Blind Allie 2:2

“ Do you know how many young skeletons are now orphans because of SAGS?”

“Jesus Christ, Allie. Are you still fixated on that? It’s your turn. Get on the damn block. The ice-cold water will do you some good, now more than ever. Girl gotta fly!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. And this fish gotta swim!”

Missy’s colorful language, especially her proclivity to blaspheme, didn’t sit well with Allie this time for some reason, but she looked past it, reminding herself that sometimes words are just words. She wouldn’t even have thought anything of it had her Bible study friends not pointed it out to her recently. Allie wasn’t in the cafeteria that day to witness it for herself, but apparently, when Missy told them to fuck off for the Lord’s sake, they responded with a few verses from Skelexodus and danced macabrely out of the cafeteria and down the hall.

Allie wouldn’t have thought much about the orphaned skeletons either were it not for the book and her own story. Quasimodo was one in a long line of famous foundlings in human history and popular culture, falling somewhere between Moses and Edward Scissorhands. As tropes go, he was almost certainly the ugliest and unluckiest one (though Scissorhands was a close second, and Moses was denied entry into the Promised Land), but he was worthy of love and accessible to Allie in a way that neither Esmeralda nor any of the other characters were.

Allie wasn’t anything close to famous, but she, too, was a foundling. Her parents had found her at an outdoor market, abandoned on a makeshift bed of crushed ice that someone had hastily arranged on the pavement between neighboring stands of seafood and legumes. Allie was too numb from the cold that day to remember any of it, and she was too embarrassed today to reveal anything about her humble origins to her friends. Although skeletons have nothing to hide (nor anywhere to hide anything), Allie’s parents reluctantly agreed to keep the story a secret.

To this day, Allie wonders who came up with the idea of the chickpeas.