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Leo is eight, and he prays every night that Heavenly Father will make him a boywife.
Leo is smart. He's skipped two grades and even so he's bored; the teachers let him read textbooks from the grades ahead in the back of the class. But he's small and he's clumsy and he likes playing horses with the girls more than he likes playing football with the boys. The other boys are large and confusing and they hurt him. He comes home from school with black eyes and scrapes and he doesn't tell his dad where they came from. He might still grow up to be a husband, and husbands are supposed to protect and defend their wives.
Men grow up to work construction or drive trucks or farm, and that scares Leo-- jobs outside that leave you sweaty and tired once you're done, jobs for large men who are good at sports, having to be around men who swear and spit and make him want to cry. Boywives get to read books, he's seen them. The books have shirtless men on the cover and he's not allowed to read them until he's bigger, although he doesn't know why he'd want to read them anyway. It doesn't seem like there's any math or science or history in them at all.
Maybe it makes more sense when you're a grownup.
Leo spends hours cuddling his little brother and sister, counting their toes and kissing their noses and reading them board books. He wants to play with his sister-wives' babies and read them stories and teach them their numbers and their colors and their letters. He wants it so badly it hurts.
You're not supposed to speculate about Heavenly Father's will. But Leo knows exactly who he wants Heavenly Father to choose for him: Marlo, four years older than him. Marlo found out some boys were hitting Leo and told them that next time they could pick on Marlo instead of picking on someone littler than them, and since then Leo has hardly had any black eyes. Marlo is brave and noble, like a hero in a storybook, and Leo wants to wear a white dress and marry Marlo and kiss him and be held by him and be sealed to him for eternity.
Leo is eight, and the prophet has just had a revelation, and he is the happiest boywife in the world.
--
Leo is ten, and he's stupid.
He's slow and stupid and it feels like he's thinking through molasses, and he has to read the page three or four times before it sinks in and he keeps making stupid mistakes on all his math problems and he never finishes all of his homework no matter how hard he tries.
His mom got pregnant when the baby was only five months old, and she's so tired, she's so so tired, and he has to help his mom watch the younger kids as soon as he gets home from school and then he's up all night with the baby so his mom can get some rest and-- he knows it's important to help out but he's so stupid.
He starts getting B's on tests. Then C's. Then D's. Then he fails, and the teachers start talking about holding him back a year.
His mother says, "it's all right. You were ahead already."
--
Leo is twelve and he doesn't go to school anymore. Boywives don't need to go to school. He'll learn everything he needs to learn from his mom, and she needs the help around the house, with all the kids.
He borrows the textbooks from a friend and tries to read them but he usually can't get more than a page in before he falls asleep.
--
Leo is fourteen, and he's awkward and gangly and somehow simultaneously too skinny and too fat and he has a big nose and acne and he tries not to imagine how disappointed his husband would be to get him.
He won't end up with one of the important families. Heavenly Father picks, but somehow Heavenly Father ends up picking the most beautiful girls and boywives for the most powerful men. Boywives don't ever wind up being a man's first wife; the first wife should be capable of having children.
He doesn't dream, anymore, of marrying Marlo, except at night, when his hands are between his legs and he's doing something he's pretty sure a good boywife is not at all supposed to do.
He hopes for an older man. Someone kind, gentle, understanding. Patient with him, if he wants to go slow. A man whose other wives would be understanding. A man whose children are all old enough to sleep through the night, and whose wives are too old to have more, so he can get some rest.
--
Leo is sixteen, and he's not married yet. His mother says that Heavenly Father knows she needs the help. Leo suspects the shy awkward ugly boywife who keeps falling asleep during church is not as popular as one might hope.
The textbooks have gathered dust, but sometimes late at night he can think, and he knows his Bible and his Book of Mormon well enough to think about them even when the baby has been crying for three hours, and he has... questions.
He tells his mother that he's taking the toddlers to the library today, and he lets them play in the children's section, and he searches on the Internet for "questions about Mormonism" and then "questions about Mormonism atheist" and he reads and his stomach sinks to the floor.
Leo is sixteen and Marlo has disappeared with Malcolm LaBaron's boywife and he thinks: "why couldn't that be me?"
--
Leo is sixteen seventeen eighteen and he's not brave enough to leave the only life he's known to go out into the real world, the world of sex and drugs and sin, where he'd have to be one of those real men whom he still doesn't understand at all and who still scare him to no end, to work construction and take care of a family and have opinions about sports, the world where it matters that he's stupid and slow and can't think right. And he thinks about it all the time but he's not brave enough for the other way out either.
Leo is eighteen and Malcom LaBaron keeps looking at him at church and Malcolm's fifty years old and has three wives and six babies and Leo knows Heavenly Father is going to give the prophet a revelation soon and the thought of touching the man makes him want to throw up and he knows what his life is going to be--
Leo starts reading and-- Sasha was cuddling him earlier, it's allowed, and it was weird to go so long without holding anyone-- rests his head on Sasha's shoulder.
Sasha moves so his shoulder will be a more comfortable pillow and keeps working.
The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds is written in a really weird style and everyone is talking funny and it doesn't make any sense, probably because he is stupid.
When he reads the end of Troll Bridge, when a man escapes his life and becomes a troll, he reaches for Sasha's hand and squeezes it.
Don't Ask Jack makes him clutch Sasha.
Sasha puts a hand in Leo's hair and holds him tight, tries to mimic what works when Marlo does this.
"I like the stories," he says into Sasha's shoulder. "Even though they're. Not sweet."
"I think I like them because they're not sweet, at least a little bit. — My favorite story in this one is Sunbird, it's towards the end."
He reads it; he laughs, he clutches Sasha, and at the end he sighs and closes the book and rests his head on Sasha's shoulder.
"It's good."
Sasha is making that face at him and it makes Leo suddenly realize that Sasha is very very pretty, and he's holding Sasha's hand and has his head on Sasha's shoulder and their thighs are touching and their faces are close enough that he could reach out and kiss Sasha right now and he is very aware, from this morning, how nice kissing is.
He should stop touching Sasha.
He is going to stop touching Sasha any minute now.
Just a few more seconds.
Marlo could walk in-- Marlo could walk in and see them and he's very kind and self-sacrificing and noble but any man would get upset about his wives cheating on him with anyone, much less each other-- does Leo want to get a black eye--
Well, evidently, yes.
To distract from his internal turmoil, Leo says, "so do you have thoughts about how you want to divide things up? You're his first wife, you get more say."
"...I can't sleep without him. You could join the two of us if you wanted but I do need him there at night, when he's not there I — it's — not good.
Other than that I haven't thought about it as much as I probably should have."
He's smiling so hard his face hurts and-- he's going to feel guilty, later, even if Marlo doesn't catch him, but right now he's so happy.
"Can I still have-- some nights with him, even if he goes back to you after?"
"Yeah. Of course, as long as I'm not sleeping alone."
He's maybe clinging to Leo, just a little bit.
"I'd like getting to sleep with you and him."
He'd like getting to see Sasha in his pajamas and touch his back when there's plausible deniability and maybe rest a hand on his hip when everyone thinks he's asleep and can't be held accountable for his actions. Which probably makes him a grade-A terrible person, since Marlo is his savior and they've barely been married for 24 hours and now Leo is fantasizing about cheating on Marlo with his own wife. But it is hard to feel bad about that when Sasha keeps looking at him.
"We can alternate days? --I don't know how you want to divide up chores, or if you're going to want me to get a job."
"There winds up not being as many chores as you're expecting, there's only three of us and no toddlers and we have a dishwasher and a laundry machine. I started doing commissions when I noticed myself getting kind of itchy with how much free time I had but maybe that'll make sense for you and maybe it won't, one day isn't really enough to know, and you're going to want to get your feet under you first either way."
"That makes sense," Leo says. "I'd offer to cook but I'm not sure I know how to cook things with uh. You know. More ingredients than just flour, beans, rice, oats, eggs from the chickens, and whatever came from the garden."
He has the overwhelming desire to pet Sasha's hair.
"I can teach you, I mostly figured out a handful of really easy things and got good at them."
(If he follows through on this desire he will find that Sasha makes soft happy noises when his hair is touched.)
He very carefully brushes just the tips of Sasha's hair with the back of his hand.
"Honestly," he says, "I would be happy if I never ate beans and rice again."
"You're not. — I mean, you are, but not in a way that's hurting any, I was working for most of last night so I can afford to be distracted for a while."