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.