I imagined this woman I’d just met coming with me to sit on a couch next to my mom while I said, “I made that thing that made a lot of people lose their minds and also inadvertently caused a few people we knew to die,” and my mom going, “Oh, sweetie, we’ll need to talk about that, but does your friend here want, like, something to drink? Or some sandwiches? Does she want pizza? Frankie? Frankie? Are you listening? Does your friend want pizza?”
Mazzy stared at me for a second. “Could I have your cell phone number? I’ve only ever called your home phone. It’s just so we can stay in touch.” I had a feeling that she suspected I might immediately get on a plane to some random country and she’d be left with an article that no one wanted to publish. I think she was very smart to suspect that.
I looked at her card and used my phone to send a text to her, and she nodded and then added me to her contacts. We stood up. I still had a Corn Pup left to eat, and I was about to reach for it when Mazzy asked, “Where did it come from?”
I was looking at the mini corn dog, distracted, but then tried to focus. “The poster?” I asked.
“The words, yeah, that phrase,” she said. “Where did it come from?”
“Me,” I said, not sure what else to say.
She looked at me for a few seconds, and I knew she was repeating the phrase in her head. I could hear every single syllable inside her mind, the entire utterance, because I knew what it sounded like so clearly.
“Let’s talk soon,” she said, and I agreed, and as soon as she left, I dipped the corn dog in mustard and ate it in two bites.
Fourteen
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I GOT A SCHOLARSHIP AND ENDED UP AT a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, which is where I met Aaron. And I made friends. I felt myself expand into those open spaces, to hang out with people who had been like me in high school and now were surprised that, holy shit, they could revise themselves into someone who was a little cooler. I was an English major and sometimes I shocked my professors by having read some of the books already. They were impressed, and that made them give me a little extra attention, and that made me feel so grown-up that I decided I’d devote my four years to doing whatever they said.
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.