I found out today that a character from my short story, “Reasonable Terms,” has several pages on facebook and over 23,000 followers (far, far more than me). “Reasonable Terms” is about a group of giraffes who go on strike and stage a group mock suicide at a zoo. One of those giraffes, Lulu, starts hallucinating and has dreams of flying around New York City, peering in windows. The story appeared in my collection, Animal Crackers, and apparently was recently used in a standardized test for New Jersey high schoolers. The students had a strong reaction to the story, created facebook and twitter pages for Lulu, uploaded photographs, and even made their own psychedelic posters with catch phrases. So I guess the story struck a chord, or at least made them laugh (hopefully it did not inspire drug use). The strange thing was stumbling over this news in an online article, and realizing that a character I had dreamed up years ago was off having a whole new life that I knew nothing about. But I’m glad to hear that Lulu is still out there somewhere, floating over the city.