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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Thirteen: A Nemesis’ Hinky Commitment

At the beginning of his final high school year, Jim-Jam O’Neily had the displeasure of encountering Raymond Charles’ newest confection of loveliness and light, Lima Quinn. That transfer student’s mother was known to be a chemist at a nearby university. Her father was rumored to be an engineer busied abroad with nanotechnology.

The Quinns’ move, from a rental unit near the university to a modest Cape Cod near Raymond Charles High School, occurred at an awkward time for Lima, a rising senior. Lima was unaware that it was an equally awkward time for her mother as her father had reappeared in her mother’s laboratory.

All things considered, Barbra Quinn refused to allow anything to prevent her from embracing the singular opportunity that presented itself as an available, foreclosed house. She might be worn down and might, again, be thinking about poisoning herself, but she was still capable of planning Lima’s fiscal future. So, Dr. Quinn uprooted herself and her daughter and replanted the two of them in Jim-Jam’s neighborhood.

* * *

Lima Quinn made Jim-Jam nervous. It was not so much that he feared that she would lower community millenary standards, beat him at calculus, or get him kicked off Montana Great Falls College of Technology’s listserv. Rather, the prodigy worried that she might undermine his attempts to deprive the eco-warriors of power or alienate his social media shout-outs. He wanted his electronic messages to continue to circulate all over Upper Buckwheat County.

Jim-Jam grasped that Lima was not only a smart girl but that she was also one who was keen to compete with him in ways in which no one else had ever ventured. She had, for instance, already announced — in a “friendly” email — her plan to prevent O’Neily from gaining the majority market share in secret inventions intended to rid the planet of military might. Perhaps she was bluffing, or perhaps she had learned of his anti-tank keychains.

Lima had already mucked up Jim-Jam’s study of illegal, thrill-seeking behavior among the local teens. She had been surveying students about their treatment preferences for somatoform disorders, including but not limited to indigestion, nausea, vomiting, gas, diarrhea, constipation, unexplained pain, decreased alertness, newly developed complications with reading or writing, and muscle weakness. Yet, for reasons unfathomable to O’Neily (she did not seem coy), she had not asked her subjects about their sexual symptoms of stress or whether boredom, fear, or something else catalyzed them to engage in drugging, drinking, and other sensorial stimuli.

Further taxing was that Lima had been charging for the consultations she provided to help teens work through distorted thoughts and unrealistic beliefs. Many of the interventions she performed eroded Jim-Jam’s customer base. Fewer and fewer local youth were paying him for guidelines on parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, and passing classes.

That is, fewer and fewer of his peers were receiving reality-based guidance. Whereas Jim-Jam expected profits for his efforts, Lima expected profits for doing nothing. Jim-Jam’s solutions had feet in the real world, their wings and claws notwithstanding. Lima’s solutions, the wrong way round, were often only verbatim recipes she had scanned from Internet sites like Dating for Guppies and Family Combustions.

What’s more, Lima’s machinations had interrupted a study that Jim-Jam had been conducting. Specifically, they made a mess of his cross-fostering analysis of siblings with and without alexithymia. Given Lima’s many interferences, Jim-Jam no longer had a pure population from which to glean data.

Moreover, despite her protests to the contrary, Lima had become a competing font of fashion advice. With Lynnie Lola’s clique disbanded and other girls having assumed places in the school’s most popular coterie, it became known that Ms. Quinn was the address for assistance with pattern mixing and fabric choices. She had undercut Jim-Jam in price, too. No one cared that she lifted her ideas from Funky Female Fashions or from Terrific Teen Pages.

On top of all of those concerns, Jim-Jam had to share classes with Lima. Both of them took Advanced Placement Chemistry, Advanced Placement Calculus BC, Advanced Placement Physics C, Advanced Placement Statistics, and Advanced Placement Biology (Lima had signed up for Advanced Placement Mandarin Chinese and for Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics, too.) At first, Jim-Jam had pitied the new girl for having to endure a scantly populated course with Mr. Weaver, and for having to be second to Jim-Jam during most of the rest of the school day. Once he recognized the many ways in which Lima was disrupting his life, however, he cast no extra sympathy for her.

* * *

Lima Quinn didn’t like Jim-Jam O’Neily, either. He was more than a nuisance, he was an actual rival. Never before had another adolescent threatened her commercial or scientific triumphs. Twelfth Grade should not have become a time to have to attend to some other kid’s slice of I.Q.

None of the other techies, whom she befriended, battled, or served, including representatives of her buyers of leaked, classified government information, had similarly incensed Lima. In actuality, lawyers of various stripes, and corporate bigwigs with assorted purposes, deposited good money to her three offshore accounts for her aid. Only one flyboy had regularly tripped her up in her Internet dealings, and that poor example of humanity had had the guts not only to turn up in her new school’s AP Chemistry C course but also to sit a few desks away.

Senior year was a dreadful time to have to face down an adversary who dared to jumble her dealings. Top universities cost money, and Lima neither qualified for significant financial aid nor had a parent who could help pay her bills. She needed to be able to continue to hack federal banks despite Jim-Jam Ariel O’Neily’s due diligence.

For years, her programs had bounced against his network security systems. She had known that there existed an indemnity expert who regularly quashed her work, but she never thought she’ d meet him, let alone sit near him in multiple courses. Like her own, O’Neily’s programming directives were typical of someone who had had at least a graduate degree or two’s worth of training rather than were emblematic of the work of a self-tutored teenager.

Not only did O’Neily’s virus scanners detect and delete her computer instructions, hence cut into her earnings, but they also represented a Weltanschauung antithetical to hers. Somewhere in his puny mind was a beneficence she would never know. That boy seemed to be all about minimalizing electronic carnage, while Lima defined herself by violating security for very narrow, narcissistic reasons.

Initially, she had perceived that other teen to be an unfeeling mogul who was inferior to her because he allowed himself to be led by his smaller wheels instead of those attached to his own drive. At the time, Lima had mulled over unmasking her competitor and then offering to take him on as her computer crime assistant.

If O’Neily hadn’t been so much of a valiant, he might have been able to enjoy social supremacy and increased income. Certainly, other adolescents accepted that smart kids could be motivated by reprisal, and it was public knowledge that Jim-Jam O’Neily was nearly universally despised. Yet, he persisted in engaging in clandestine, do-good behaviors.

As Lima got to know Jim-Jam better, she came to realize that his interest in building revenue was offset by his interest in making sure that hacking was engaged in only for good, ethical, or legal purposes. Granted, axiological terms are relative, but O’Neily proved himself the scion of his lawyer mom. Although, like Lima, he had no father in residence, unlike her, he had a mother who was regularly and predictably psychologically present.

Lima juddered as she typed. If it wasn’t for O’Neily’s existence, she’d only have to contend with daily death threats and hourly vitriol. Those pressures were expected ends of her work. Jim-Jam’s hindrance was not. At least, he had no idea that she was using backdoor attacks against him.

* * *

Again and again, Lima referred to an Excel sheet. If enough nasty business gets tossed at an object, something sticks. Lima would destroy her nemesis via an old-fashioned PR campaign. Although she hated having to share classroom space with Jim-Jam O’Neily, at least her present circumstances had enabled her to identify him.

More exactly, she dialed up a certain ecology organization and then carbon-copied them some of the snippets she had lifted from emails O’Neily had sent to the crews of Thar She Blows and of Where-Away. After all, a girl had to protect her territory. Young Quinn needed to guarantee that her electronic heists would continue so that she could buy the most inclusive food plan at the most elite university as well as to have enough money left over to enjoy a shopping spree at a bedding store specializing in dormitory needs.

Once O’Neily was muzzled, she would also be able to increase her predations on the Raymond Charles High School student body. Girls were less suspected of promulgation than boys and newcomers were rarely, if ever, assumed to have avaricious inclinations.

As per the needs and wants of Mac and Doris Giskin and of the rest of the Deli Deluxe gang, they mattered as much as spoiled milk to Lima. Like O’Neily, she had never enjoyed authentic popularity. Unlike him, she used that lack as a rationale for revenge.

It was a good thing that O’Neily had barely tapped the students of Raymond Charles High School. Already, she had been able to introduce them to worrisome ideas about: Khitty Khleen millinery fashions, boxing lessons, and ballarinos. It didn’t bother her that she had had to filch from Jim-Jam’s files for her findings. Like her father, Lima never minded scavenging from others’ research.

That her mother, Barbra, likewise helped her with “extracurricular” projects and schoolwork was immaterial. Expertly, Lima massaged her only-child status to sucker her lone parent. Not only was Lima able to avoid all household chores, but she, likewise, was able to beguile Barbra into helping her with biochemistry projects.

Dr. Quinn’s helped her daughter calculate the correct measurement of compounds in anticholinergic drugs. As well, she provided her with access to international libraries, an ample amount of dry eupatorium, dry rue, and dry valerian, and green portions of arnica and damiana. Similarly, she helped Lima transform their new home’s front yard into a treasure trove of materials suitable for biochemistry research.

Lima didn’t always appreciate that help. All she saw was that her mother’s free hand with spending on Lima’s idiosyncrasies meant that her mother was failing to save for Lima’s future.

To boot, Dr. Quinn did nothing to alter the realities revealed by Lima’s probing into Jim-Jam’s files. It annoyed Lima to no end that O’Neily had involved himself in most of the same scientific foci in which she was interested. He had already run many studies in molecular chemistry, biochemistry, and medical chemistry, and had continued his research even while being temporarily banned from the public library.

The kibosh on him leaving home failed to block him from sourcing reports from academic institutions and research centers. The channels that Lima’s mom, as an independent scientist, had afforded Lima were nothing relative to the channels Jim-Jam infiltrated vis-à-vis entire departments’ worth of scholars.

Lima could not tolerate being eclipsed. She was going to be her class’s valedictorian. She was going to be accorded early admission to top schools. She was going to receive Barbra’s promised graduation gift of a new car. She was not going to be one-upped by a two-bit nerd.

* * *

Accordingly, Dr. Barbra Quinn’s daughter believed that her demonstrated, relatively easy to attain, social sleight of hand was sufficient for taking care of her face-to-face and her Internet reputations. It followed that she sent an email, to a certain ecology organization’s advocates, in which she offered help getting their offspring to procreate lawfully.

The anonymous sender of that email said they had in mind their recipients’ best interests, per their future boasts of grandchildren. They also mentioned that, purportedly, a “Mr. Jim-Jam Ariel O’Neily,” of Bozeman, Montana, who ran a used-car dealership when not otherwise helping to matchmake people, might be of use to them. His service was exclusive to the world’s elite and was obtainable only for at a high fee.

Amazingly, most of the ecology organization’s lawyers, using pseudonyms, of course, responded to that email. They wished that their sons and daughters had listened to them and had married gawky nerds with great leadership potential, not slept around with poets, basket weavers, and drummers. Those legal experts mused that if O’Neily mediated immediately, their youngest children, in any case, might still create unions with persons of superior intelligence and social graces, not to mention nonpareil bankrolls.

It seemed that those lawyers held that compatibility and romantic resonance were less desirable in sons and daughters-in-law than pedigree. They were eager for O’Neily’s help. After their children hooked up with spouses of “proper” lineage, those offspring had their parents’ blessings to find happiness through whatever extramarital intimacies they desired.

Consequently, the next morning, Jim-Jam found his main email box filled with spam from the same idiots that had bothered him before. This time, though, they did not want photos with Captain Albatross, but the help of “Jim-Jam O’Neily, Car Dealer Extraordinaire” with matchmaking.

A quick investigation revealed that in addition to being put on those legal predators’ mailing lists, Jim-Jam’s many Internet landing pages now exhibited banners emboldened with his name and alternate email addresses. Theoretically, beyond matchmaking, O’Neily Enterprises also oversaw: an international lime pie baking contest, a national hospital supply business specializing in adult diapers, and a pay-per-view poetry site. Jim-Jam muttered a gratitude that he had never let his likeness be posted in photographic, cartoon, or any other visual form.

* * *

The Brain-in-a-Shack schemed. His priorities became assessing the damage, controlling the damage, and then humbling the responsible parties. It wasn’t Ralph. It couldn’t be Mrs. Preenberry. Mr. Atkins remained incarcerated. Mr. Weaver was too dumb. Likely, the perpetrator was someone who had nothing to do with Raymond Charles High School or with Upper Buckwheat County.

His planning notwithstanding, Jim-Jam remained exasperated. He hadn’t wanted to devote resources toward thwarting maleficent others. Soon, the Ivies would be expecting receipt of his college applications. He needed to reroute his attentions to perfecting his difluoromethylphosphine oxide formulae, recording raccoon dog growth patterns and bellybutton lint yields, and getting his research published. Vanquishing a black hat hacker ought not to have had to appear on his to-do list.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg

Proceed to Challenge 953...