Page 51 of Radar

Eddie was as thin as a bean pole, but he was about as tall as Xander, and Xander was six feet three. Eddie was hardly delicate. Granted, Elyssa was tall, too. Five ten maybe five eleven? Hard to tell with boots on.

The image of her walking across his lodge room, bare feet, long legs, his T-shirt just brushing the tops of her thighs, slid unbidden through his imagination.

Eddie was perched on the arm of Elyssa’s chair as he told the story. “These frat boys, smelling strongly of beer, surrounded me. And they had a lot to say about people ‘like me.’” He threw those last two words into finger-flexed quotationmarks. “And how they were going to punish me for daring to be different from them. Now, I had never been in a fight before. I mean,” he spread his hands wide, “I’d have no idea what to do in a fight even today. I am of the strong belief that everyone should just chill out. So, this boy-circle starts to edge closer and closer, like someone was pulling a lasso around a poor little calf. And all I can think to do is cover my face to protect my eyes when I hear. ‘’Scuse me. ’Scuse me coming through. He’s mine.’” Eddie was animatedly miming this sequence. “Then Elyssa—I had no idea who she was at the time—grabs this guy’s shoulder and tears him out of her way. I mean fierce! She goes, ‘Yup, he’s mine.’ Then she bends at the waist, shoves her shoulder into my midsection, grabs me by my thighs, and stands. I am both confused andincrediblyimpressed. And also, all the blood was running to my head, so slightly dizzy. Anyway, she powers through the other side of the circle, through the party, and sets me down outside by her car and says, ‘Can I give you a ride somewhere safer?’”

“What?” Paca was grinning hard from his cross-legged seat on the floor.

“Oh, Elyssa here was on our university rugby team. She is a warrior.” He gritted his teeth and pulled his lips back, making his eyes fierce. “She does that on the field,” he relaxed his face. “I’d say she was trying to terrify her opponents, but they’re all doing it. Just this side of berserker. Just raw, brutal aggression. Women rugby players scare the living crap out of me.”

Elyssa sighed and shook her head at him.

“You?” Xander couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice. Elyssa presented as warm and soft but also forthright and intelligent. He couldn’t imagine her as fierce, though.

“Elyssa,” Eddie insisted. “My warrior angel saw I was in trouble and did what she’d trained to do, grab up the opponent who was clinging to the ball and put them down where she wanted them.”

“Elyssa for the win!” Paca laughed with victory fists in the air.

“Years ago.” She waved a hand through the air. “Back in the day, as they say.”

“Wanna see?” Eddie pulled out his phone and started scrolling through his photo album.

“Please don’t,” Elyssa said quietly. “That was a long time ago.” There was just enough wistfulness that caught the edges of her words that Eddie immediately looked contrite and slid his phone away. He followed up with a side hug.

Xander read that as Elyssa was an athlete benched by events. He’d watched it happen to friends and family alike. Some of them came through the change of circumstances okay, but different, some people became so uprooted that they wilted to the point of being unrevivable. Elyssa was obviously resilient in her effort to make a meaningful life for herself, regardless of what had happened.

“Rugby,” Paca said. “How did you get interested in that sport?”

“I was a wrestler in high school. There wasn’t a girls’ team, so I was allowed to compete with the boys’ all the way up to the State Championship.”

“That means you made State Champion, and they wouldn’t let you participate?” Paca asked.

“Exactly. My read on it was that the parents who wanted their boys to get college scholarships were putting up a fuss because they were afraid their sons would miss their opportunity if I showed the males up. But I tell you, a woman’s leg strength is formidable.”

“It’s the truth,” Xander said. “When I go to the gym, the women are deadlifting three-fifty-four hundred pounds. The men won’t go near that. Arms, shoulders, and skip leg day.”

“Butts are the powerhouse.” Elyssa had a look of curiosity glinting in her eyes as she looked at Xander, then she blinked it away. “After an article about the situation showed up in the local paper, my future university’s Rugby coach contacted me. She said that since there weren’t a lot of high schools with girls’ rugby teams, they recruited athletes from track and field, and when they could, wrestling. I’d never heard of rugby. The coach showed me a Maori women’s team performing the Haka before a match. To me, the utter power they displayed was so antithetical to the messages I had heard growing up. There was such conviction in their power.”

“What you’re saying is that you were a rebel?” Paca asked.

“You would rebel, too, if your mother wanted you dressed in ruffles and bows and sat you like a doll on a chair.”

“True,” Paca said. “But I was a boy.”

“Your mother didn’t do that!” Eddie said to Elyssa.

“She did,” Elyssa countered. “I can show you pictures. But soon enough, she learned that life was easier when I ran off my energy. The bigger the girl, the bigger the energy, so when I said wrestling, she adapted.”

“I have three kids, and I know for certain that a child shows up with their own personality,” Paca said. “I was an early disappointment to my father, who would have reveled in having a child like you, Elyssa. Instead, I wanted to stare at animals through binoculars all day long. Poor dad.”

“My mom and dad wanted me to be a musician,” Eddie said. “But I was told I have a tin ear. My piano teacher said they shouldn’t waste their money.”

“Oh, Eddie!” Elyssa exclaimed.

“To be fair. I was actually pretty good. But when anyone was home, I banged around like an elephant trying to play the keys because I said electric guitar, and they said piano. And I was a shitty little kid.”

Elyssa turned his way. “Xander, did you disappoint your parents?”

“Every single day. Mostly, I think that I left them feeling lonely because I spent so much time with my nose in my books. I read everything and anything. I wanted to know it all. When I got uncomfortable because I was growing faster than the different body parts could keep up, my doctor suggested going to the gym and lifting weights. And she was right. Lifting and exercising hard took away the aches. I became a book-reading gym rat.”

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