Now Is Not the Time to Panic(48)

Senior year, I did an independent study with a cranky old lit professor named Dr. Burr Blush, who was retiring at the end of the year and had not, to my knowledge, taught a course that you could register for in the past decade. He had a huge office in the library, one with three sofas (which he later told me were reserved for separate uses: 1. socializing, 2. reading, and 3. sleeping), and I never saw him anywhere else on campus, as if he teleported into the room each morning and then went back through some kind of wormhole to his home. I had searched him out specifically because I wanted to show someone the novel I’d written that summer in Coalfield, and I did not want it to be anyone who had a connection to me, a professor who would then think, I simply cannot write a letter of recommendation for a girl who writes Nancy Drew fan fiction. If it was awful, the only person who would know would be an old deranged man who would most likely die in his office on the day of his retirement.

Through a little research in the library, I found out that Dr. Blush, who, when he was actually teaching students, specialized in nineteenth-century American literature, had also written a novel called Huckleberry Finn in Russia, where Huck ends up winning the affections of Olga Nikolaevna, the daughter of Emperor Nicholas I, and is chased by the Imperial Guard all over the continent. It was a deeply insane book, with Tom Sawyer at one point showing up with a pet Siberian tiger to help Huck and Olga escape from a burning building before completely disappearing from the story. It ends with Huck becoming the czar of the Russian Empire and deciding to conquer all of Europe. As soon as I finished it, I thought, Dr. Blush will love my evil Nancy Drew novel.

I think my presence at his office door shocked him in such a way that he signed the form just to get me to leave, but I also gave him a typed copy of the manuscript, and I did not see him again, despite knocking on his door, for more than a month. Then, just as I’d given up, I received a letter at the campus post office, on real stationery, wherein Dr. Blush invited me to meet with him in his office, where he proceeded to tell me that he thought the book was really quite good. “Subversive!” he kept saying. “So strangely subversive, you understand? It was intentional, right?” and I proclaimed that it was entirely intentional, hoping he wouldn’t keep pressing me on it. He admitted that he had read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew novels to his eight children, and he had a fondness for them but also an intense irritation with how good everyone in them was. “It’s unnatural for two brothers to not, at some point, beat the absolute shit out of each other over some ridiculous slight, don’t you think?” he asked me, and I guess it would have been nice to see Frank throw Joe off a balcony over a broken microscope.

When he handed me the manuscript back, it had been line-edited, everything written in neat penmanship with red ink, and he said that I would get an A if I just made the suggested revisions, mostly grammatical because, he stressed, my grammar was quite terrible. The class was done, and I spent the rest of the semester sitting on his sofa every Tuesday and Thursday, the one reserved for entertaining, and I would do my homework and study, and he would either read or nap, and sometimes we would drink tea and he would talk about literature, admitting that he understood very little of it, and he was kind and lovely. At the end of the year, he told me that his grandson’s wife was a literary agent for a boutique agency in New York, and he had sent her the book, which she loved, and she was certain that she could sell it and it would be a breakout series for teens. He handed me a card with her information on it. I was crying, which he did not seem to notice, and before I could hug him, he went back to lie down on his sleeping couch. If someone had walked into that office at that moment, to find Dr. Blush snoring on his sofa and me bawling so hard that I was hiccupping, I cannot imagine what they would have assumed. By the end of the summer after graduation, I’d signed a two-book deal with a major publishing house. Because of this old man who did end up dying five months after he retired, which made me cry all over again, his kindness before he disappeared from my life, which was not how people usually left me or I left them.

As Frances Eleanor Budge, I had written four of those books featuring Evie Fastabend causing chaos throughout the town of Running Hollow, both loving and hating her father and sister (their mother long dead). And they were all bestsellers, and lots of girls dressed up like Evie Fastabend for Halloween, and, well, again, it was deeply strange to watch this thing I had made in my room in Coalfield that summer spread out into the world. There was always talk of a TV series or movie, but it never quite happened, which was fine with me. I didn’t want it to be that real.

A few years ago, as Frankie Budge, I published an adult novel called Sisters with the Same First Name, which was about a woman who learns that her long-lost father is dying and travels cross-country, picking up all twelve of her half sisters, all born to different mothers, who each share her first name, on their way to his deathbed. And it did not do well, sold poorly, and though the reviews were positive, I could tell that maybe I’d tried too hard to write about my own life, had made it too explicitly autobiographical, and it had gotten messed up in the execution. I’d been embarrassed in the interviews and events when I started to talk about my dad, ancient history. It was fine now. It was a good enough book. I had wondered if my father might read it and contact me, but I had not seen or heard from him since he’d come to my college graduation, when Brian tried to karate kick him before the ceremony even started, and all of us decided, I guess without saying it, that we did not ever need to see each other again. His daughter Frances, who looks nothing like me, is very pretty and has a very active social media presence; she works for a publicity firm in Chicago and the two of us have never exchanged a single word. I think if we met in real life, one of us would explode, would simply cease to exist. I don’t even know if she has any idea who I am. I keep hoping that she will get married, will take the man’s last name, and maybe then, maybe, I wouldn’t hate her quite as much as I do, as petty as that is.