A forty-two year old man wakes to the sound of his dog vomiting. After attending to the dog, he gets ready to head to school and thinks about how he is the oldest college student in America. While eating breakfast, he thinks of a girl at his university that he had convinced to go back indoors when he found her standing outside her dormitory drunk and crying that her father no longer loved her. The man had hugged her out of instinct, and the girl let him and then exclaimed for him not to touch her.  In class, the man’s professor calls him to discuss a paper he had written on the mechanics of intercourse with a dead corpse. The professor explains that he likes the topic, but more appropriate, academic language should be used instead of obscenities.  For the next assignment, the man has to write something to influence the reader, which the professor calls Rhetoric and Persuasion. The man writes a story called “Ralph the Duck,” in which Ralph the Duck’s mother keeps him warm in the cold. Again, the professor calls him after class to mention again how the story is not appropriate for college, but the man says that he wants to keep his story even if his grade remains a D. The man returns home to his wife Fanny, whom he tells about the grade, and she comforts him.  Later, during a winter storm, the man receives a call that a student is missing, and the student is threatening suicide. Since he helps answer emergency calls at the university, he prepares to search for the student and eventually finds a girl — the same one from before — crying out in the cold, outside of campus. He asks if he remembers her, and she says, “You're the sexual harassment guy,” referring to their last meeting. The man jokingly says he will hug her again, and the girl screams. The man tries to calm her down and invites her to come with him, saying she can’t die. He says if she dies, he will dream about her, and the girl replies that that’s what she wants. The man picks her up and helps her into his truck, and as they drive back to campus, he tells her that he once had a daughter. A town cop comes to take the girl to the emergency room, and the man follows behind.  When he returns home later that day, his wife asks how he saved the girl, and he says he told her stories and did Rhetoric and Persuasion.