Beverly Quarter: Invisible Frenemy (Chapter 1)

An experiment in fiction

Starting today, I’m going to use this newsletter to publish a book I wrote. It’s called Beverly Quarter: Invisible Frenemy. I have been unsuccessful in trying to sell it to a traditional publisher. But I’m proud of it, and I don’t want it to just sit in my computer forever.

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. If any of this intrigues you, I explain the book’s backstory here.

Give the first 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.

Beverly Quarter: Invisible Frenemy

By Matt Crossman

Chapter 1

Sally stood at the top of the slide, as she had 10,000 times before. She peered down from the metal plateau. The great, gaping, yawning distance to the ground startled her. She turned her attention to the bright yellow slide. There were so many turns she couldn’t count them all before the slide threw children off of its ledge and onto the dirt. She couldn’t swear to this, but she thought there were scorch marks on the ground from other children landing there with their bottoms on fire.

Each of the 10,000 times she had stood here before, she had said the same thing. “I don’t think this is a good idea.” And each of the 10,000 times Sally had said that, she had turned around and climbed back down the ladder without going down the slide.

“Honey,” her dad had said the first 50 times or so, “All you have to do is make sure the slide is clear, and you’ll be fine. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

The worst thing? The absolute worst thing? Oh, she had an answer for that, all right, and that’s why her dad stopped asking after 50 times.

Sally had created a mental picture of what a trip down the slide would be like. The first turn would be so fast that because of the sheer velocity, her left arm would go flying off of her body and hit the next kid in line at the top. She always figured he would take it home as a souvenir. The next turn would be so fast that her right arm would elongate like silly string until it eventually slinked out of her shoulder socket and blew away in the wind. A collision with the roof of the tunnel would cost her her right leg. The darkness of the tunnel would be so all encompassing that she would be permanently blinded.

When she finally got to the bottom, she would be so scared over the fact she was blind and missing two arms and a leg that she would scream. The scream would be so loud she would go deaf. She would finally calm down, content to know that even though she was blind, deaf and had no arms, at least she had one leg. And then, because she was deaf, she would not hear the screams from the next kid on his way down the slide. He would get to the end, fly off of it, land on her leg, and break it clean off.

All of this she recited, with only slight variations, to her dad 50 times. She told him it made no difference if the slide was clear or not.

So, yeah, she was afraid of that slide. She and her parents called it The Slide of Death.

Her dad had offered to slide down with her to make her feel comfortable. But Sally was the only little girl in the world who read the park rules, and not only read them but followed them, and those rules clearly stated only one person was allowed on the slide at a time. “It’s right there in the Sandusky Conclusion,” she said to her dad, a reference to a meeting of park administrators in 1946 about which Sally was a renowned expert.

Sometimes she stayed up there on the plateau only a fraction of a second. Sometimes she stayed up there for hours, arguing out loud with herself about whether to try the slide, just this once, as kids filed past her one after one, taking their turns. The kids at the park were used to this routine—accustomed to her long pauses at the top, followed by tearful climbs down. The other kids sometimes called her “No Slide Sally,” though never to her face.

There she was again, a day like the 30 before it that summer, and like every day the summer before that and the summer before that. Except for our story about her and her adventures begins today. So you know something new happens today.

Once again, she said, out loud, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

She had just gotten to the ladder to start her way down when she realized there was somebody coming up the slide. “You’re supposed to go up the ladder and down the slide,” Sally said. Not only was she the only little girl in the world who read the rules at the park, she was also the only little girl in the world who recited those rules to other kids. At most parks she visited, she could quote the rules verbatim.

“I know,” the girl said. She must be new. Most kids who played in the park at Whistlers Chase knew to just ignore Sally when she started in about following the rules. “I’m Beverly Quarter. I heard you say, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’ And you’re right. It’s not a good idea. It’s a GREAT idea! Watch me go, then I’ll come back up, and you can go right before me. I’ll help you! Deal?”

Help me? Sally thought. You want to help me lose both my arms, both my legs, my vision and my hearing? Why would I want help with that?

Before Sally could say anything, Beverly Quarter launched herself down the slide. She screamed with delight through the turns, howled like a banshee in the tunnel then sang “turn turn turn” as she entered the final phase. Sally heard a pop, which she assumed was Beverly Quarter breaking the sound barrier.

Almost as fast as she had gone down, Beverly Quarter was back up at the top. In fact, Sally didn’t even see how she got to the top. All of a sudden there she was, breathless and giggling. She grabbed Sally’s hands in both of hers.

“Now it’s your turn! You can do it!”

Before Sally knew what she was doing, she turned around and sat down on the top of the slide. She had actually moved from the plateau to the slide. This might not seem like a big deal. But it was. It was the difference between your dad scooping ice cream into a bowl and giving you that bowl full of ice cream. You still haven’t eaten it, but you can. In all of her years of going to this park, of all the 10,000 times she had climbed to the top of the slide, she had never, ever, ever done this.

Like, zero times.

Her butt rested on the start of the slide. Her feet, encased in pink sneakers, dangled a few feet down it.

She felt like an Apollo astronaut, strapped into a rocket bound for the moon, moments before takeoff. Only braver. A million billion trillion times braver.

Sally looked down the long, lonely slide. It was so long her entire life could pass before her eyes, six or seven times, before she reached the end.

Inside her head, a furious argument raged. She wanted to go, she didn’t want to go. She wanted to go, she didn’t want to go. All of a sudden, she felt Beverly Quarter’s small hand on her back. “Let me help you,” Beverly Quarter said in a still, small voice.

Then Beverly Quarter pushed gently on her back, and Sally started down the Slide of Death.