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.