DerekDerek was enjoying the summer of his gap year off traveling in Europe by thumb and student rail pass. Since he arrived in Switzerland five weeks before, he's seen seven countries and the Vatican. He's spends his nights drinking in pubs and sometimes gets lucky. There was the Argentinean girl in Rome and before that, two American girlfriends on the night train to Barcelona, and a beautiful Dutch-Indonesian woman he fell in love with for a week. There's something about the Maple Leaf sewn on his backpack, Derek observed, that makes a favorable impression.
Derek loved his life. He had "great" parents who cut him a lot of slack as long as he got into McGill (he did). They gave him money for the trip and were planning on helping him buy a car. Derek thought he was pretty much invincible to problems -- although just a week earlier, he noticed he had caught crabs a day after a drunken one-night stand. It happened thumbing through the Loire valley. He was daydreaming about his girlfriend when a grey Mercedes picked him up. Perfumed, wearing sunglasses and drinking from an opaque flask, the driver was an attractive, older woman of about 28. They spent a night together. Derek didn't use a condom. AIDS has never been his concern.
When he met Dr. John in one of Prague's main city parks, he wanted to know about the first symptoms of STDs. A burning sensation had begun soon after he had seen the crabs and NOW he was worried. "What if this is really serious? I'd kill myself if it was AIDS," he said. Dr. John told him it was probably a STD and for that, there is a cure. The American educator called a Czech colleague and the Canadian student was off to the doctor's office. Afterwards, a more subdued Derek said it was probably time to go home -- he was missing his girlfriend. He wasn't going to inform her about the STD because it would be "stupid to tell her" about his summer liaisons. He helped in Dr. John's volunteer street theater where he played a convincing college student who got HIV from a one-night stand. Dr. John told the mixed group of teens, "Lying to a sex partner is a common phenomenon to get what you want" (quick sex). Yet STDs pass between partners and sometimes, HIV. Derek is playing Russian roulette.