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.