“Congratulations,” I say. “No more Reds.”
“Stopped taking them two weeks ago,” Shelby says. “It’s another reason I switched schools. I thought I’d get more support here.”
“Noticed any changes yet?”
“Nothing major; but my sense of smell and everything I taste is more heightened. Also, colors are more vivid. Other than that, no.”
“In class today, I scented you immediately, and I could swear you were scenting me. You were up close, right behind me—”
“Oh, yeah, that’s new, too,” she says, with a blushing grin.
“What is it?” I ask. “How did you do that?”
The crowd roars and everyone around us stands, pounding their feet. We’ve scored the winning touchdown. Shelby and I stand too, but I can’t hear her. She realizes this and smiles. When the noise settles and we sit, I’m waiting for her to explain what happened to me in English Lit when Angel leans toward Shelby.
“Okay, you two, no more Vamp-chat,” she says. “Let’s hit the field!”
We follow a mob of students down the stadium bleachers, everyone shoving and cheering as the visitor side of the field leaves in a more orderly fashion. I had no idea how fanatical our fans were; some of the guys are bodysurfing again over the crowd. We make our way onto the track that circles the football field where our team gives out high fives to students and fellow players.
“Is this what happens after every game?” I ask Angel.
“Not like this,” she says. “Monticello was last year’s conference champion. It’s a big win for us!”
Searching the crowd, I spot Weezer on the field, talking to one of the Stoners. I can’t find Kira and Josie, but I’m not overly concerned at the moment. Shelby is nowhere in sight, and I find myself scanning the crowd quickly to find her.
“Come on, Darius!” Angel shouts, as she follows a group of girls toward the goalpost where we just scored our touchdown.
We sprint, dodging slower fans to avoid collisions, when I feel a shove from behind and I trip, sliding across the cool grass. It’s a familiar feeling and I look up to see Bao Wang standing above me.
“Hey, Freak!” he says with a mad smile.
I stand quickly so I don’t get trampled. Bao isn’t wearing a football uniform. He’s in street clothes like the rest of us. My guess is he’s on the JV team and not good enough to play varsity, but he can certainly tackle. He’s standing with a skinny kid who has a red bandana wrapped around his head. I only know of him as Chao.
“What’s up, Bao?” Dumb question, I know. What’s the polite way to greet your bully?
“Don’t ‘what’s up’ me. You know what’s up,” he says. “Time to finish what we started yesterday.”
“We didn’t start anything; you started it,” I remind him.
“You called me a Great Ape.”
That part is true. My mouth, as my mom often reminds me, gets me in trouble. This time I throw him a verbal sucker punch. “Well, it was a figure of speech. I said you were a Great Ape. It’s not as if I said you’re a Dumbass Ape or a Fat Slimy Pig Ape, because in theory those labels might also apply.”
Bao’s friend Chao bursts into irreverent laughter. “Dude, he disrespected you. Oh!”
“You’re dead, Batman,” Bao says, lunging for me.
Bolting through the crowd, I sprint toward the goalpost, not really sure where I’m headed other than that’s where everyone is moving. I slip again on the wet grass under the goalpost and fall, people stepping on me. Somebody is kind enough to lift me under the armpits and pick me up. I turn to see it’s Bao! We’re standing toe to toe, both of us breathing hard from our sprinting.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” Chao chants.
Students circle around us, creating a human boxing ring. There’s no way I can escape. When it comes to fight or flight, I always choose flight. I’m a fast runner and pretty good at sprinting 50-100 yards, just enough to escape predators like Bao. But when the herd encircles, you must fight for your life.
Bao pulls my sweatshirt and slings me around like a chew toy and I tumble to the grass at people’s feet. They kick me enough to shove me back into the center of the ring. Bao motions for me to get up.
I take my “ready position,” the one I learned in middle school martial arts class, and Bao takes his position as well. In the background I hear Angel trying to push through the crowd to put an end to this. Nobody lets her through.
Bao’s first move is a mid-kick that I block and answer with a jab to his ribs. The crowd roars. Bao spins with a high roundabout kick that hits me in the chest, and I’m leveled to the ground. The stadium lights are blinding, and I’m again reminded of that movie Gladiator, where Russell Crow’s character Maximus Decimus Meridius fights for survival and taunts the onlookers. What’s the famous line Maximus shouts? Bao lifts me by my sweatshirt and we’re toe to toe again.
“Let’s go,” he taunts me with his arms down. “Your best shot, Freak!”
I’m not strong; I’m quick. I’m also desperate, so I use a chick move and kick Bao in the groin, crushing his seeds.
“Ooooh!” all the guys in the crowd shout in empathy. I get a round of applause from the ladies for that one.
Bao is less amused, and unleashes a flurry of punches at me. This is no longer martial arts, but a sloppy street fight. I block as many blows as I can with my forearms, and I back myself into the throng as if I’m a boxer on the ropes. One of Bao’s punches lands directly on my right eye and I drop to my knees.
“Yeah!” roars the fickle crowd. Whose side are they on, anyway?
Bao motions for me to get up. I look around and see Angel and Shelby standing together, watching, freaking out. I’m tired and whipped. I decide to make a good show of it, so instead of standing upright, I lunge for Bao’s knees and tackle him to the ground. He lands hard enough that I hear his head thump against the goal post!
“Whoa!” Then there’s silence.
Bao is motionless on the grass, like a sleeping giant.
Now what?
Standing over him, I notice Bao blinking and looking around. He must’ve passed out for a brief nanosecond. My mouth got me into this mess, and I know my mouth will get me out of it, too. I step away from Bao and turn to the crowd, remembering what Gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius would say at this moment.
“Are you not entertained?!” I shout, wiping blood from my eye.
The crowd is silent, many recording with their phones.
“Are you not entertained?! Isn’t that why you’re here?!”
My voice echoes throughout the stadium and I spit, pushing my way through the gawkers who slap me on the back, touching my clothing as if I’m the Messiah himself. Bao tries to come after me, but everyone holds him back—they’ve had their show for tonight.
My right eye aches, and I feel it swelling up as I make my way toward the bleachers. Kira and her friend Josie are the first to catch up to me and I’m glad, because the last thing I want to do now is spend an hour searching for them with this bleeding eye.
“Darius, are you okay?” she asks, with genuine sisterly concern.
“I’ll be fine. Sorry you had to see that,” I say, covering my eye.
“No, you were great. He deserved it,” Kira says, handing me her scarf. “Use this.”
“You’re amazing, Darius,” Josie says, as if she’s admiring me from a new perspective.
The scarf soaks up the blood, and Weezer joins us with Angel and Shelby. They approach me at a fast clip, with obvious worry. I try to calm myself as I clean up the blood so this doesn’t look so bad.
“Dude, that was awesome,” Weezer says, with a pat on my back, which actually hurts because of Bao’s tackle.
“You did it,” Angel says. “You put Bao in his place, on the ground.”
Shelby says nothing at first. She helps me with the scarf. She’s like my nurse as she wraps it around my head, tight enough to hold back the bleeding.
“His ring must’ve cu
t your eyelid. You need stitches.”
She licks her finger and wipes blood off my cheek, which is something that is so maternal and caring I could just roll up into her arms. This girl makes me feel so loved without having to say a single word to me. Angel watches Shelby and me together; this is the role she usually plays, the loyal friend. Has Shelby replaced Angel? Of course not. But I’m so uncomfortable I turn away as we walk out of the stadium.
Saturday, October 11
Saturdays I sleep in, and wake around noon. Today is no different. I open my eyes, staring at the pipes in the basement ceiling. On hot summer days the pipes sweat. Now that it’s October and much colder, the pipes are dry. A spider has been busy spinning its web from pipe to pipe while I’ve been sleeping.
Climbing out of bed, I pull on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt from the clean laundry basket my mom leaves at my bed each week. Who needs drawers when laundry baskets hold so much? I rush upstairs to the bathroom where I shower, and the first thing I notice in the mirror is my swollen, bruised eye. It’s both gross and cool at the same time—six stitches on the eyelid that is swollen so badly I can only see half my eyeball peeking through. Under the eye it’s a mix of blue and green, broken blood vessels under the skin, a real shiner. When I touch the stitches, pain radiates through my head.
My morning routine is effortless. I can do it in my sleep because I’m always half-awake when I get ready. My bottle of Reds is in the mirrored medicine cabinet. I take one pill and swallow it dry, without water. Brushing my teeth, I inspect my mouth for any damage from last night’s fight. Everything is in order. If I were a Vampire, my canine teeth would be sharper, but the Reds prevent that from happening…at least for now.
I remove my guyliner with makeup remover that I borrowed from my mom’s bathroom, splash water on my hairless face (I only need to shave once every other week) and then weigh myself. This step in my routine is totally unnecessary, and admittedly vain. I’m not concerned about my weight and if anything, I wish I could gain a few pounds. I weigh myself anyway, and I’m up one pound!
Waiting for the shower to heat up, I strip naked and realize my skinny, pale frame in the mirror has bruises along the shoulders. If girls were into heroin-skinny, pale guys with blood-splattered black hair, then I would be their poster boy.
My dad has an old iPod that he left behind, and I found it in a box of his stuff. I’ve never added my own music to his, but instead left his playlists the same, just as they were the day he walked out on us. I listen to his music plugged into mini speakers on top of the toilet tank. It’s a way of spending time with him each day, I guess. If he were around today, I’m sure he’d share his music with me, because the rock and grunge music from the ‘80s and ‘90s appeals to my taste. Today, however, I play my dad’s favorite song (according to my mom), “A Beautiful Boy.” It’s a song John Lennon wrote for his son, Sean. Maybe my dad thought of me whenever he listened to it.
The hot water feels tranquilizing, as if it’s the first shower I’ve had in months. Truth is, I shower every day, sometimes twice if I’m going out at night. When somebody takes thirty or forty minutes to cleanse you’d think they were rubbing mud or barnacles off their body. I shampoo my hair and do as the bottle instructs: lather, rinse and repeat.
Singing the lyrics along with the iPod, I wonder: Did my dad think I was a beautiful boy?
The kitchen is immaculate, so I know my mom must feel better today. She switches over to daylight hours on the weekends to spend more time with Kira and me. Mom’s on the phone talking about money, and the lack of funds in her bank account.
The economy’s collapse back in 2008 has been pretty hard on us, and we live from paycheck to paycheck. Mom’s too sick to hold a second job, and nobody these days wants to hire a teen who doesn’t have his driver’s license. Adults have snatched up many of the part-time jobs in St. Cloud, even the crappy mall-rat jobs.
Mom slams her phone down hard, as if the customer service person can feel it. “Banks! They have such high fees for insufficient funds.”
“Banks have been burned too many times,” I remind her. “Money in before money out,” I say to her, reciting a slogan plastered on banner ads all across Facebook and RenRen. The government launched its fiscal education campaign to everyone under the age of thirty. My mom’s Generation X is a lost cause. I guess it’s up to us Millennials to figure it out.
“Your eye is so swollen. You want some ice?” She stands up to go to the refrigerator.
“Let’s start with coffee,” I suggest, glancing at her iPad. She manages all our finances on it, and I scan her account balance as she fetches my coffee. Between the government subsidy for me taking the Reds and her part-time job, we should have enough money to get by; but sometimes she spoils Kira and me by taking us out to eat. My stitches last night set us back a chunk of change, too. Mom agreed to every test the doctor offered.
She sits with my coffee and blasts me up with too many questions so early in my day.
“How’s your head? Any concussion symptoms?”
“Brain is fine. My eye hurts.”
“Why did he pick on you?” Mom asks for the hundredth time since we left urgent care last night.
“No idea. Maybe I’m his favorite.”
“Did Kira see the fight?”
“Again, no idea. I was too busy surviving to stop and count my fans.”
“She’ll see it soon enough,” Mom says. She lifts her iPad and hands it to me. It’s Mom’s Facebook page, with a video of my battle. Of course, half the kids who witnessed the fight recorded it on their phones. This has been online for at least sixteen hours. I click on the video and watch my fight from the third-person point of view. If cameras really add ten pounds, then I’m one sickly-scrawny Goth boy.
The fight seems longer on video than I remember it, and Bao connected a few blows to my head that I must’ve erased from my rattled memory. His fall to the ground, when his head hit the goalpost, shocks everyone. There’s commentary on this video where the girl filming questions if Bao is dead.
Then my Gladiator rant and my spitting to the ground had everyone pointing their phones at me and cheering. They’re missing the whole point of my rant: Bullies and fighting are wrong, not something we celebrate. When I said the line, I was mocking all of them for not protecting me, but instead my rant seems to have bonded them to me.
“The video’s gone viral,” my mom says, with a bit of pride mixed with concern in her voice.
Clicking over to YouTube, I search for my name and any phrase relating to the word Gladiator. There are at least twenty recently uploaded videos from my fight, and each one from a different vantage point. The videos have 30,000 views in total. One has more than 10,000 views alone! It’s a compilation of several videos of me tackling Bao with music from The White Stripes’ song “Seven Nation Army” playing in the background, an excellent song choice! My fight has its own sound track. Rock on—YEAH!
Logging out of her Facebook account and into mine, my news feed is filled with other kids reposting the video. My inbox contains thirty direct messages waiting for my reply, plus another fifty Friend requests—some of them are kids from China who I don’t know, but Bao probably does. The only thing I’m thinking is, what’s Bao’s opinion of all of this?
“Well, let’s hope this is the end of it,” Mom says.
“My guess?” I say, glancing at her. “It’s about to get a whole lot worse.”
Uncle Jack’s apartment is a cool Minneapolis loft in the downtown warehouse district. Steering my mom’s Prius while she rides alongside me, she clutches my learner’s permit in case a cop pulls me over, which shows how confident she is about me being behind the wheel. I’m totally cool driving, even though she’s slamming her foot into the floor as if she’s riding the brake. When we arrive at Jack’s building I pull over to the curb.
“I’ll talk with Jack and you’ll wait here?” I ask, implying that this is a guy’s discussion, no moms allowed.
“Ther
e’s a Starbucks around the corner. Park there and you can walk,” she instructs me. “Text me when you’re done.”
After I drop her off I park far enough away that I don’t have to parallel park. Walking along the broken city sidewalk I arrive at Jack’s building, hit the rusty call button for his loft and he buzzes me in. The ancient freight elevator takes me to the fifth floor of this artists’ community. The entire building is a “live and work” space. Artists use the lofts to host private gallery showings of their work. Jack is rich, single, and hasn’t worked in many years. He’s too wealthy to work, but apparently he likes living among those who do.
I knock and pull on the sliding rail door, entering a loft with twelve-foot ceilings, mostly windows, red brick and hardwood plank floors. There are wood-beam rafters overhead and Jack is hanging upside down from one of them, the back of his knees wrapped around a steel pipe. He’s doing sit-ups at least ten feet off the ground. How did he get himself up there, and how will he get himself down?
He pauses his workout, hanging comfortably like a bat. “Close the door before the cats get in. You’re late.”
“Better late than never, and better late than early, right?” I say.
“Yeah, never arrive early. You have no idea what kind of weird stuff you’ll walk in on.”
Jack says odd things like that all the time, and I never know if it’s sarcasm or bragging. This time a petite woman in workout tights walks across the loft toward the kitchen.
“Darius, this is Kim,” Jack says, as he adds a few more air sit-ups.
“Hello,” she says. Her tan skin contrasts with her bright smile. Kim is super-fit, in a one-piece bodysuit.
“She’s my yoga instructor,” Jack says.
He has a personal instructor or trainer for everything—tai chi, marathon running, meditation, you name it.
“Kim, Darius is my favorite nephew,” Jack says.
“I’m his only nephew,” I say to Kim.
“You’d still be my favorite,” he says before he spins around the bar like a gymnast, hangs by both hands, and drops to the floor on his feet, shouting, “Dismount!”
Blood Orange Soda: Paranormal Romance Page 4