Beverly Quarter Chapter 24
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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 24
It was dark, of course, when the kids, their invisible friends and Sally’s dad gathered at the park at 4 a.m. on that Tuesday morning. Two of the girls, both named Mackenzie, had to drop out because they had emergency soccer practice from 4 a.m. until 8:45 p.m.
Sally’s dad carried two flashlights, firewood, four tents, a skateboard, a stuffed Mickey Mouse, a dishwasher, a tool kit, a box of band aids and enough gauze to relace the Hoover Dam. He wore two headlamps across his forehead and had three more strapped across his chest. And, as always, he had the right front pocket of his pants stuffed full of grapes.
Raillatot—the unicorn with the corn chip for a horn—walked out of the park and toward The Adventure. He stopped at a bush.
“This is it,” he said. “This is where we travel to Imaginary Land. This is where we all learn if we have what it takes. This is where our courage will be—“
“EWWW!” said one of the Mackenzies. She was looking at Sophie, who was sticking her tongue out. There was a bug crawling on it. She let the bug walk right into her mouth, then she chewed it and swallowed.
Sally spoke up.
“I’ll go first,” Sally said, but nobody heard her. She shouted, “I’LL GO FIRST!”
Everyone was too stunned to react as she ran and jumped feet first into the bush. She disappeared.
There was silence for one, two, three, 10 full seconds. Finally, as if from somewhere else, Sally spoke.
“Are you guys coming or what?”
She had not been annihilated. She would not spend eternity in the nameless ether. She had merely “jumped” for lack of a better term, into another world. It was as easy as stepping into a closet, or maybe a wardrobe. Soon the rest of the kids joined her.
They looked around. It looked like their own world, if they had used finger paints to fill in the colors. Everything was bright and loud and a little messy. Trees looked like trees, only the shapes were somehow less distinct. Like, the center of the tree looked normal, but as your eyes moved to the edge, the color faded and blurred into the sky.
They had landed on a path of yellow tile about the size of a sidewalk. There was a handwritten sign that said “To Find Beverly Quarter and Corder Quarter, Go This Way.”
“Well, that sure makes things easier,” Sally’s dad said. But he was suspicious that their journey into another world had dropped them into (apparently) the one place in that whole world that would be helpful to them. “I hope it’s not a trap.”
“It’s not a trap,” said Raillatot.
“And who are you again?”
“I’m Mackenzie’s invisible friend, Raillatot,” he said.
Her dad looked at all the little girls. “Which one of you is Mackenzie?” he said. Ten hands went up. “Oh, never mind,” he said.
“You can trust me,” Raillatot said. “Follow me. I’ll take you to Corder Quarter.”
They walked and walked and walked some more. When they were done with that, they kept walking through a forest and then into a clearing on the outskirts of what appeared to be a small town.
As the path intersected with a sidewalk that ran parallel to a paved road, the girls and their invisible friends took a much-needed break. “My feet are killing me,” Sally said. “And I’m dying of thirst. Daddy, this is like the Hike Of Ridiculous Length About Which Nobody Who Went On It Speaks, only a million times worse. How long have we been walking?”
Her dad looked at the clock on his phone. “Eleven minutes,” he said.
Turning to Raillatot, he said, “any idea how much longer?”
“Not real—THERE HE IS!” Raillatot said. He pointed across the street to a park in the middle of a grass field. “that’s Corder Quarter!” Inside the park was a slide. A man was tied down, apparently, in the middle of the slide. Sally’s dad ran toward him. He was almost to the base of the slide when Sally yelled, “DADDY WAIT!”
Sally was the only little girl in the world who read the rules, and this park had a board at the entrance. It strictly forbade smiling, laughing, joking and smirking. “The Mulheisen approach,” Sally said to herself approvingly.
She moved her index finger down the list. Her dad joined her. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“A ‘once you start, you can’t stop rule,’” she said. “Back in the 1970s, there was a big movement in parks to prevent kids from sliding halfway down, stopping themselves, then crawling back up to slide down again. …”
Her dad looked around at the kids and their invisible friends. None of them was listening. Here she goes again with a history of safety, he thought.
“Not only did climbing up the slide increase the amount of time each kid spent on the slide—at the expense of efficiency—but it also became a major safety hazard as kids—“
“ALL RIGHT SALLY,” her dad interrupted, “get to the point.”
“The point is that starting in 1977, most parks outlawed stopping on the slide. Separated shoulders and broken collarbones almost ceased to exist as an injury, and the slide-to-time-in-park ratio nearly doubled overnight. It’s considered one of the most innovative rules in park safety history.”
“So?”
“So this park looks to be in the pre-1977 era, and I’m looking for the rule. If it’s on here, I don’t know how we’re going to get him off the slide.”
“Why can’t we just walk up the slide?”
The look on Sally’s eyes could have popped every last kernel in a bag of microwave popcorn. “Up the ladder, down the slide, Dad. It’s one of the 10 commandments of parks.”
She kept scanning the rules. “It’s not on here. We’re good to start and stop.”
She called the kids to circle around her. “The best shoes for a start and stop are made of a leather and rubber. The rubber allows the friction to slow you down. The leather gives you stability. Let me see your shoes to see who has the best equipment.”
She looked at every foot. They were all wearing flip flops. It appeared that not a single one of them had washed their feet, ever. She looked at her own feet. Her neon pink sneakers were perfect. She swallowed deeply. “Looks like I have to do it.”
Her dad heard in her voice a deep reluctance, like how she sounded before she tried an egg roll for the first time.
“You can do this, honey,” he told her. “I have confidence in you.”
“I’ve never executed this maneuver, for obvious reasons,” she said half to him, half to herself. “But I’ve read all about it. All the best literature says you have to start applying brake pressure eight feet before your desired stopping point. The world record for a successful stop is 4.25 feet. You have to be perfectly balanced. Even the slightest leaning one way or the other could spell disaster.”
Her dad stifled a laugh. “Sally, he’s a lot bigger than you. You won’t be going very fast. If you run into him, you’ll stop, and neither one of you will be hurt.”
In response she calmly walked over to the rule board, pointed to rule 87, subsection 2 and read it aloud: “Under no circumstances will one slider make contact with another.”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve never broken a park rule. I’m not going to start now.”
Sally pulled a piece of paper out of her backpack. It said, “last will and testament” on the top. The dot over the “i” in will looked like a heart. She solemnly unfolded the paper and handed it to her dad. He solemnly took it and read. “Should I die in a freak sliding accident,” it began. He scanned the rest. “You’re leaving your riddle books to Mom? I’ve read those to you 87 trillion times! What the—“
“Focus, Dad,” she said.
All the kids cheered as Sally started climbing the ladder.
She paused as she got to the top. She looked around at Imaginary Land. It was as green as a leprechaun’s daydream. She sat at the opening of the slide and looked down. She thought about how Beverly Quarter had changed her life, in ways good and bad. She would never be at the top of a slide without Beverly Quarter’s help. But she wouldn’t have been forced to be at the top of this one if it weren’t for the problems Beverly Quarter caused.
“Hurry,” Corder Quarter said. “You have to get me out of here so we can save Beverly Quarter.”
Sally scooted forward and was just about to begin her descent when her dad screamed.
“NO! STOP!”
“What’s going on? What’s the matter?”
“I don’t have time to explain,” he said. He rubbed his leg, caressing the scar that looked like a whip. “But I just remembered something, something that explains everything,” he said. “You have to be very, very careful when you go down.”
Sally started to protest. She hated when her parents knew something that she didn’t. She begged him to tell her what was going on. But he refused. All the while, he looked around the park, like he was worried he was being watched.
“I remember now,” he murmured. “It all makes sense.”
“What makes sense?” Sally said.
“Nothing, just go now, and be careful.”
Finally, Sally carefully started her descent. She over-estimated the first turn and lost control of her feet. They flittered at first and then swung wildly out of control. She was going fast, too fast, as she approached Corder Quarter. Twenty feet, 15, 10, she was out of control, her feet flying in the air. She summoned strength she didn’t know she had to finally slam her feet down. But that wasn’t until the four feet to impact mark. The rubber bottoms squeaked against the plastic slide, an unholy siren that made the hair on everybody’s head stand on end.
Her dad screamed.
It was too late. She slid almost full speed into a helpless Corder Quarter. But his body absorbed the blast. Neither one of them was hurt.
There was a bottle full of water in front of him on the slide and a full bowl of steel cut oats behind him. Sally leaned over grabbed the water and gave it to him. He drank it all in one slug. “I’m starving half to death,” he said. “I have to eat.”
“Why don’t you eat that oatmeal?” Sally’s dad said, pointing to a full bowl that was within arm’s reach of him on the slide. There was a spoon in it, and raisins placed in a smiley face.
“I’m not THAT hungry.”
Three little girls rushed to the slide. They threw up to Sally an array of Gummi bears, Starbursts and M&Ms. He devoured them.
“Good old Corder Quarter,” her dad said with a smile. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“But you sure have,” Corder Quarter said. “You’re a foot taller and twice as heavy.”
“It’s been 30 years!” her dad said, and they both laughed.
Once he was untied, Corder Quarter slid the rest of the way down the slide. Sally watched intently, waiting until he was completely out of the landing area, per rule 198.125, before she completed her trip down the slide.
Sally walked a lap around Corder Quarter. His resemblance to Beverly Quarter was uncanny. Even his body language—the way he stood—was exactly like Beverly Quarter. “Dad, what took you so long to realize the connection? He looks exactly like Beverly Quarter.”
“I know. It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” he said. “Don’t forget, I never actually saw Beverly Quarter until the night of the dance recital. I only knew Corder Quarter for a little while, maybe one summer. We played a lot of baseball together, just like you and Beverly Quarter spend all that time at the park. There was a big argument one day. His brother was stuck on the slide. I helped get him down. I never saw Corder Quarter again after that.”
He sat down on a rainbow-colored bench. “I don’t think I’ve thought about Corder Quarter since then. It’s like he was completely wiped from my memory bank until I saw Beverly Quarter’s face,” her dad said. “I still don’t remember very much. I cried for a week when I realized Corder Quarter was never coming back. But then I made some real friends and forgot all about it.”
“Wow,” said Corder Quarter. “Thanks, buddy. I see I made a big impression on your life. Now I see why my brother hates you so much.”
Everybody stopped. Was he serious? Corder Quarter started laughing. “I’m kidding. That’s the life of an invisible friend. We help you, then we disappear. In his own twisted way, that’s why Dime Quarter is so mad after all these years.”
“Dime Quarter?” Sally’s dad said. “Who’s that?”
“My brother. You probably know him as Uncle Nailglue. That’s what he calls himself now. When he found out Beverly Quarter was Sally’s invisible friend, he kidnapped me and ordered Beverly Quarter to … well I don’t know what he ordered her to do, but his master plan was to lure you here.”
Sally spoke up. “Beverly Quarter made me ruin the dance recital and almost killed me when we rode our bikes off the roof.”
“WHEN YOU WHAT?” her dad shouted.
“Nothing,” Sally said. “You have to focus, Dad. Corder Quarter, where do you think Beverly Quarter is?”
“I know exactly where she is,” a voice said. It was Raillatot. His formerly sweet voice turned menacing. “What a sweet little reunion. I’ve been waiting years to see this.”
Sally’s dad turned to look at Raillatot. “What do you mean years?”
As those words passed his lips, Raillatot began to change. “Sally I must admit, I didn’t think you’d be able to even try the stop and start move, never mind survive it. Beverly Quarter did a great job.”
He turned to face Sally’s dad. “You ruined my life. Now I’m going to ruin yours.”
Corder Quarter shouted, “Dime, no, what are you doing?”
Raillatot—now revealing himself as Dime Quarter, aka Uncle Nailglue—grew much larger. His feet grew clownishly big and they had red shoes on them. He suddenly grabbed Sally’s dad and injected him with a substance that put him to sleep, heaved him over his shoulder, and ran off.
Sally screamed. As Uncle Nailglue and her father disappeared, she collapsed into Corder Quarter’s arms.
Merry Christmas Beverly!