The Torch

Uma looked at the Facebook scroll and there was Brian Hartmann again. He had posted a Christmas photo of his family in front of a fireplace. He looked amazingly similar to how he had looked when he was 17 years old, adding the softening pudge that everyone got after 20 years.

Brian's wife, Anna, a girl they had both graduated high school with, seemed even prettier than when they were in school together. She was a few years younger than they were and Uma wasn't even sure if she had known Brian when they were in school.

Why does it still bother me to look at these pictures? Uma thought to herself. She inserted herself in the photo and imagined what their kids would look like. They would be shorter, likely. Their hair would be darker. They would be beautiful, though. Beautiful.

Uma met Brian the first day of summer vacation at the local pool. He was a lifeguard and she was no one. She lived two houses down from the neighborhood pool and her mother had sent her there to meet friends, as if it was that easy. Her father was a colonel in the Air Force and this was yet another move in her life, the fifth that she remembered, and sixth overall. She was 15, pale and not a very good swimmer and she only went to the pool because she had nothing better to do.

The first person she met at the pool was a blond, beautiful boy with muscled abs and protruding veins on his arms. He nodded at her and just said "what's up." It wasn't a question. She remembered Justin well. "You go to St. Matt's?" He asked.

"No, I just moved here from California. I am going to North next year," I said.

"What grade?" he said, growing more interested.

"I will be a sophomore," I said.

"Fully aged sophomore meat!" he said, quoting Sixteen Candles.

Uma disliked Justin immediately. He pulled down his mirrored sunglasses and walked away. She realized that he hadn't even asked her name.

She almost left right then, but mostly out of laziness decided to just go to the pool, read her book, fall asleep and get sunburned. What else was there to do?

Uma was baking in the sun, wearing no sunscreen of course, the faint smell of roasting meat wafting up from her reddening body when a shadow crossed her and covered her book.

"Hey, I know I am going to sound like a weirdo, but maybe you should put on some sunscreen," the boy said.

Uma looked up at him. He was backlit by the sun but could see his wavy brown hair and blue eyes. He looked earnest and was holding out a bottle of Coppertone Sport SPF 15.

Uma took the sunscreen and sat up, and tried not to be embarrassed. Her skin was visibly burned.

"Actually, I think maybe you should go inside," he said. "I am sorry, but I think I am ordering you to go inside. I am sort of - like - supposed to tell you to go inside. I'm a lifeguard."

He was a lifeguard. His shirt proved it. His skin was dark brown from the sun, even this early in the summer. His face was round and soft and he had the look of a boy who had been a little chubby before getting his growth spurt.

Uma stood up and grabbed her small bag and followed him into the small room where the lifegaurds rested during break.

"I guess you're not supposed to be in here, but there isn't a good place for you to sit inside other than this room," he said. "My name is Brian. What's your name?"

"I'm Uma," she said, expecting him to say, "Like Uma Thurman? as most people did."

He just smiled and nodded. He sat in the other other chair in the small white room and fiddled with the stereo that blared music out to the community pool. He pulled a bottle of water from a cooler and handed it to her.

"I think you're OK, but I could see your skin turning red even in the sun, which normally you don't see until you get out of the sun, and I know from experience that you are in for a pretty bad burn. Better get some aloe."

Uma remembered feeling oddly shy and embarrassed. After all her moves, she had become good at meeting people, if not at making long-term friends. Her father promised that this move was going to stick for awhile. He had been assigned to a project that could last five or six years.

They chit chatted in the room for 15 minutes until another guard came to rest and he went outside. Uma took that as a cue to go home.

A few days later, after her burn had healed, she was back at the pool and talking to Brian again. He was kind and almost overly formal. It was cheesy in a way, like he was a server at a nice restaurant, but it seemed genuine.

Uma liked him so much that she started thinking of him as her boyfriend and spun little fantasies about going to the homecoming dance and then prom, then the drama of what they would do when they went to college and how they would manage to stay together through it all.

A few weeks into summer there was a party at the pool after close for the staff and he asked her to stay. He kissed her and she remembered it well. Too well. So well she would never her tell her husband about Brian. Other boyfriends, sure, but not him.

Uma felt like she was really in love. Really in love. She woke every morning thinking about him. No one had cell phones then, so she had to call him at his house. They would talk for hours until one of their parents would roust them off the phone. They took walks around the neighborhood holding hands. He always had a little smile on his face and Uma felt totally comfortable with him and free of any pretense, need to show off or make up anything.

And then, near the end of summer, a stricken looking Brian approached her at the pool and pulled her aside.

"Uma, this is so hard, so hard, but I - I have to stop dating you," he said. "I just can't date anyone right now. Maybe later, but not now. I want to be friends. You're the best. I mean it."

Uma remembered interrogating him about why but he wouldn't budge. She cried and then held out hope that whatever crisis had happened to pull him away from her would resolve itself and he would return to her.

A month passed and they talked almost every day, but they didn't hold hands. And then she heard from Justin that Brian was taking another sophomore to the homecoming dance. Justin, apparently, was planning to take her. He even suggested that they could all go together.

It felt like the greatest betrayal. How? How could he take another girl. Uma stared at herself in the mirror, picking apart her every feature. She recorded her voice to determine if it was annoying. She backtracked over every word she had ever spoken to him. Had she revealed too much? Did she scare him away? She looked up photos of the girl who he was taking to the dance. She was on the dance team. Skinny and athletic. She looked at her own body and felt betrayed again.

When she saw Brian she almost hit him with anger, but he only smiled broadly and gave her a hug, like he understood her pain, comforting her. Uma determined to never speak to him again, but she couldn't do it. She liked him too much. She wanted to talk to him.

Brian remained a good friend to her. He introduced her to new friends and even boyfriends.

They grew up. They went away.

After drinking too much in college, she wrote a long e-mail to Brian and poured out her soul. She said all the things to him that she wanted to say. She told him that she still wanted to be with him. That no one had been the same.

Brian responded with a very short and sweet e-mail.

"I love you Uma, but I just don't feel the same way," he wrote. "Take care."

That was the last time she had spoken to him until he Facebook friended her. She had never messaged him, only daring to like and post on things that involved him and his family. She wondered if he had ever spoken to his wife about her. She doubted it.

Uma turned her thoughts to her own family. Two girls who she loved more than life. Her husband, a goofball with sandy blond hair and a great job who loved her. Maybe Brian looked at her photos and wondered "what if?"

She smiled and got back to the work she had set aside.