Beverly Quarter Chapter 23
MABA 2025 is almost here
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?
Also: You're not going to do 3,100 burpees and not buy a shirt, are you?
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 23
Sally’s dad carried two lawn chairs, two bottles of water, sandwiches, apples, oranges, potato chips, peanuts, pretzels, hummus, a cooler full of sandwiches, a dry erase board, dry erase markers and umbrella in one hand and a video camera, corn chips, salsa, bread, Nutella, knives, forks, spoons and a dehumidifier in the other. He had a banana, pineapple, dried cranberries, raisins, mango and trail mix in his left pants pocket. As was his custom, his right pocket was full of grapes. He balanced his phone on his head.
Sally carried one napkin, which she dropped and let the wind blow away.
“Did you text everybody?” Sally asked.
“SALLY!” her dad said. That’s what he always said when she asked him the same question 67 times in five minutes. “Yes, I texted everybody. Yes, I told them to come to the park. Yes, I told them what time. Yes, I told everybody to bring their invisible friends. No, I did not tell them what this was about because that would be impossible to explain in a text. PLEASE stop asking me!”
“Sorry, Dad,” Sally said.
She was nervous. She had concocted an elaborate plan to rescue Beverly Quarter, and she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. If that meant checking the details 67 times in five minutes, she was fine with that, even if her dad wasn’t.
“Here come the twins,” Sally said as her dad set the places on the picnic table. “Make sure you know which one is which.”
“I got this,” her dad said.
“Hi, Charlene,” he said to the one who arrived first, “welcome to the meeting. Thanks for coming.”
“I’m Marlene,” she said.
“Oh, sorry. Did you bring your invisible friend?”
Marlene just rolled her eyes and sighed deeply, which in her house meant, “yes.”
Charlene, apparently, arrived next. Seeking to avoid further humiliation, Sally’s dad simply said, “Hi, sweetheart.”
One by one the children arrived with their dads. They wore sneakers and costume jewelry and serious expressions, in the middle of July. The children sat on a picnic table underneath a wooden pavilion supported by wooden poles. To their right was a swing set and a jungle gym. Nobody played on either one, except for the dads.
One dad stood on top of the tube you were supposed to crawl through. He jumped off of it and tried to catch a football thrown by another dad. Sally’s dad videotaped this, deleting each dropped attempt. He planned to share the video, if the guy ever caught the ball.
Sally was the only little girl in the world who read the rules at the park, and she had read the rules at this park so many times she had them memorized. She pointed out that this activity violated at least three of the rules—the dads were too old; you were supposed to go through the tunnel, not climb on top of it; and jumping was strictly prohibited. The dads waved off her concerns. She knew better than to fight all the dads at once. She walked over to the pavilion and called the meeting to order.
All the kids’ eyes were on Sally.
Sally’s dad had showed her a YouTube video of a movie called Patton earlier that morning, and she was pretending to be him. As she watched it, she wished she had quoted it at the recital. She was smart enough not to say that out loud. She had her Darth Vader baseball hat on. Her t-shirt said “Team Super Cute.”
She paced back and forth the length of the concrete pad upon which the picnic table stood. The shoe laces on her pink sneakers were double-tied. She carried her collapsible green light saber like an old man carries a cane.
She was silent for a long time. She was sizing up her friends, trying to impress upon them how serious this was. When finally she spoke, she wanted to have their full undivided attention. “Your mission,” she said, “should you choose to …“
“Look!” Clare interrupted. “A caterpillar!”
She pointed, and everyone gaped at a long, thin green thing on the ground. Everyone jumped down to inspect it. Sophie, known as the kid who will eat anything, picked it up, stuffed it in her mouth and started chewing. It was crunchy. “It’s not a caterpillar,” she said, disappointed. “It’s a green bean. A crunchy green bean.”
This caused a great disturbance for 10 minutes, as the kids openly debated what the grossest thing Sophie ever ate was. If Sophie’s opinion matters most, the worms in the school parking lot were the grossest. She said their guts tasted terrible, and that was made worse by the way they squished between the gaps in her teeth. But those who beheld Sophie’s grossness agreed that the time she drank the water coming out of the downspout at the chicken farm was the grossest.
Sally finally got their attention by banging her light saber on the wooden poles as she walked the outside of the cement platform. The light saber flickered ever so slightly with each tap.
“Today,” she said, and when her dad told the story later, he swore that word echoed across the length and width of Whistlers Chase, “we declare our invisible friends visible. We stop hiding them. We bring them out of the shadows!”
And then a whole bunch of things happened at once. There were pops and screams and whooshing sounds. And where there once had been five girls, now there were five girls and a menagerie of … of … of people-ish creatures and animals and things that defy description. And not only were the invisible friends now visible, they were also audible. They spoke English and Indian and Russian and made-up languages. But somehow, everybody understood everything.
Each of the twins had an invisible friend that looked exactly like their sister. It was uncanny. Charlene’s invisible friend looked like Marlene and Marlene’s invisible friend looked like Charlene. Oh gosh, it wasn’t the other way around was it? Did Charlene’s invisible friend look like Charlene? It was hard to know. “I’m never going to figure this out,” Sally’s dad muttered under his breath as he lay on the ground nursing the ankle he twisted when he landed after catching the football.
When everybody calmed down—and this took a good 40 minutes, and included time on the swing set, four fights, two crying calls home to separate moms and a rousing game of tag—Sally laid out the circumstances.
“You might have heard what happened last night at the dance recital,” she began.
“I heard it was awesome.”
“I heard you barfed.”
“There was a dance recital?”
“QUIET,” Sally shouted. “But you don’t know what happened afterward. Beverly Quarter disappeared. And I don’t mean in an invisible way. I mean, she is missing!”
“Who’s Beverly Quarter?” Ella’s dad asked from atop the slide.
“Sally’s invisible friend. Well, frenemy,” Sally’s dad said.
“If she’s invisible, how do you know she’s missing?” Ella’s dad asked.
“Shut up and listen.”
Sally started talking again. “I called you here today to see who will lead us to the invisible land. I know we can get there. I just don’t know how. Beverly Quarter started to tell me. She disappeared before she could finish. Now, you invisible friends, I need one of you to lead us to her.”
What followed was 30 seconds of silence, the longest any of them had ever been quiet in their lives. Ella bit her lip, deep in thought. Sophie bit her lip, thinking about donuts stuffed with mud and bird guts. Clare bit her lip and daydreamed about a castle made of licorice. Finally, a unicorn with a horn made of a corn chip who said his name was Raillatot, spoke up.
“I can take you there. But it won’t be easy.”
He paused and looked around. “Who are you?” Sally asked.
“I’m Mackenzie’s invisible friend,” he said. There were 37 Mackenzie’s in Whistler’s Chase. Sally didn’t think to ask him to specify which one, an oversight she would later regret.
Raillatot continued. “It will be the greatest challenge any of you have faced in your lives. It will include—”
“EWWW another caterpillar!”
Sophie ate it. “Yep,” she said. “That actually was a caterpillar.”
This loud to a loud uproar of “gross!” and “EWW!” The unicorn got everybody’s attention by blowing out of his corn chip horn music that sounded like an ice cream truck. This of course led to 20 minutes of the kids begging for ice cream from the dads, to which they relented, and an hour-long trip to the ice cream shop, and finally they came back to the park to hear what Raillatot had to say.
The girls all took their seats on the picnic tables. Sugar coarsed through their veins. Raillatot paced back and forth.
“This trip to Invisible Land will test you to your core. There will be no nap time, no rest, no stories before bed time. You will walk farther than you’ve ever walked. Remember that time your dads took you hiking?”
Sally leaned over to Ella and nudged her. They remembered all right. They didn’t call it The Hike Of Ridiculous Length About Which Nobody Who Went On It Speaks for nothing. They shuddered together as Raillatot spoke.
“Remember how you cried after five minutes? It will be worse than that, a million-billion-zillion times worse. You will cry harder than you’ve ev—”
“Will there be snack time?” Sophie asked.
“Of course. Don’t be ridiculous. I said it would be hard, not impossible.”
“YAY!” everyone said.
“All we have to do is find the magic bush in The Adventure. It’s a portal to our world. But no real kid has ever gone through it. I don’t know if your atoms will be properly reassembled when you come through the other side or if you’ll be annihilated and spend eternity in the nameless ether.”
None of the kids knew what portal meant, never mind atoms or annihilated or eternity or ether. So they weren’t scared. They decided unanimously to go as soon as possible, which meant two weeks from the following Tuesday at 4 a.m., because that was the first time none of them had something previously planned.