Beverly Quarter Chapter 25
MABA starts Wednesday
MABA 2025 starts Wednesday. 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.
Early this year, 1,200 men, women and children on seven continents did 3 million burpees. We will beat those totals (well, except the continents) in 2025, 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 25
They had been standing there debating what to do for 10 minutes when Sally noticed Sophie had wandered off. She was maybe 500 yards down the sidewalk. Every few minutes, Sophie stopped, bent over to pick something up and popped that something into her mouth.
Sally rallied the kids around her and they all ran up to Sophie. She was still chewing.
“What are you eating?” she asked.
“Grapes!” Sophie said excitedly. “It’s like there’s a trail of them.”
“REALLY?” asked Sally. “Are they green?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said, with grape juice dribbling down her chin. “Why?”
“Those are my dad’s grapes! He must be leaving them as a trail!”
Now Corder Quarter joined the conversation. “He still loves grapes? That’s all he ever ate when he was little.”
“He has them in his pocket every time we go anywhere. My mom thinks it’s totally weird. She told him if he ever leaves them in his pocket and they wind up in the washer, she’ll never buy grapes again. But he always eats them,” she said. “Always. Until now.”
They followed the grapes for 12 more minutes. Six Mackenzies passed out from exhaustion in that time. The odometer on Sally’s watch said they had already walked 1.2 miles that day—more than 10 times longer than the Hike Of Ridiculous Length About Which Nobody Who Went On It Speaks.
The trail of grapes led to a park, and from far off Sally could see Beverly Quarter tied to the swing set. As Sally ran to her, she noticed that the swing chains did not appear to be connected to anything. And there were play things she had never seen before. One of them looked like a torture device.
As Sally entered the circle play area, she looked up at the slide. It was the most enormous structure she had ever seen in her life.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said to herself.
The top of it was in the clouds. A sign called it The Imaginary World’s Real Slide of Death That Could Kill You AND Take Your Life At The Same Time But You Should Ride Anyway Because It’s Fun (The Slide We Mean Not Dying).
Under the name was a list of the park rules.
“Help me,” Beverly Quarter croaked. White foam bubbled around her lips. “Read the rules later.”
“Hold on,” Sally said. She was the only little girl in the world who always read the rules, and she wasn’t going to stop now. Even though she was a super-fast reader, it took her 27 minutes to get through all of them. They were very specific about what constituted running. Under the rules was a description of the slide from the manufacturer. It reminded her of the seminal description of the You Must Be Crazy to Ride this Slide at the Olympic Park in Munich. It contained the words, “certain death” and “no chance of success.”
“What are we waiting for?” she mumbled to herself as she finally she arrived at Beverly Quarter’s side. She gave her a sip of Coke from a glass bottle, and that healed everything that ailed her, instantly.
“I knew you’d come find me,” Beverly Quarter said. “I’m sorry about the dance recital. My Uncle Nailglue wanted to lead you here. He really hates your dad. He wants to take you on The Imaginary World’s Real Slide of Death That Could Kill You AND Take Your Life At The Same Time But You Should Ride Anyway Because It’s Fun (The Slide We Mean Not Dying) because he thinks that will scare you so bad you become invisible.”
Sally scratched her head. “Did he come through here? He had my dad. Now that I’ve rescued you, I have to rescue him.”
“There,” Beverly Quarter said, and pointed up. A shadowy figure moved smoothly along the stairs. They watched as it disappeared into the clouds.
“You stay here,” Sally said to Beverly Quarter as she ran toward the slide, “And stop them if they come down. After they’ve disembarked from the slide of course. Gotta follow the rules.”