Mademoiselle,

J’ai le plaisir de vous informer que le dessin que vous avez soumis il y a un an environ à l’opération <<Dessine-moi Notre-Dame>> a finalement reçu une mention honorable pour sa représentation très originale de la Sainte Vierge à cheval sur la cathédrale. Il aurait reçu une médaille, mais les juges ont été embarrassés par le placement de la flèche du XIXe siècle par le célèbre architecte restaurateur et écrivain français, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

Veuillez recevoir, Madamoiselle, mes salutations distinguées,

Monseigneur de Boneville, archevêque de Paris et frère de Madame de Boneville, archiviste des Catacombes de Paris (Dead on a Rival, chapitre 13) et directrice de l’École supérieure d’espionnage for Girls (Missy Impossible, chapitre 8).

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Miss,

I have the pleasure of informing you that the design you submitted a year or so ago to the “Draw me Notre Dame” project has finally received an honorable mention for its very original depiction of the Holy Virgin astride the cathedral. It would have received a medal, but the judges were perplexed by the placement of the 19th-century spire by the famous French architect restorer and writer, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

Please receive, Mademoiselle, my best regards,

Monseigneur de Boneville, archbishop of Paris and brother of Madame de Boneville, archivist of the Catacombs of Paris (Dead on a Rival, Chapter 13) and director of the Advanced School of Espionage for Girls (Missy Impossible, Chapter 8).

“ 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.

“More than a million skeladults have been reduced to gelatin so far, Missy. And the numbers keep rising.”

“I wish my parents were among them. See you at practice.”

Allie had been obsessed with the current health crisis since the first reported case nearly 18 months ago. It all started mysteriously. Although the Ministry of Osteology had quickly identified a preventative measure to reduce the risk of contracting the illness, the Ministry’s team of dead scientists were still searching desperately for both the cause and a cure.

Severe Acute Gelatinization Syndrome, or SAGS-19, disproportionally strikes older skeletons. It first attacks the coccyx, causing it to soften and droop. It quickly spreads to the thoracic cage, mandible, and patellas, eventually reducing one’s entire frame to a slimy puddle. By all accounts, it is a physically and emotionally painful way to fall apart, particularly for female skeletons. It’s even more painful to watch.

The best preventative measure thus far is astonishing in its simplicity: ice-cold water. Scientists made the bone-chilling discovery almost by accident.

The first case—and the first of several spikes—appeared in the balmy South, a popular winter destination for dead retirees. Public bone health officials had initially downplayed the syndrome to appease cynical local business owners, falsely attributing it to a rare algae bloom that dissipated on its own within a couple of months. But the cases in the South kept rising. And then a Northern skeleton fell apart from it.

The number of cases in the frigid North never reached those in the South, which made it easier for the Ministry to study the affected population. With only a few exceptions, all the northern victims had contracted SAGS after spending time in hot tubs. But the scientists still couldn’t rule out the possibility of algae or some water-borne, bone-eating bacteria since hot tubs are often filthy, especially after use by skeletons whose bones are still wet.

One of the afflicted, who had miraculously stopped himself short of falling apart, attributed his good fortune to a polar bear plunge he took for charity after sitting for a couple hours in a jacuzzi. Lacking any other plausible explanation, the ministry scientists gave him the benefit of the doubt. His case, along with the exceptions (all aging skeletons who had taken hot bubble baths in the privacy of their own homes yet fell apart never the less), led them to hypothesize that the temperature of the water, not its quality, somehow played a role in contracting SAGS and controlling its spread. Experiments in the Ministry laboratory involving volunteers and a thousand pounds of crushed and cubed ice supplied them with the proof they needed to put some interim safety protocols in place.

“Fish gotta swim, ladies!”

“Girl gotta fly!”

Allie and her teammates performed the call-and-response ritual each time she mounted the block before a practice or real race. They had learned the hard way to leave a good amount of time between their exchange of lines and the starter’s signal. Though a tough pill to swallow for the first several days following that disastrous meet, especially for girls without entrails, their disqualification from that relay medley—their best event as a team—helped solidify their bond and gave birth to the sassy “It was just a twitch!” comeback which they deployed even when it didn’t make sense.

Allie could remember exactly when she seized control of the fish line, which now she and her classmates recognized and respected as her signature phrase. She had every intention of tying the line to her senior picture in the yearbook, and everyone at school expected as much from her. She earned it.

It wasn’t always that way, as the book reminded her. The line and her seizure of it followed a raw emotional path bounded on one end by pride and by triumph on the other with some very dark laps in between.

Lap 1: Playing the role of Julie Dozier in the school’s production of Show Boat was a major accomplishment for her and quite possibly a defining moment in her high school career. Sure, she won every swim race she entered. She excelled in the butterfly. No one even came close to matching her dolphin kick. But being on a stage in front of so many people and both playing a role and singing a song so laden with controversy gave her the existential jolt she never thought she’d receive or need as a dead teen.

Lap 2: The overwhelmingly negative response to her performance on opening night infuriated her. Not the most graceful out of water, she had reluctantly signed onto her drama teacher’s idea that she play the role of Julie in a clawfoot tub. With the help of some of the students from shop class, the production team mounted the tub on wheels so that she could be rolled around on stage during her scenes. No one commented on the delivery of her lines, the authenticity of her makeup and costume, or the quality of her voice. All they talked about instead was how foolish she looked sitting in that tub with her fishtail flapping to the rhythm of the music while singing that line.

Lap 3: Anger soon gave way to shame. For days, Allie beat herself up for blindly signing onto her teacher’s boneheaded idea. She had been so excited about playing her first, and possibly her only, theatrical role that she sacrificed her dignity in exchange for a shot at momentary and, ultimately, illusory fame. She also didn’t think she had a choice. She felt complicit in plotting her own humiliation.

Lap 4: As hoots of “fish gotta swim!” began filling the halls between classes, shame gave way to sadness. She was, after all, a mermaid skeleton. She couldn’t deny it, She was different from her teammates, her classmates, and even her family. Her faith alone sustained her. Faith reminded her she wasn’t alone even though she felt lonely in her scales.

Lap 5: One morning, she awoke and sat up straight in bed. “Fuck it,” she said to no one but herself. If she couldn’t stop the insult, she could at least try to claim it, take it from the people who were hurting her with it and transform it into something others might learn to respect, which she did.

After the fifth lap, Allie decided she’d had enough and got out of the pool.

“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.