“Just like a man to fall apart when separated from a woman, if you can even call it a man.”

“I think it’s romantic. It’s about self-sacrifice. Eternal love.”

“Oh, snap out of it, Allie. It’s fiction. Pure boneheaded sexist fiction. I still don’t know why you suggested reading it. It’s like reading an ancient manuscript written in some extinct language by some male dinosaur.”

“Because it’s a classic and it’s for class. Speaking of, I have to go to my next one. See you at practice?”

“Yeah.”

Allie pretty much knew that the author’s male gaze and his objectification of women would come up during the class discussion, so she didn’t take the bait that Missy had just dangled in front of her. Besides, she loved Missy, her teammate, friend, and feminist compass, and didn’t want to fracture their relationship. She admired Missy’s outspokenness, especially on matters of equity and social justice. And her flair for drama. No one will forget the day when Missy marched through the cafeteria, twisting left, then right, and left again at her sacroiliac joint, with the phalanges of both hands high above her skull holding the book with “#SkeletettesToo” scrawled in black Sharpie across the cover.

Allie agreed with Missy on most things, but she had a hard time squaring Missy’s world view with her own reality. Although Allie’s mother was the confident proactive one who had filed for the divorce and who had stood to gain more from the postmortem nuptial agreement, she, not Allie’s father, was the one who fell apart when all was said and done and couldn’t pull herself back together. Fearing for his daughter’s safety and security, Allie’s father eventually gained full custody. She’d been living with him ever since.

About eighteen months or two years after the events which terminate this story, when search was made in that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days previously, and to whom Charles VIII. had granted the favor of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrézarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.

[Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Volume 2, Book 11, Chapter 4, “The Marriage of Quasimodo”]

“So, after all that he just falls apart?”

“What were you expecting, Allie, some sort of apotheosis?”

“He was christlike.”

“He was a freak.”

Quasimodo’s pitiful exit left Allie feeling more eviscerated than usual. She was the one who had suggested after the fire that they read the novel in class. She thought—or she assumed as she wended her way through the chapters—that the author would end the story by celebrating him for the guardian angel she believed he was. Instead, Quasimodo fell apart in tragic yet predictable fashion just like an ordinary skeleton.

Allie knew a bit about being a freak. She was not a typical skeleton. No, she was a mermaid skeleton with chickpeas for eyes. Pretty much no one at school tormented her about it, thank heavens, especially not her friends on the swim team. After all, they depended on her to propel them to glory in the 100-meter relay at every meet.

Her fishtail gave her an obvious natural advantage in the pool, but her eyes were her secret strength. Convex and encapsulated in impermeable translucent skins, Allie’s big garbanzos added buoyancy and all but eliminated eye socket drag, a perpetual source of frustration and barrier to greatness for the anatomically normative skeletons on the team.

“Everyone has their superpowers,” said a dead priest once from the other side of the screen. “Consider yours God’s gifts.” Those reassuring words stuck with Allie long after her first confession, and she tried at every flip turn to live up to them. Etched in the occiput of her cranium, they were always in the back of her mind.