine, there’s actually a glimmer of hope.

In English Lit I’m sitting in the back of the classroom, this time with Shelby next to me instead of behind me. We talked briefly in the hallway before class started, and she had confirmed that I would attend her T-Party on Halloween. I keep trying to tell her about my decision to transform, but there isn’t enough time to explain it. A topic like this deserves more time than the few minutes we have between classes. This might justify asking her out, even if only for coffee after school. What sucks is I don’t drive, so I’m not exactly in the position to ask out older girls. Shelby could probably drive us, but would that be weird?

Ms. Andreesen walks up and down the aisles as she lectures on Hamlet. She’s a younger, cooler teacher, only in her late twenties, and she seems to get the vibe of what the kids here at Stearns High need from their teachers. We need somebody who cares, but who doesn’t stick her nose in our business.