The Makeover of James Orville Wickenbee

by Anya Bateman

  James, who was carefully setting the chess pieces on the board, didn’t look up. “I take it you don’t think my running for president of the school is a good idea.”

  “Noooo.” I half- laughed. “I’m sorry but I really don’t think it’s a good idea and here’s why: You have no chance whatsoever of winning.”

  “I think I have some pretty good ideas for Fairport,” James said to the chessboard.

  “He sure does,” seconded my brother, his voice vibrating with enthusiasm. “James has come up with some great ideas for our school.”

  “James, please listen to reason.” I pulled up a folding chair. “You may have some extraordinary ideas for Fairport. You may have the most wonderful ideas in the world for our school. In fact, I’m sure you even have some really noble hopes and wishes! But you still don’t have a chance!” Alex’s eyes pierced me with a laser stare. “Well, someone needs to tell him,” I said to my brother.

  James began tapping one of the pawns on the edge of the table. “I realize there’s a good possibility I won’t win, but I thought getting some of these ideas out there might help the students— might give them something to think about. Maybe even inspire them.”

  A good possibility? I shook my head. “Let me try to explain.” I pulled my chair even closer and leaned forward, my back straight. “You’re dealing with individuals who don’t care, James.” I was speaking slowly in the hopes that James would finally understand the seriousness of the situation. “They don’t care about noble causes. They don’t care about being better people. They don’t care about making Fairport a better school.”

  James looked up. “Do you really believe that? Because I don’t. I give the students of Fairport much more credit than that.” James lifted one of the knights from the board and held it midair as he looked me in the eye. “Our classmates may act as if they don’t care, Jana, but I think that in reality they want to live good, productive lives and that they want to believe in something bigger than themselves. I think they’re aching for something to hold on to.”

  “James, stop it.” I stood up and pressed my fingers against my temples. “I honestly can’t stand to hear any more of this nonsense.” I was distraught beyond belief that our good friend wasn’t grasping what I was trying to tell him. Why was he not hearing me? He just couldn’t do this! I had to convince him to drop these ludicrous plans!

  James repeated his belief in the students of Fairport High School. It was almost pitiful the way his eyes lit up with such faith and hope.

  “Don’t you think this is up to James?” Alex said from the c avity in the couch. “Don’t you think this is his decision? It’s his life.”

  “Look, James,” I was almost pleading now. “We’re your friends. It took us a while to . . . I should say it took me a while to fully recognize who you are and well, appreciate you. But Alex and I know you. We know what you’re like and who you are and that you’re . . . you’re—” I wanted to say “a remarkable individual,” but that sounded pretty over the top, so I said, “a decent human being,” instead. “But there are people in our school who . . .”

  I didn’t know how to complete the thought. “You know Lyla Fannen. You know what she’s like. She showed her true colors that last day she ate with us after all. She isn’t exactly a fan, James. I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

  James chuckled. “No, Lyla and I don’t seem to have the same taste in clothes.”

  I widened my eyes at my brother until I realized that even Alex probably didn’t realize how much Lyla hated us now.

  “So do you think Lyla Fannen is planning to run for an office?” asked James.

  “No,” I said, still looking in Alex’s direction. It was clear that James wasn’t catching on. “Why should she? Lyla understands that she doesn’t need an official office. She has all the clout she needs without the work. She’ll help determine who wins, however. Lyla will tap her candidate of choice on the shoulder with her scepter and say, ‘You’re in!’”

  In fact, what I was coming to realize was that once Lyla knew that Alex’s best friend James was running, she might make it a point to see to it that one of her troops would be in there to annihilate and humiliate James. Maybe she was making plans right now.

  My throat tightened as I remembered something Adriana had told me a few days before that I had pushed into some little nook in my brain cavity. There was someone Lyla would be tapping on the shoulder and would use for her purposes. Carson Parker had told some of Adriana’s dance company friends that he planned to run for president. I’d shrugged it off at the time and had told Adriana that the school couldn’t get much worse anyway, but now Carson’s running suddenly seemed highly significant.

  “Was Carson Parker at that meeting yesterday?” I asked James.

  “Carson Parker?”

  “You must know who Carson Parker is! He looks a lot like that bad boy in Pinocchio, the one who turns into a donkey. Only Carson’s a bit better looking.” As a matter of fact, Carson had been the school’s Flashy Floyd until Lyla latched onto him. Straying then became out of the question.

  “You mean the one Lyla eats lunch with now?”

  “Yes.” Rumor had it they did much more than eat lunch together. I had the feeling by the way Lyla made it a point to glue herself to Carson whenever we came around that Carson was kind of a rebound, just- for- show boyfriend.

  “I did see him there. He’s one of the nine of us running for president.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s exactly what I was afraid of.” I took a deep breath, held it in, then blew it out slowly.

  “Do you think Carson would do a good job as president of Fairport?” James asked.

  “Oh, no, but he’ll still undoubtedly win. Carson will run such a nasty campaign that whoever runs against him will be made to look like the class fool. And with Lyla backing him this could end up a pretty nasty business. So do you see now, James, why it would be extremely smart of you to pull out while you still can?” I hoped he was finally getting at least a portion of the picture. With Carson Parker running James was not only looking at a lost cause but at an extremely dangerous course as well.

  James sat quietly, fully absorbing, I hoped, what I’d just said. But then he raised his head and pushed up his glasses. “I guess we’re just going to have to let the students of Fairport decide,” he said, his voice firm. “I’m sorry, Jana, but I have a feeling this is something I’m supposed to do, win or lose. And you never know. Sometimes miracles happen.”

  Heavenly stars! I looked up at the ceiling, opened my mouth, shut it, and shook my head. It wasn’t hard to guess what was happening here. I understood by now how my friend operated. He had a feeling this was the right thing to do. James was convinced that this spirit, this Holy Ghost he believed in so fervently, was sending him a message from God.

  “James, if you’re thinking your imaginary little angel might be sitting on your shoulder again, whispering in your ear, maybe you need to move out of fairy- tale land into the real world,” I snapped. “If you’re—” I didn’t finish because Alex had narrowed his eyes and was tilting his head the way he does when I’ve gone too far. I quit talking as well because, well, I didn’t feel that good myself about continuing.

  “There’s always a chance,” Alex hissed, his jaw thrust so far forward he looked like the nutcracker prince we display every Christmas, “that James is right. There’s no such thing as a lost cause. You never know.”

  I couldn’t stand it. “You’re hallucinating! You’re both hallucinating! Well, you know what? I don’t care what idiocy you two submerge yourselves in. I came here to play chess.” I picked up a pawn and slammed it down on a middle square of the board. “Do whatever absolutely ridiculous and moronic things you want to do, just please don’t, and I repeat don’t, involve me!”

  Chapter Twelve

  •••

  For someone who did not plan to be involved in my friend’s election plans, and who did not care, I got very l
ittle sleep those next two nights. I kept thinking about poor James and the terrible position he was throwing himself into. I worried about Alex as well. It struck me as tragic that someone who at one time had been a shoo-in for president of Fairport was now the captain of a lost cause. Oh, how I wished I could protect those two from the bludgeoning that I felt was sure to come!

  On Monday for approximately a second and a half, I thought things might actually be looking better for James. Adriana met me at my locker with what sounded like great news. “Carson Parker’s not running,” she said. “He didn’t have the grade point.” Before I had a chance to express my complete lack of dismay at this development, Adriana finished the story: “Lyla’s running now.”

  As I widened my eyes, Adriana looked around to make sure no one had seen her relay the information. “Oh, boy,” I said, my mouth remaining open. “Oh, boy!” I tapped the door of my locker with my fist, then pressed my forehead against it.

  This was not only completely and thoroughly unexpected but oh- so not good. I pulled away, took a deep breath, and studied the industrial floor tiles and dull walls that were so unlike the posh pleasant halls of the private school where Mom had wanted us to go. Then I looked back at my friend. “Okay, thanks, Adriana. I’ll get the message to James and Alex.”

  -B-

  “Now there is no doubt whatsoever that you will need to talk James into backing out,” I almost shouted to my brother a few minutes later from my cell phone in Uncle Bartho’s old BMW. I’d begged Mom not to trade in the car because driving it made me feel close to our uncle.

  “I’ll tell him,” Alex said, “but I’ll betcha it won’t change anything.”

  He was right, and we both knew it.

  After I’d hung up, I just sat there in the school parking lot watching students swarming to their vehicles. I gained consciousness, however, when I noticed Lyla and Carson a few spaces down, laughing at Angela Corbotta who seemed to be having some difficulty getting into her small Focus. Next to James’s friend Cassie, Angela was the largest girl in the school.

  Lyla spotted me, lifted her hand, and waved at me with delicate fingers, smiling sarcastically. I quickly started the car, jerked it into gear, then slammed on my brakes as I realized I was about to hit a truck that didn’t look like it needed any more damage done to it. “My fault. Sorry,” I called out to the driver, a boy with acne, braces, and bad hair.

  “Hey, Jana, be careful! You might kill off one of Wickenbee’s three votes,” Carson called. Lyla laughed happily and leaned into him as I quickly rolled up the car window.

  -B-

  That night I slept even more fitfully than I had the nights before. I dreamed that I was part of a group of people partying on the top floor of a tall building. Alex and James and others were walking along a path far below. The building turned into a school— my school. Dressed in well- made, designer clothing, Lyla and Carson spotted those below and began shouting insults at them. Angela Corbotta was on the path below and so was the boy with bad hair I’d almost run into earlier that day. But then they began aiming their insults at James and Alex. I leaned out a high window and called down to the two tiny dots on the path. “For heaven’s sake, you’d better come up here where you belong and hurry!”

  Lyla pulled me away from the window. “We don’t want them up here,” she said.

  “It’s my brother and our friend,” I explained. “They need to enter our building and be a part of things here.”

  “We don’t want you here either,” Lyla sneered.

  In the next frame of my dream I was walking with James and Alex down below on the pavement in front of the building. We were all wearing pants that were too short and multi- colored western shirts with sleeves that didn’t come anywhere near our wrist bones and monstrously hideous glasses.

  “Look at her!” someone from the building shouted, pointing at me. Several more people laughed. Strangely, I didn’t seem to mind and instead felt relieved the focus was no longer on Alex and James. In fact, when Lyla and Carson and the others shifted their attention back to James and Alex and started taunting them again, I charged up the building after them, but James reached out to stop me.

  “They can’t get away with that,” I raged.

  “Look at the loser!” the people in the building yelled. “Hey, James Orville! Been to church lately, Wickenbee? Hey, Friar James!”

  “Just ignore them,” Alex said. But I didn’t.

  “You can’t talk to my friend like that!” I started climbing the building like Spiderman. But the group had grown to hundreds of people and all of them had the same fox- red hair as Lyla Fannen. They shouted insults right back until they were all shouting in unison.

  Then the building turned into the bleachers of a huge stadium. Alex, James, and I were on the football field, which had acquired squares until it looked like a giant chessboard. Thousands of people in the stands were booing at us and shouting “Losers! Losers!” as if we were the players of the opposing team! When they started throwing things at us, I felt even worse, like a referee. “Push ’em back! Push ’em back! Waaaay back! Losers! Losers! Back! Back!” A tortilla slapped me across the side of my face. More tortillas pelted me, pelted us all, along with empty beer and soda cans, and then potatoes started coming down. I turned and jumped from one square to another to avoid getting hit.

  Then suddenly I was hungry and poor again. I began picking up the tortillas and potatoes and stuffing them into my pockets. Lyla was laughing and typing words on a laptop. The words scrolled across the scoreboard in ten- foot high red letters: Jana Bennings is the biggest loser of all! The words turned into pictures and then a scene unfolded showing me as I looked in eighth grade in that filthy motel lobby, begging the manager for a few more days of credit. I broke out in a cold sweat.

  “Wake up, Sweetheart.” Mom was pushing on my back gently. “Jana, you need to get ready. Alex left for jazz band practice almost twenty minutes ago.”

  Jerking awake, I felt great relief as I realized I was not on a football field but in my own bed and that nobody was throwing anything at me, and that best of all, no scoreboard was revealing any of the more private moments of my life. “Why are you dressed up this early?” I asked my mother.

  “Mary Jane and some of the ladies from her church need to get all the toys and quilts for the orphans in Kenya ready today to send to the Salt Lake headquarters. I offered to help. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

  “I think so.” Mom had mentioned a service project several days before with what I called the Relief Sisters of the Mormon Church. I didn’t need my contacts in to see she’d apparently decided the event called for her nice gray tweed pants and her royal blue silk blouse. She smelled good too— a combination of vanilla lotion and rose bath powder.

  Smelling the sweet smell that represented my mother would normally have comforted me, but it didn’t help me on this

  morning. “I don’t feel very well,” I moaned. “I have a terrible headache.” It was oh- so true. My head felt like a giant piñata.

  “Do you need to stay home from school?”

  “School?” I tried to sit up. “I thought it was Saturday or Sunday.”

  “It’s Tuesday.” Mom chuckled quietly. “I told you that Alex left for jazz band practice, remember?” She cocked her head. “You really didn’t know it was the middle of the week?”

  “Ooooh,” I groaned. “Is it really Tuesday? Why couldn’t it be Saturday?”

  Mom frowned. “I’ll bring you a glass of water,” she offered and left the room.

  I pressed the back of my head into my goose- down pillow but then sat up. I tend to get confused and nauseated when I’m overly tired and if this was a school day then I needed to force my limbs to move and my muscles to cooperate. What classes did I have?

  I made an attempt to mentally go through my schedule but couldn’t seem to find my way past first period French. Why wasn’t my brain functioning? At last I was able to emerge from the cotton balls stuffing
my brain. Second period: A.P. English. English was fine. Third: A.P. American History. We’d just had the unit test, and I was well ahead of schedule on my research paper. Art—no problem. A.P. Physics: again ahead of schedule. Business management? I could catch up on what I missed. A.P. Psych: Not good . . . We were working on a supposed group project, which, of course, meant that I was single- handedly preparing it. Well, maybe just for today the other group members could get a taste of life without Jana Bennings. Maybe they could even do some of the work for a change. I thought harder. I came to the conclusion that I could miss school this one day without jeopardizing my grades.

  Mom came back with a glass of ice water in one hand and a worried expression on her face. She felt my head and checked my pulse. “At least you don’t seem to have a fever. But maybe we should take your temperature just to make sure.”

  “I’m sure I don’t have a temperature. I’m just suffering from sleep deprivation.”

  “I’m not surprised. You work far too hard. I know you like to do well in your classes, but four accelerated courses is just too heavy a load even for someone as intelligent as you are.”

  I swallowed the water quickly, glad I’d chosen not to tell Mom quite yet that I’d already approached Adriana’s father about doing some part- time bookkeeping for his financial planning firm. I was hoping to become a little more knowledgeable about money and earn a few extra dollars, but I knew what my mother would say about it. “We have plenty of money, thanks to your uncle,” was her theme song. But we’d found out the hard way plenty could disappear overnight. I’d been nervous when Mom had switched from full- time to part- time, working only a couple of days a week. To my relief, she’d picked up some editing assignments on the side and ended up making decent enough money, but I still didn’t want to take any chances. Mom and her sisters were completely right- brained when it came to finances and not one of them thought things through clearly or pragmatically when it came to that area.