It was gone.
My heart was in my throat as I frantically clawed at every pocket and crevice of my duffel bag. All of my other things were accounted for, all my trinkets from my desk were still safely wrapped in old sweaters, pressed flowers from my students tucked within the pages of our math textbook, but the picture was gone. My last picture with Andre, our last night together. All of the other snapshots were still there, but the most damning one was nowhere to be found. White noise filled my ears and I couldn't breathe, having to stop and sink to the floor in panic. I hadn't planned for this, thought shoving my duffle far enough beneath my bed would be discouraging enough that no one would go rummaging through all my shit and find...it.
But. Who? Who had found it? My mind raced and jumped to every possible conclusion. If it had been Red, I don't think he would sit on it, I would've heard. Kitty might wait, corner me in the kitchen with tears in her eyes, begging me to say that the picture was a fluke or trick of the light, that'd I'd still be able to give her grandchildren. My eyes felt hot as tears started to burn in the corners, threatening to fall. Oh god. That was the doomsday scenario that I'd spent most of the plane ride home thinking about, and I still felt so desperately unprepared for.
If it wasn't my parents, it had to be Hyde. Donna and I hadn't been together in my room since I got back, I'd only gone over to her place, still too uncomfortable to have her back in this space where so much of our relationship was created. I could maybe count on one hand the times the rest of the gang had been in here, poking around beneath my bed didn't seem like something they'd do. Maybe I'd been wrong this whole time about Hyde. Maybe the thing with Buddy had been a fluke because we hadn't ended up together and it was easier to brush off, but now that there was proof, now that I was...proof, maybe that changed everything for him.
What if he told someone? What if he told my parents, or Donna, even Fez? My hands began to tremble at the thought and I hugged my knees to try to stop their shaking. What would happen to me? Where would I go? Who would be willing to be seen with me? I thought warily of Buddy, not even knowing where he was anymore, he was smart enough to probably be in like, Yale or something, not still bumming around his high school small town, not that he'd even want to see me if I asked after I avoided him for the past few years. I wouldn't be able to take the Cruiser, for christ's sake, it wasn't even my car. I'd be on foot or hitchhiking, and I wouldn't even know where to.
Nausea crept up my throat. I was doing the thing that Andre always called spinning, catastrophizing. He used to cup my face in his hands whenever I'd start so I'd be forced to look him in the eyes and tell him what was wrong and calm down. But Andre wasn't here now and I ran to the bathroom to dry heave into the toilet, unable to breathe through all the retching. It struck me in that moment how I'd never felt so afraid before in my life. I'd felt all sorts of anxieties, and moving to a new continent for a year when the only time I'd ever left the country before was to smuggle beer from Canada was terrifying and left me incapacitated for my first full week there, but I'd never felt so scared before. My secret, great and terrible, was now out, to a person I didn't even know, or possibly a person I used to be able to call a friend, and my life rested in their hands.
Red and Kitty, thankfully, were still off on their anniversary vacation in Madison, and I hadn't seen Hyde since before he left for work a few days ago and he'd brushed me off by saying something cryptic and biting. I should've known. And now I had to find him and plead with him to keep this secret, hoping he hadn't already spread it. I rinsed my mouth out in the sink, standing up on wobbly legs and headed downstairs, pausing at the end of the staircase to listen for him watching TV in the living room or banging around in the kitchen, but the house was silent. I quickened my pace and stepped into the kitchen, but it was quiet and empty. I tried the basement, cautiously descending the stairs, but he wasn't there either, probably left early to open the store. I locked the door to the outside steps, not having any energy to be barged in on by one of our friends, and cautiously crept into Hyde's room. Maybe he'd left the photo in here, if he was the one who had it, and if I stole it back, maybe we could just keep on pretending that nothing had happened, that I was still the same now that the proof was gone. I missed Andre, but I could burn the polaroid if I needed to, if it meant survival.
It was strange being in this room alone, I hadn't been in it by myself since before Hyde moved in and it was just a storage space full of Christmas decorations and the occasional dead mouse. It was so much cleaner than I expected, after seeing how Hyde had lived in his old house when Edna left. He'd even made his bed before he left for work, a thing I still basically never did, and not a thing was out of place. His small trunk that he used as a bedside table was perfectly neat, magazines stacked perfectly, hell it wasn't even dusty. It made me all the more nervous to poke around in here, he'd know I'd been through his things. It was so Red of him, honestly. I expected to find hairs on the hinges of his trunk or on the door handle to the room to let him know someone had been here, so anal about neatness and privacy.
After fiddling with the lock, the trunk only held an extra blanket and a spare pair of boots. There wasn't much else in the way of furniture, a few milk crates housed his records and 8-tracks and his clothes were folded up and stored under his cot. Slowly as I could, I searched his t-shirts and jeans, wondering if he'd stashed the photo in between them, but found nothing. I searched the records next, gingerly lifting the vinyl out of their sleeves, but only found where he kept his rolling papers. In a cold sweat, I sat back down on his cot. He didn't have it. If he didn't have it, who the fuck did? I buried my head in my hands.
I should've left Andre alone. This was all my fault. When I saw him in the school for the first time, dropping off his little brother, I shouldn't have said anything. When he stopped to chat with me while he ruffled his brother's hair and asked me all about American soccer, I should've been rude and brushed him off. I shouldn't have waved to him in the market and let him teach me how to haggle with the vendors, or let him buy me all the fruits I was curious about but too cautious to try. When he came to the apartment I was staying in, dropping off a book he thought I'd like, I shouldn't have let him in. When he invited me to his family's home for dinner, to meet his mother with her booming, infectious laugh, his doctor father whose eyes shone with pride for his children, I should have said no. When he came over in the middle of the night, half drunk, eyes wild, I should have told him to leave me alone, to go home. I shouldn't have let him hold me in his arms. I shouldn't have let him kiss me. I shouldn't have liked it.
Defeated and exhausted, I laid down on the cot. Either Hyde had the picture with him, or he'd never seen it and I was still no closer to finding out why he hated me so much, or who had it and what they would do. I was determined not to cry, but I could feel them building up, and I flipped onto my side, hands under the pillow. I was struck at that moment with how at one point, this was my cot that I used to use for sleepovers with my friends, all of us camping out in the basement or in the backyard, fighting over who would get to sleep in the cot and who would have to sleep on the ground or the bare concrete floor. Hyde would often strong-arm us into giving it to him, and I only then realized, that that might be because he didn't always have a bed at home, wherever his home had ended up being that month. Hyde had never talked about it, but I'd heard from Kitty and other parents that he and Edna sometimes slept at the women's shelter the next town over, when Edna would get them evicted from the house they rented, or whenever a man she'd shacked up with decided to kick them out. Ten years later, this cot would end up rightfully his. What a strange thought.
I sighed deeply and shifted onto my back, staring up at the blank ceiling, still no closer to a solution, the panic still there but slightly subsiding. I missed my friend. When I was gone, and when Andre wasn't around, I missed Hyde the most of anyone from home. Andre made me feel like I was wanted, a part of something, but I didn't feel that way often in Cape Town. Many people spoke english, but I was still treated suspiciously, even by my students at times. I missed the ease of being with someone who understood me, made me laugh in all the familiar ways I'd longed for. Whenever he wasn't around when I called home, I couldn't lie, it stung, but I had no idea that it was building up to this. I sometimes had dreams about our old conversations and I'd wake up with a smile. And sometimes, after Andre and I started...whatever it was that we'd started, I had dreams about Hyde that were...something else. Something, like this missing picture, I'd tried to ignore. Something I didn't understand.
Shifting on the cot's mattress, my hands brushed against something thin and square-shaped underneath the pillow that I hadn't felt before, and my blood ran cold before I shakily slid it out. I was hoping for porn, something ignorable. But there, in the mid-afternoon light, I saw my face, pressed up against Andre's. I saw the smallest glimpse of my apartment couch in the background. I saw Andre's chest hair.
He knew.