He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.

“I’m working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from,” I said.

“Where do they come from?”

“I have no idea. And if I don’t get back to work, I never will.” I stuck out my hand again. “Nice to have met you, Dr. O’Reilly.” I started back through the maze.

He followed me, saying thoughtfully, “I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop.”

I was going to say I didn’t think there’d be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off the floor and into file folders before I went home.

I told Dr. O’Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her leather skirt.

“I came back and you’d left,” she said, making it sound like I’d left her sinking in quicksand.

“I was down in Bio,” I said.

“I had to come all the way back from Personnel,” she said, tossing her hair. “You said to come back.”

“I gave up on you and delivered the package myself,” I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.

“I looked all over your office for it,” she said virtuously. “While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left on the floor and threw it in the trash.”

The old curiosity shop [1840–41]

Book fad caused by serialization of Dickens’s story about a little girl and her hapless grandfather, who are thrown out of their shop and forced to wander through England. Interest in the book was so great that people in America thronged the pier waiting for the ship from England to bring the next installment and, unable to wait for the ship to dock, shouted to the passengers aboard, “Did Little Nell die?” She did, and her death reduced readers of all ages, sexes, and degrees of toughness to agonies of grief. Cowboys and miners in the West sobbed openly over the last pages and an Irish member of Parliament threw the book out of a train and burst into tears.