Blood Orange Soda: Paranormal Romance

by Larranaga, James Michael

  “I’m not judging you. I just want to give my mom, your sister, a chance to live as long as possible.”

  “I know, I understand,” Jack says in a more hushed tone. “I’ve offered her fresh blood before and she’s turned it down. Honestly, at this point I think it’s too late. She probably only has a few weeks left.”

  A few weeks?! I’m not ready to accept her death when I know she still has good days. Sure, the bad days are starting to tip the scales, but she still has the good ones.

  “Get her fresh blood, Jack. Please, let’s try one more time!” I plead.

  He looks at her on the couch. Her breathing is light, and almost silent.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Fresh blood might give her more time, but if we want any chance of saving her, and I mean it would only be a sliver of a chance, we’d have to track down her First Bitten.”

  “What are you saying? There’s a way to stop this disease?”

  “No, never mind,” Jack says.

  “C’mon, Jack! Tell me!”

  “There might be a way. I’ve talked with Virginia about this. There are documented cases where V2 has gone into remission by reuniting a sick Vampire with his or her First Bitten.”

  “What? How?”

  “In that first bite, a Vampire transmits enough of his or her own cells into the Bitten,” Jack says. “And if the person receiving the bite has never been bitten before, those cells grow and can be used to reverse and stop V2. Again, this is rare. There are only a few documented cases.”

  “But there’s hope!” I say in a loud whisper. “We could contact her First Bitten. She said his name is Jonathan and—”

  “Hold up,” Jack says. “The only way Jonathan could transmit Virginia’s cells back into her body is through a bite. He has to be a Vampire.”

  My hope fades. “She said he’s on the Reds, living life as a Normal. He’d have to transform into a Vampire and then bite her?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What if I call and ask him if he’d be willing to try and save her?”

  “This isn’t like donating blood, Darius. You’d be asking a married man to transform into a Vampire, all for a slim chance of saving an old girlfriend.”

  Now I wish Jack just hadn’t said anything. He’s right; who would sacrifice so much?

  “We’ll start with some fresh blood to see if we can get her comfortable again,” Jack says. “Let her sleep a bit longer, and come with me.”

  We walk back into the kitchen and as we enter, Kira slides two pizzas out of the oven. The food smells delicious, and the thought of a warm pepperoni pizza is like a wave of comfort.

  “How is she?” Kira asks, as she slices the pizzas into triangle sections.

  “Better after she rests,” Jack says, sparing my sister the details.

  I’m grabbing plates from the cupboard and Jack digs through the refrigerator. Kira takes the plates and we load up with pizza slices and sit down together as Jack prepares our drinks.

  “Smells great, Kira,” he says, setting a can of Coke next to her plate.

  He sets another can of Coke next to his own plate and then hands me a bottle.

  “Here you go,” he says. “There’s four chilling in the refrigerator, and seventy-two more in that box.”

  In my hand is a cold bottle of pink-orange liquid. The label reads: Blood Orange Soda.

  “Why does he get orange soda?” Kira asks.

  “It’s no ordinary soft drink,” Jacks explains.

  “I’m transforming,” I explain to Kira. “I’m off the Reds.”

  “You are?” she asks me in disbelief.

  “This bottle will kick-start his transformation process,” Jack says.

  “Wow, really? Mom knows about this?”

  “She’s cool with it,” Jack says. “Go ahead, take a sip, Darius.”

  Hesitating for a second, I hold the cold bottle to my lips. This is the moment of truth, when I begin my transformation, and it deserves some reflection. No more life as a puny Goth; soon I will be a Vampire, with authority and power. The first sip tastes like bitter grapefruit juice as it washes over my tongue and down my throat. The weird thing is, the aftertaste reminds me of the taste of blood, what I tasted after I outran Bao and Chao today—a bitter, coppery aftertaste.

  “Well?” Jack asks.

  “Refreshing and bitter at the same time,” I say. “What’s in it?”

  “The refreshing part is red grapefruit, and the bitterness is blood.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Doesn’t matter, it’s clean blood. The guys on the street smuggle blood using these bottles of Blood Orange Soda.”

  Kira stares at me. “Feel different?”

  Sipping again, I’m enjoying my freedom to live off the Reds as I indulge in this red grapefruit drink spiked with blood.

  “I feel the same so far,” I say.

  “By the time you finish that bottle, you’ll catch a buzz,” Jack says. “It will last for twenty or thirty minutes. Drink only one bottle a day. Taking your dose in the evening is better than drinking it before school. Don’t go to school buzzed.”

  A cold headache hits me between the eyes, and my head buzzes. I feel lighter, and woozy, and Kira is gazing at me. She seems jealous that her older brother is drinking from a fruit that she’s forbidden to taste.

  “I’m feeling it,” I say to Jack.

  “What do you feel?” Jack asks.

  “Major head rush. Lighter, happier and…” Closing my eyes, I search for the appropriate description. “Buzzy, I guess.” Buzzy? Sounds like a Weezer word. And I burst into laughter.

  “Your blood mixes with the blood in the bottle. You’ll get used to it in a few days. Remember, Darius, only drink one bottle per day. That’s all you need right now.”

  This must be how it feels when you’re drunk, and I see why the Populars at school like to party. I’m bold, uninhibited, not a care in the world. This Blood Orange Soda is like courage water, and I could see myself really standing up to bullies like Bao Wang by drinking this stuff.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kira says, looking past me.

  She walks into the kitchen in a sleepy daze. Jack pops out of his chair and pulls a chair from the table.

  “Want pizza?” I ask her.

  “Not right now,” she says, “but thank you.”

  She sees the bottle in my hand and turns to Jack, then notices the large box on the floor. For a moment, I can’t decipher her reaction. Is she pissed that he started this process without her final approval?

  Jack straddles his chair with it facing backward. “You said he could do it.”

  “I know. I wanted to see him take his first sip.” She nods and smiles.

  “Sorry, Mom,” I say. “You were sound asleep and—”

  “From this moment forward you’re on the path to becoming a Vampire,” she says, as she leans in and gives me a hug. “We’ll have a man in the house soon.”

  “When Dad transformed after your bite, how long did his transformation take?” I ask my mom.

  “I noticed his changes within the first month, and he fully transformed within nine months.”

  “With one bottle a day, you should transform within six weeks,” Jack says. “You could speed it up by drinking more than one bottle a day. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. Is there any reason you’d want to transform sooner, Darius?”

  “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 wh
o 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.

  Thursday, October 16

  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 gr
aduate 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.