Cliffton High School

Cliff College student Lizzie Goswell is scared. She'd run into her archaeology professor, Virgil Dubois at a party and he tried to kiss her. When she slapped him, he became upset, accusing her of leading him on. She denied it, he became increasingly upset, and she finally just left the party. She didn't realize until too late that he had left as well and was following her or she never would have taken the shortcut through the high school. Now he has caught up with her on the track.

He looks striking with his long black hair shining in the moonlight and, for a moment, though she is not attracted to him, she can see why her lover Maud once was. But the hungry look in his eyes quickly banishes her idle thoughts.

ELIZABETH Don't you touch me!

VIRGIL I'm not going to touch you... you're going to touch me.

ELIZABETH In your dreams.

VIRGIL Au contraire. Behind the gym.

ELIZABETH I wouldn't go behind the gym with you if my life depended on it.

VIRGIL Oh yes you will because if you don't, you're going to lose Anais.

Elizabeth felt the silky hairs at the base of her neck stand up. How in the world could Virgil Dubois threaten her relationship with the child that the authorities presumed to be Maud's? Even if he knew that Anais was a foundling, he certainly couldn't prove it. Or could he?

ELIZABETH You can't do anything about Anais. She's Maud's child.

VIRGIL I might believe that if it weren't for the fact that I'm the child's father.

Elizabeth is too shocked to speak.

VIRGIL And if you ever tell anyone, I'm going to assert my rights and take her away. Now come with me.

Like a lamb to the slaughter, Lizzie lets him take her hand and lead her down the narrow pathway beside the fence behind the gym. When people meet here, it is seldom for licit purposes, as evidenced by the burnt roaches and used condoms that litter the ground, and this assignation is no exception. Through lenses of fury, she watches him unbuckle his hand-beaded belt then unbutton the fly of his faded jeans.

VIRGIL I've been haunted by you since that first day you walked into my Comparative Ethnography class. I remember lecturing about Malinowski, but it wasn't savages whose sexual lives I was thinking about... it was you, the cream-skinned Trobriand in the front row. Well, my sweet... it's time for your orals.

Lizzie's mind is racing, trying to figure a way out. But the humiliation she is about to endure is nothing compared to the pain for both herself and Maud if anyone tries to take Anais away from them. This is Lizzie's last quarter. The entire Sayers Gang will graduate and then Anais will finally come live with Maud and her as a family instead of being raised communally in the dorm. She reasons that full-time parenthood will be a life of sacrifice, and so she sinks down to her knees to make her first.