Confessions is a series of fiction and photography by Samuel Shopp and Nick Henderson. Nick Henderson is a photographer with the Mason Gross School of the Arts and his complete set can be viewed here.
November 1, 6:40 AM:
A pale sun would rise unannounced, a tangerine backlight to a thin veil of fog, but it was dark when Joanna and I rolled back onto campus. Everything was all empty. The street’s only light came from the spectral haloes of street lamps and two cones of weak, downcast spots emanating from us each. We turned into the student parking lot. Joanna sat next to me, and her head swung forward when I tapped on the brake. She did not say anything; no music was playing. When the engine was off, I tried to catch her eyes.
“I’m so tired Scott. We can talk later,” she said. She grabbed the handle of the door and put her feet to the pavement.
“Joanna—“ I wanted to say. She shut the door with maybe a little more force than intended. I sat there for a second without saying a word. Then I scrambled out of the car and called after her.
“Joanna wait!” I said.
“What, Scott? Please, I’m so tired.”
“Your keys,” I said. I tossed them stupidly to her across the parking lot. She lost them in the dark and they fell in violent chimes by her feet.
She fought back tears picking them up and walked to her dorm.
I stood there, in the dark and cold morning, watching her walk away, the insides of my cheeks getting a raw deal from the business end of my molars. I shrugged my arms up into the badly insulated polyester track jacket and began to walk uphill towards the stadium. The weather vain of a distant belfry peaked over the trees. It flew a strange flag: torn in two but bound in colonial iron, impaled, bisected twice by metal rods with the letters SN and EW. I got to the top, at the entrance to the stadium, and looked down past the track, through the college town, directly into the earth’s crust, mantle, core, out again, to nothingness, nowhere.
I blinked my still crusted eyes and pulled at them, stretching my face with a groan. Below me, Bethlehem looked like a town before and after its liveliest moments. It was that threshold between weary, strung-out souls wandering in and blinking, empowered bodies walking out; that quietly liminal space reserved for red eyes and greyhounds.
At this hour, the town was barely a muffled engine fueled by coffee, gasoline, muscles, and blood. My fingers felt for my phone, which was ceaselessly vibrating face down on the ground. I found the lock button and silenced it.
A hollow gold baton clattered terribly to the right of me, startling the exhaustion from my eyes, and Peter O’Hara came clamoring after it. I had completely forgotten about our meet today. The bus left at 7:30, so the couriers would be gathering momentarily. I was slated to run the 3200 against Lafayette’s top guy. Peter had a relay; hence the baton which was now briefly suspended above the ground on a bounce.
He said “shit, fuck, I’m sorry,” and grabbed at it, but it flipped out like prison soap.
He said “Oh Christ, you’re joking” and the baton rang out mockingly. It hit the ground rolling, begging a long chase down the hill. A few excruciating minutes later, Peter passed the it off to me like a scroll.
“Please hold this,” he said. “Clearly I’m incompetent.”
I nodded and said “you really are.” The baton slipped coldly into my grip and I wrung it’s unyielding metal. This comforted me greatly. Peter took a seat to my right on the stadium steps, swung his legs up, and leaned them against the chainlink fence. Water vapor escaped his mouth like a packet of cirrus clouds. Peter had been my roommate since freshman year and he was easily the prettiest 800 runner on the East Coast. We were Seniors now, math majors. I loved him because he knew how to live out a story. He bled eager climax. I looked at him now, my eyes level with his upside-down knees, and my heart strings kept my lips from smiling. Some tension just beneath the surface kept everything on edge.
“Gotta get the blood flowing.”
“It’s flowing in the wrong direction, Pete.”
“What do you imply there Scott? This brain needs all the help it can get.”
After a moment of silence, he said, “you’re out here early. You’ve never been early for the bus.”
“We only just got back.”
“Ahh an all-nighter. How was Montauk then?”
“Fucking radiant, Pete,” I said after a long pause.
“Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“Yeah I—“
“You and Joanna, intrepid on the moonlit beaches of Montauk, exploring with messy fingers the—”
“—ah no it’s—“
“—dusky purple acres of passion and pai—“
“—Pete would you please shut your God damn mouth.”
His puzzled mouth did shut. Just then, Gabby Yama, our resident social therapist, popped down on my left, dumping her track bag between her feet, and asked “how are you boys this fine and much too early morning?”
“Subsisting,” I said.
“Aren’t we all. And Mr. O’Hara?”
“All is well from this angle; you can see how the world curves.”
“Uh” Gab said, “uhm.”
I clarified for her, “Pete thinks that a little extra blood flow to the head will reanimate his long lost brain cells.”
Peter uprighted himself, “Now look here you two. I argue and maintain that I have taken extraordinarily good care of my brain and any leisurely activities of the chemical nature that I may or may not partake in on a weekendly basis have, in fact, stimulated the development of my neural networks. Now I’d swear by that.”
Gab and I exchanged tiny glances, and smirking she said “maybe Pete. Could you remind me though what you did last night after your ‘neurochemical experience’ with my bong?”
“I’m pretty sure I ate Taco Bell and jerked off.”
Peter and Gabrielle snorted with laughter, blue track jackets glowing in dawn sunlight, and we were all at peace with our our preserved jar of freedom and strained 
happiness. They were still messing with each other, but I sat between them, heart spilled on my shoes, still gazing past the beat city earth. My phone would not stop buzzing but in order to silence it for good, I’d have to look at the screen, and I did not yet have the courage for that.
Gab spoke to us then, “did you see about Rutgers?”
Peter nodded, solemn by custom, “I saw, I saw. I feel guilty.”
“I know what you mean,” Gab started, “I wasn’t surprised. I have this really sick, nagging thought that it’s only the geography shocking me, rather than the act itself.”
I looked at the ground and Peter nodded furiously, “Honestly Gab, same here. And I actually know people who go there! It’s trending on Twitter too, you know. Worldwide even.”
“Oh Lord, as if it weren’t surreal enough.”
“I heard that this one was a white guy,” Peter said.
“Oh really?” Gab replied.
“Yeah or— I saw a tweet that said it was an alt-right attack or something like that. I think they shot up a basement show or a DIY art thing, maybe like a statement against liberal ideology in art communities.”
“Yikes,” said Gab, “but I’ll bet you they don’t call him a terrorist.”
Peter looked around over the three of us at the tops of the trees above the city. He must have been thinking, as I often did, about the people down there, the Americans, the kids who would be waking up soon for school and spilling out onto the playground like so many little leaves, lifted and swirled in a patriotic vortex. He must have
been thinking about all his friends who chose here instead of there.
“It sickens, Gab. It sickens, but it’s true.”
Gab sighed and tugged at the grey veil over her lock
screen. She pulled the grim, translucent shade over the time, the date, and finally her girlfriend’s face.
In the gaps between sentences, it was very quiet on the hill. We could see the cars and buses crossing paths on the streets below and we could see distant pigeons landing on homeless, fetal sleeping bags, shivering on metal benches, but we could not hear anything other than my fingers, tapping syncopated on my water bottle; the infant green leaves of trees rustling in bellows of wind; the rubber souls of our shoes grazing the cement. My phone buzzed anxiously. The birds were singing too low to hear.
Gab asked, “Do you know anybody who goes there?”
“A few, from high school,” Pete replied, “But I texted them this morning, they’re all accounted for. Do you?”
“Nah, most people I know go to Penn State for the tuition.”
“Same here.”
Pete and Gab paused a moment, noticing an absence. Gab pointed at me and said, “wait Scott you’re from Jersey, aren’t you?”
My phone was tense with buzzing.
“Yea.”
“Well, did you know anyone?”
I felt dark and sick. The Earth turned and I could feel it. My phone buzzed again and I wanted to ignore it. My phone buzzed and my heart hurt and I wanted to ignore it. Birds flew above me, circles upon circles underneath random uncertain clouds and my phone buzzed
and I tried,
I tried,
I tried to ignore it.
“Scott?
Did you know anyone at Rutgers?”