The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily
by Channie Greenberg
James Jackson Ariel (“Jim-Jam”) O’Neily is an adolescent virtuoso, a bright teenager who has a passion for invention. But he is also a loser who postures as a champion. He remains a regular target for his high school’s most popular kids and for his school’s fiercest intimidators.
Jim-Jam is nasty and sweet, vainglorious and insecure, book-brilliant and publicly stupid. He is often inadvertently funny. His life is far from perfect; he tiptoes around his disapproving mother and finds himself battling another highly capable nerd. He’s arbitrary in friendships, spews balderdash and focuses on profit margins. Jim-Jam is a rascal on the rise.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Mechanisms of Prosecution
Jim-Jam straightened out his bowtie. There were no more minutes left to procrastinate. Doris deserved another crown and he deserved to delight in the conclusion of his high school career. Jim-Jam might be an opportunistic egghead, but he was also very much a teenager and was one who wanted to experience a final, golden adolescent moment. So, in lieu of spending his last senior dance worrying about who might next try to pummel him with served papers, or stove in his face with fists, Jim-Jam resolved to enjoy the evening.
Toward that end, he pocketed a new vial of brandymel with which he meant to spike the punch and which had been bought for him by a stupid adult whom Jim-Jam had come across outside of a package store. That touch of alcohol would be the Technology Wunderkind’s parting gift to his classmates, despite their desire to see him hanged.
At the edge of Raymond Charles High School’s gymnasium, Jim-Jam-Ariel-O’Neily-Make-It-or-Break-It-That-Will-be-Fifty-Dollars-an-Hour-to-You-Mister reached for a cookie while watching Doris twirl and swirl. He had gotten her to the festivities and had loyally danced four sets with her. When the caller took a rest, so, too, did the junior scientist. Neither was enamored of taped music.
Doris could participate in a continent’s worth of folk dancing without him. Because of his inattention during physical education, Jim-Jam knew no hambos or schottisches. That night, he was not interested in learning them or any other ways in which to move to a half-tempo. The only sort of movement that might catch his attention was the sort that would free him from federal prosecutors and local lawyers. Jim-Jam couldn’t clear his mind of his troubles.
So, he sipped and munched, all the while wishing he weren’t linked to people like Dr. Washington, Mr. Atkins, or a certain ecological society more interested in spin-doctoring than in saving sea creatures. Sure, Mom claimed that Jim-Jam’s visits to the imprisoned Atkins might become the grace that legally saved Jim-Jam, and sure, since George was dead, that horrible human wouldn’t be able to testify against Jim-Jam in any meaningful way, but there remained many other stumbling blocks between him and a guarantee of freedom.
The Magnificent Mathematician wished that all of the hoopla around his biological inquiries and around his investigations into physical chemistry would die down. It seemed as though the entire town was talking about his research and its link to his upcoming trials. Jim-Jam had become better known for possible legal loopholes than he had ever been for his academic trophies or millinery work, discounting the Jones’s love of his hats.
Granted, he was glad that he had tried to raise Komodo dragons, to befriend the crews of Thar She Blows and of Where-Away, and to develop keychains capable of activating antimissile technology. He was proud of his Khitty Khleen couture, and he thought that his counsel to Doris and her brother, Mac, to redirect their ill-focused anger into katas, had been sagacious. On top of everything, if not for his choices, his neighborhood would have remained overrun with yippy dogs, Lynnie Lola would have been crowned Harvest Queen, and the relative capabilities of the members of the local police force would never have been tested.
* * *
Jim-Jam weighed eating another cookie, but instead sucked a trace of sugar off of his lower lip. He was about to pour the last of his brandymel into the fruit punch when the door leading from the school’s main hallway to the gym burst open. Scores of the community’s youngest 4Hers poured in.
No one yet knew that those young 4Hers were searching the gym for school board members or that those kids had chosen to riot at the last senior class dance because the local newspapers had mentioned that the school board would be in attendance, and because the newspapers, themselves, and many gossipy parents, too, were going to populate that hall. Those kids wanted to focus adult attention to the unfairness of their punishments.
For the moment, Jim-Jam inhaled. He was witnessing something more sinister than a protest against allowance caps or a group of overnight campers who had become agitated from eating too much sugar. The pack of kids that had entered the gym looked as though they could become violent.
* * *
The school’s overseers could not have anticipated that uncontained event. Had they had such foresight, to a one, they would have taken early retirement. The school board was not composed of selfless organizers. More to the point, all perceptions those persons had had about the last senior class dance had been compromised by resources spent on Asian porn, photo ops at local houses of worship, buying and selling pork bellies, and being written about in the gobbledygook of the community’s newspapers. Their titles aside, none among those makers and shakers ever truly probed deeply into or wanted to know much about the workings of Upper Buckwheat County’s youth.
As long as those men and that token woman felt welcomed by attractive or fiducially well-endowed local citizens when attending community potlucks or local dance recitals, they’d continue to move forward in their efforts at divisive rhetoric, payola, and domestic obliviousness. None of them took as much as a backward glance toward new social psychological findings or perturbed themselves for a minute about unfulfilled campaign promises.
Innovative approaches to community obstructions were for health care cowboys, not for education professionals. If those board members had tried to heed their advisors’ reports, they would have become distraught, they would have found themselves faced with legal contests, or they would have been held accountable for a large number of children born out of wedlock. It remained better, in those wheelers’ and dealers’ view, to turn their lauding of the local police chief into a PR moment and to accept kickbacks from however many main street proprietors felt the need to “creatively” interpret local tax ordinances. Such small feats of social climbing cost the board members relatively little.
Additionally, the county prosecutor and the local judges were in those bosses’ pockets as long as those bosses provided them with free tuition for their dear ones at the regional community college. Among the graduating seniors, someone named “Betty” and someone else named “Mac” were thusly due to receive the scholarships that were annually given at the board’s discretion.
Snorkel Preenberry had been on that list, too, but as he was currently learning at a boarding school in Connecticut, he was no longer within the board members’ province. Anyway, Snorkel’s grandfather had asked the board to compel the hamlet where Snorkel’s school was located to become part of Upper Buckwheat’s territory, at least on paper. Legislature to achieve that end was going to be proposed at the next school board meeting.
Their justification for Betty’s scholarship was her last-minute enrollment in a single AP course. What’s more, the superintendent and his cronies were applying pressure to Raymond Charles’ chemistry and physics teachers to give her laudatory grades.
As for Mac, the civil servants deemed his worthiness for an equal prize by inventing a civics award. That young man would be touted as an exemplary denizen, that is, as a promising contributor to society, who necessarily ought to have his tuition paid by local taxes.
After they bestowed those scholarships, the commissioners would meet in the county chief magistrate’s chamber to wash down their efforts with decent brandy. All that remained for them to do, for that school year, was to find a reason why their high school’s notorious arriviste and alleged criminal, Jim-Jam O’Neily, was ineligible to be valedictorian.
* * *
O’Neily’s status, that of the son of a single mother, would make for interesting paragraphs and great sound bites, but his simultaneously being a juvenile delinquent under investigation by multiple governmental bodies would make the school board look foolish. It had never occurred to those leaders that one of their most academically accomplished young people would sabotage government agencies or import illegal pets.
Further, there was that funny business concerning some of his online postings. O’Neily had huffed and puffed about a popular, international ecology movement that regularly funded school science programs. That is to say, he had written in multiple chatrooms that a particular nonprofit organization’s “solutions” were counterintuitive to economic heterogeneity. That kid had backed his assertions with electronic buckets’ worth of proof elicited from “anonymous” sources and had, likewise, audaciously proclaimed that any immoral enterprise, such as the green agency in question, deserved what was coming to it.
The local politicos could, with effort, which they did not want to expend, find other organization to fund their district’s enrichment offerings. They could not, however, easily, or possibly at all, fix all of the animosity that O’Neily had stirred up in other officialdoms. That a kid, who had tried to mess up a principal’s promotion appeal and who had regularly mucked with teachers’ files and with students’ grades, might be named valedictorian, created grievous problems for them.
In truth, the school district’s overseers wished that they had the smarts to act similarly. If they could have “erred” in their tabulations of seniors’ GPAs as easily as they had engaged in voter fraud, those executives would not have had to acknowledge O’Neily’s academic superiority. Unfortunately, unlike O’Neily, they were stumped by the district’s record system.
Conversely, if that newcomer to the senior class, Lima Quinn, had performed better in BC Calculus, they would have been able to celebrate her, instead of that problematic boy. It would certainly have been of interest to the newspapers that one of their teens had overcome the stigma of being a transfer student, late in her pubic school career, and had risen to her class’s pinnacle.
As it were, the school board members drew straws to determine who would let Quinn know that she was merely the salutatorian; her uncle was reputed to travel in powerful circles.
* * *
At about the same time as the 4Hers appeared at the dance, Ralph burst through the door leading from the fields to the gym. Although that entry had been locked, Ralph had unhinged it. Framed by loosened crepe paper, that near-adult tripped over its threshold.
Immediately, quiet filled the hall. The teen was covered with grime, his clothing was tattered, and his hair was matted. No one yet knew that Ralph was there to get revenge on young O’Neily.
Mere seconds later, Betty and Samantha ran to Ralph and tried to kiss him. Those girls snarled at each other as they both started to brush the detritus off of Ralph, disregarding that the debris then clung to their dresses and manicures. Each meant to exploit the reality that Lynnie Lola was not in attendance and, hence, not claiming their school’s hunk.
* * *
Across the room, near the refreshment table, Jim-Jam held his breath. Not only had Ralph and a large number of third, fourth, and fifth graders, all of whom knew Jim-Jam by name, and all of whom were wielding hoes and pick axes, crashed the dance, but so, too, had a single juvenile Komodo dragon controlled by Lima Quinn. Lima’s ensemble matched in color and in texture the skin of her liberated lizard. No one yet knew that Lima was there to trump her nemesis and to use his beloved creature to do so.
Jim-Jam shook his head as though he could clear the scene in it in the same way that he might clear an Etch-A-Sketch screen. When he opened his eyes again, he noticed that Mrs. Preenberry had appeared and was trailing Lima to the podium.
Mrs. Preenberry ran up the stage’s steps to post photos of Snorkel and of Lima as dance king and dance queen. That her son would rule in absentia didn’t bother her. That Lima was controlling a Komodo dragon, however, did worry her a bit.
As she made her way across the stage, Mrs. Preenberry spotted Ralph. That boy was still struggling to get out from under the attention of an increasingly large number of girls. Unhesitatingly, Mrs. Preenberry dropped her posters, ran down the steps and then pushed her way through that crowd of hormonal adolescents. With her handbag, she smacked Ralph on the head.
Mrs. Preenberry next reached into her purse for her cell phone and called Mrs. Dupas. It was wrong of children to worry their parents.
Ralph rubbed his head. The swarming girls did nothing to diminish his pain. Only the chilled juice, which someone had thrown at his face, and which had scattered many of those pesky females, tempered the throbbing bumps on his noggin.
The would-be tramp stood up to reevaluate his situation. Upon sighting Lima and her absconded giant lizard, he ran screaming out the door from whence he had come. A significant number of female students went screaming after him.
* * *
The 4Hers, too, noticed the lizard. In neat choreography, they split into two groups; one to feed the poor pet and the other to track down the adults responsible for incarcerating it. Those kids suspected that the tall villains who had imprisoned the Komodo were the same ones who had recently made the kids’ lives miserable.
The square-dance caller, who had been imbibing his own version of punch, “returned from the loo.” Noticing that the elementary school children had made a parallelogram without him, and supposing that the event’s participants had resumed dancing, he grabbed the microphone and began to shout out the figures for the Virginia Reel. He got as far as “head lady and foot gentleman forward and back” and “forward again with both hands round” before the local police stormed the gym. Following that, the sort of do-si-doing that took place was not of his making.
Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg
