Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

To protect Selena's reputation, Doc Swain performs an appendectomy on her. After losing Lucas, Selena trips and falls down a hill, causing her to miscarry. When Selena returns home later that night, Lucas drunkenly chases her through the woods in revenge. After Selena confides that Lucas raped her, the outraged Swain threatens him with jail, then forces him to sign a confession and orders him to leave town. Mathew Swain, the kindly town physician, for an abortion. Following graduation, Selena discovers that she is pregnant and turns to Dr. Ted escorts Selena home, and after he leaves, the lecherous, drunken Lucas rapes her. After the dance ends, Michael, alone with Connie, kisses her, but she again rejects him. At the dance, Betty, peeved at Rodney for breaking their date, flirts with him and then slugs him with her purse.

Soon after, Harrington calls Rodney into his office and offers him a new car if he will break his date with Betty, whom he calls the 'local tramp,' and take Allison to the dance instead. While there, Michael invites Connie, who had previously rebuffed him, to chaperone Allison's graduation dance. That Sunday after church, Michael visits the MacKenzie house to announce that Allison has been named valedictorian of the senior class. After the roguish Rodney insists on turning out all the lights, Connie returns home and angrily ends the party, thus humiliating Allison. Also attending the party is Selena, her fiancé, Ted Carter, who dreams of becoming a lawyer one day, and Norman Page, a sensitive youth who is dominated by his overbearing, possessive mother. Later, at the party, Betty arrives with Rodney Harrington, her childhood sweetheart and heir to the Harrington fortune. When the aloof, proper Connie objects to Allison inviting teenage sexpot Betty Anderson to her upcoming birthday party, Allison bristles. At the end of the school day, Connie's studious daughter Allison, an aspiring writer, meets her best friend, Selena Cross, Nellie's daughter, at Connie's dress shop. After a contentious interview, the highly idealistic Michael is hired by Leslie Harrington, the owner of the mill and president of the school board, as the new high school principal. Lucas' world-weary wife Nellie works as a housekeeper for Constance MacKenzie, the young widow who owns the local dress shop. As stranger Michael Rossi drives into the small New England town of Peyton Place in search of employment, he passes a broken-down shack owned by Lucas Cross, a bitter, self-pitying drunk.

Return to Peyton Place by Grace Metalious