Beverly Quarter Chapter 21
MABA 2025 starts soon. Sign up here! MABA is Make America Burpee Again, the annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day every day in January. The theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together. Watch: The point is to end loneliness because you can’t be lonely if you’re doing burpees outside with your friends.
Last year, 1,200 men, women and children on seven continents did 3 million burpees. We will beat those totals (well, except the continents) this year, right?
On Tuesdays, I’m using this newsletter to publish a book called Beverly Quarter: Invisible Frenemy. It’s got nothing to do with the rest of the content of this newsletter. I mean, for real: It doesn’t even contain the word burpee. But I think you’ll like it.
I wrote it to make my kids laugh, their friends laugh, and their parents laugh. I’m guessing most of you have kids, or know kids, or were kids, so you’re my target audience. I explain the book’s backstory here.
Give this chapter a read. If you like it, read it to your kids, their friends, their friends’ parents, random strangers on the street, etc.
I’ll keep publishing the newsletter as usual on Thursdays. This will just be bonus content. Links to previous chapters are below.
Chapter 21
Sally ran backstage.
Beverly Quarter was yelling as Sally approached. “YOU TOLD ME THIS WAS THE LAST THING! I’M NOT TAKING HER OR HER DAD ANYWHERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? I WON’T DO IT! I’M DONE. D-U-N-N! DONE.”
Before Sally could get to Beverly Quarter, Laurie Knight stepped in front of her. Her face was beet red. She tried to speak but only mumbled incoherently about tigers and tails and show-off movie stars.
She grabbed a brown paper lunch bag out of her purse—she always had a couple in there because in 27 dance recitals, there was always something that made her hyperventilate. There was the time little Jane had run out on stage in her underpants because she had been going to the bathroom when the show started. There was the time little Katie had run out on stage during the first performance, gotten scared, and refused to take another step. She stood, right there, through the whole night’s performances. The only evidence she was alive and had not turned into a statue was when she accepted Cheez-its offered to her as a snack during intermission. She ate them without moving.
This, though, this was … Laurie Knight couldn’t finish that thought. She put the bag to her face and tried to calm down. Her breaths came in short, concussive bursts.
She took the bag off of her face, hoping she had calmed down. Out of her mouth came only unintelligible staccato bursts.
Laurie Knight put the bag back to her face. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, the world started to sway, and she passed out backward. Luckily she was standing in front of a couch and landed there. She woke up briefly two minutes later. The recital was still going on, so backstage was empty except for one little girl. Laurie Knight put on her glasses and realized it was Sally. Her first thought was to go over there and scream at her. But she stopped. Sally appeared to be having an animated conversation with … nobody.
“I TOLD YOU IT WAS A BAD IDEA,” Sally said.
And then, “BEVERLY QUARTER I HATE YOU AND NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.”
As the word, “again” left her mouth, Laurie Knight saw a flickering, like a TV that is shorting out. It looked like a little girl standing there. And then just as suddenly, she was gone.
“Who are you talking to?” Laurie Knight asked Sally.
Sally jumped. She did not know anybody was there.
“My invisible friend. This is all her fault,” Sally said. “She made me do it.”
The light flickered again. It acquired substance. Laurie Knight found herself face to face with a girl who one second ago had not been there.
“This has been one crazy night, huh?” Beverly Quarter said, as if she was an eyewitness and not the cause of the craziness.
Laurie Knight nodded.
“Well it’s not half as crazy as you!” Beverly Quarter said. Now she mimicked Laurie Knight perfectly, echoing her own words back to her: “Just remember, there’s no such thing as wrong out on that dance floor tonight. If you feel it, you must do it, and if you do it, it’s right.” At hearing her own words, Laurie Knight was proud of what she considered the wisdom in them.
Beverly Quarter interrupted her reflection about her own brilliance. “This is your fault. Sally deserved a better role.”
Now Beverly Quarter leaned close to Laurie Knight. “I’m invisible,” she whispered. “That means you can’t see me. But you can. Isn’t that weird?”
She stepped back to let that sink in.
Laurie Knight’s eyes nearly swallowed her face. She started to tremble.
Then Beverly Quarter said, barely above a whisper, “boo.”
Laurie Knight screamed. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. To this day, she’s not sure if everything that happened that night was real or part of a feverish dream.
Just in case, she never had tigers in her dance recitals again.