The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Twenty-One: Unusual Fondnesses

Like her mother before her, Lima Quinn chewed over the relative value of engaging in chemical numbing. Despite all of her attempts to route records away from O’Neily, he was counterattacking almost as quickly as she was violating. Whereas the heuristics he used to build his defenses resonated with her, hence helped her to anticipate his fortifications, there was something about his resilience that was deeply disturbing. Even given his house arrest status, her classmate continued to infuriate her.

Whereas her adversary was no Campfire Brother, having never felt loyalty to any organized group, James Jackson Ariel O’Neily had been able to amass, before being caught by the government, loyalties from various adult congregations. It was rumored that some of those collectives were intending to go on record to affirm his worth.

Worse, the more Upper Buckwheat County grew excited over O’Neily’s forthcoming trial, the more it forgot Lima. No longer did anyone delight in her existence or call out about her work. No one cared any longer that she had been nominated as class valedictorian, that she had amassed five digits’ worth of profits, or that her fashion advice was matchless. If Lima disappeared, no one, including her addled mom, would become uneasy.

The teen thumbed her iPod and then reached for her ceiling fan’s switch. The mechanical cooler’s movements were lulling. If only Lima could skip the rest of high school and advance to college, she might yet enjoy streaming radio, the notoriety of being on academic scholarship, and a couple of new pairs of socks. She wondered if she could claim to be ill for the rest of the term and then take her finals at home via a proctor.

The thud of a phone, her phone, onto her bedroom floor woke Lima. Her mobile’s whispered hip-hop music had quieted and comforted her enough that, if her bedside clock was to be believed, she had slept for two hours.

Suddenly alert, Lima rolled from one side of her sheets to the other. Finishing high school was becoming a Sisyphean undertaking. The worst of her challenges, unquestionably, was O’Neily, followed closely by the antics of those pesky Giskin twins, those two lummoxes, who ought to have been abandoned at the hospital when they were born.

Doris Giskin pranced around school as though she had made a good stock investment or had won an archery competition whereas her only advantage was her friendship with O’Neily. She was even rumored to be attending the last school dance with him. That besotted calf was so dumb; O’Neily was under lockdown.

More aggravating than Doris, though, was her twin brother, Mac. Mac had publicly espoused his attraction to Lima.

* * *

A human assemblage of uranium tailings, that teen was so unsophisticated that he had turned down the part of Jachimo in the senior production of Cymbeline just because Betty something-or-another was playing Imogen and just because Frank Hu was playing Posthumus.

That boy, contrary to his self-opinion, looked hideous in the grimy overalls that he had inherited from his physically expanding farmer uncle and that he insisted on wearing to school on the days when he was not wearing his red and purple ensembles, which were accented with a touch of gold and “complimented” by spandex kicks (interestingly, Mac would not wear his trainers with his hand-me-down bib and braces as he figured that those shoes drew attention away from his barnyard duds.)

More dreadful than Mac’s attire was his attitude toward education; that kid rarely handed in papers on time. His negligence not only lowered his quality point average but also forced the rest of his classmates to take on extra homework. All of Raymond Charles’ teachers, especially Mr. Weaver, believed in the power of peer pressure and cared little that Mac seemed resilient to group influence.

Last, although Mac was approaching his nineteenth birthday, he still made prank calls and still ate like a pig. He’d dial up associates, or their relatives, and ask why, if their refrigerators were running, they weren’t chasing them. That male Giskin had no sense of punch line delivery. As well, every week, he voraciously ate an enchilada or six, no matter the school cafeteria’s repute for filling them with mystery meat. That youth even bounced from one girls’ table to the next, begging them for their leftovers.

Lima burped up some enchilada from her school lunch and then giggled. She was unusual, among the school’s girls, in her fondness for those chemical byproduct-filled comestibles.

Yet, Mac was fabled to be responsible for local thefts of mollusks, included those crayfish that had long ago gone missing from O’Neily’s research shed. Let the grownups blame the Komodo dragons, Lima knew the identity of the real hero.

She burped, again. Indubitably, Mac was a very attractive person.

* * *

As days passed, whether Lima was glazing vessels, chopping celery, or trying to get O’Neily’s lizards moved from the local zoo to the national one, she found herself dwelling on Mac’s biceps. That clod, that dullard, that irrepressible dunce, was cuter than cute.

Master Giskin was the sort of young man who had, mindlessly, at the senior picnic, uprooted and had then relocated all of the park’s benches to a spot under some large trees, when he and his buddies wanted to sit in the shade. He was the sort of kid who imagined himself getting accepted into a technical college to study mechanical technology despite the certainty that he had never, ever, even after three attempts, passed Algebra I, and despite the certainty that the technical college’s “open admission” policy would exclude him.

As well, Mac was a chewing tobacco titlist. He could spit farther than could any other Raymond Charles student and could identify loose leaf, plug, and twist varieties by feel.

For Lima, “bad, but sexy boy” didn’t equal motorcycles or drug habits, but gross deficiencies. Mac epitomized inadequacy. He was as different from Lima as were right-handed isotopes were from left-handed ones; that is, he mirrored, but did not replicate her.

Lima wondered if she was in love.

Accordingly, she spent increasingly more time at Deli Deluxe. She knew that Mac and Doris visited that eatery once a week, on Wednesdays, at seven in the evening. She had gleaned that information from Betty What’s-Her-Name by abruptly threatening to stop tutoring that gal in AP Chemistry.

Initially, Betty had offered up complaints that Lima’s ultimatum was unjustified. In response, Lima had highlighted how the only other Raymond Charles student clever enough to help Betty with redox titrations and with the distinction between strong and weak acid solutions was Jim-Jam O’Neily, who not only charged fifty dollars per hour for his services but who was also locked out of the school for an indefinite period. She noted, too, that she, in sharp contrast, made it to class every day and only charged a modest forty dollars per hour together with a small amount of social currency.

Betty refused to budge.

So, Lima tried a different tactic; Lima “confided” to Betty that she knew that being a new student, she, Lima, lacked social wiggle room. Lima said, as well, that she wasn’t going to waste any more of Betty’s time with platitudes or anathemas about O’Neily. After all, denunciations would not help Betty score well on the AP exam.

Then Lima added that it would be wonderful if she could post to her family and friends the good news that, despite her plight as a recent arrival, she would be attending the upcoming dance. Lima leaned toward her tutee and whispered about how difficult it was to meet boys via social media channels. She knew herself to be a nerd and, as such, needed Betty’s help.

Apparently, Betty stared at Raymond Charles’ alleged brightest, placed a finger to her tongue, and then pulled away a moist droplet. No matter the sort of breath mint she used, her saliva remained sticky. If she aided the new girl, she could earn the distinction of being the one who introduced Lima to Deli Deluxe’s fries and shakes. That upgraded eminence would enable Betty to trump both Samantha and Doris. As per Mac Giskin, there was no waitlist for his companionship. Betty smiled.

* * *

Later, from her bedroom window, Lima watched the girl, who paid her for chemistry help, walk down the Quinns’ driveway. Picking essentials about Mac Giskin, from Betty’s head, had been easier and lovelier than instigating the demise of O’Neily’s mollusks. O’Neily could keep his nominations to elite universities, his time at the graduate podium as salutatorian, and his final dance with Doris. She was going to dance with Mac.

Courtesy of items that she found in and on her mother’s escritoire, Lima dressed herself smartly. Even given the implausibility that Barbra Quinn would leave her lab early and arrive home before midnight, she’d never notice the missing scents or colors or that the veneer of dust that had long been coating that desk, which doubled as her vanity, had been wiped away.

In preparation for Deli Deluxe, Lima made a mental note to stifle her oratory about open-mindedness and her fiduciary interest in helping her classmates. For one evening, she would be indiscernible from the rest of the community’s stupid teenagers. She would mingle with those intellectual peasants and make an authentic attempt to share their deep fried food and excessive amounts of carbonated beverages. Above all, she would participate in their flirtation rites.

In due course, Lima intended to return to her proper role as the school’s only “go to” intellect, as her social group’s champion, and as the hero of all academically challenged souls. Her work was too important to the rest of society to go unattended for more than a few hours.

* * *

The following morning, Dr. Sebastian Quinn used a dress stick to button his shirt. Like George Q. Washington, Sebastian Quinn had survived a lab explosion. His accident, however, had not been followed up with offers of hush money or with prosecution. More significantly, his accident had left his body partially maimed. Quinn’s intellect, nonetheless, remained as sharp as a phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor and as reliable as an Erlenmeyer Flask.

Hoping to be excused from the ministrations of his most recent occupational therapist, the good doctor righted himself in his mirror and practiced, for the third time, some range of motion exercises. Sebastian Quinn’s latest worries did not center on his handicaps or on the inroads he was failing to make with his research. As of late, his worries had begun to focus, once more, on his sister, Barbra.

Although Barbra had claimed that her initial separation from Dr. Washington had been based on her wish to spare Washington unnecessary legal burdens, Barbra seemed as distressed as she had been nearly eighteen years ago, during the period following Washington’s departure. Sebastian thought that his sibling was acting as though she had seen a ghost. In fact, Sebastian’s wife had mentioned that Barbra’s recent responses to his wife’s attempted conversations had been breathy and incomplete.

There would be no peace in the Quinn household until Sebastian had identified and resolved whatever was agitating his sister. His spouse had hid his favorite candy bars and his most prized soda and had said that those goodies would not be redeemable until Sebastian worked out the cause of and a solution to whatever triggered Barbra’s newest manifestation of complex trauma. Sebastian’s wife wasn’t playing fair; she knew that it was tough for her spouse to remain happy without Good-n-Plenty or Dr. Pepper.

That discomfort aside, all that Sebastian knew about his sister’s latest episodes was that she had muttered to Sebastian’s wife about the inadequate number of subjects that had enrolled in her newest study of psychoactive drugs. Barbra had blamed the lack of support that she had received from some idiot at a hospital, where, allegedly, a bureaucrat had promised to canvass the town’s destitute for suitable participants but had failed to keep his word.

When he had heard his wife’s report, Sebastian had inaudibly gagged back mercurial words. George was reputed to be among that targeted population of participants. Perhaps, Barbra had become newly conflicted about their old relationship. Then again, his sister could be reacting to anything. Most likely, what his wife supposed were Barbra’s newfound tendencies toward hypervigilance, self-harm, and self-neglect had nothing to do with George.

In addition to Sebastian’s wife’s reports, his niece, Lima, was relating that Barbra had, suddenly, decreased her work output and was making many mistakes in the small amount of work that she was completing. Moreover, Lima conveyed that Barbra was waking, screaming, with greater than normal frequency, was looking through, instead of talking to, Lima, and was cogitating, aloud, about ending her anguish. Lima also described that she thought her mother had taken up “cutting” but that she couldn’t be sure since Barbra had begun to wear only long-sleeved clothing.

Dr. Quinn hoped that his sister-in-law was still on sertraline hydrochloride. He wondered what he would have to do to become her conservator and to return her to psychoanalysis.

Before he could make those calculations, though, Sebastian became more sorely tested. The next day, in addition to restricting his Good-n-Plenty and Dr. Pepper, Sebastian’s wife withheld his Andes Mints, Big Red Gum, and Fanta.

The scientist had to make haste in discovering his sister’s source of renewed suffering as he coped poorly without sugar laden with food coloring. A few hours of investigation later, he grasped why the hospital had confounded Barbra’s attempt to gather subjects.

Good results from her studies were increasing the quality and duration of their cancer patients’ lives and were bringing the hospital money as well as renown, On balance, those results were preventing one of the hospital’s assistant directors from having a wing named after him and were preventing another assistant director from being credited by Cancersupport.org as the reason why the hospital was named a top facility for treating intraocular melanomas and lymphoplasmacytic lymphomas.

All of those facts notwithstanding, something else was disquieting Sebastian’s sister. She had survived worse career disappointments. Maybe, she was living through the tides of menopause. Maybe, she had returned to alcohol.

* * *

Sebastian Quinn brought that list of Barbra’s presenting issues with him when he consulted a psychiatrist. That night, as well, he and his wife debated the value of sending Barbra to a locked ward versus merely upgrading her prescription. Overall, as there was no sign that Barbra was a danger to herself or to others, there was little that the pair could do except to try to stage an action to improve her situation.

The doctor with whom they were speaking was available for interventions, but his fee was high. Sebastian and his wife vacillated over their paying for that medico’s services. Meanwhile, they contacted all of the individuals that they had identified as significant to Barbra Quinn’s life. There would be no appealing to Barbra’s rationally. At best, her loved ones might scare her into committing herself for observation.

They did not seek out George Q. Washington, though. His presence might give them some leverage, but it also might damage later confrontational discourse. In interventions, sneaky or relatedly atypical Machiavellian tactics often backfire.

Proceed to Chapter 22...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg