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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 eats as much food as he wants at dinner and then goes to bed early in his own room and falls asleep quickly.
When he wakes up, he spends a while luxuriating in the feeling of being able to lie in bed as late as he wants without having to get up to change a diaper or make a bottle.
After dinner Marlo gets himself and Sasha packed, and then Sasha pins him to the bed and murmurs "good boy, sweet boy" until he goes quiet and trembly, and they fall asleep curled around each other and in the morning he packs up the car while Sasha makes breakfast and then they can get out of this town for the week.
Salt Lake City is, as promised, enormous.
Leo has been to a city! He goes to the city on a pretty regular basis! It has sixty thousand people in it, not counting tourists.
Salt Lake City, apparently, has many more than sixty thousand people in it.
"There are so many people. I didn't realize there were this many people in the whole world." And then he realizes he's an idiot because of course the world has lots of people in it and now they're going to make fun of him for being dumb--
There are so many people! And so few of them are children-- he sees some families with five or six kids, but also a bunch of smaller families, and some families with no children at all. And people are wearing shorts and tank tops, even if they're women, and people seem to be in couples, and--
He grabs Marlo's hand and squeezes.
Sasha is noticeably more relaxed than he ever was in church.
"I love your hair," he says earnestly to a woman in a tank top whose hair is electric blue and who has so many tattoos she's running out of uninked skin.
Leo touches his hair-- it falls to mid-back, because he's a boywife, and probably says to everyone here that he's a polygamist-- and blushes.
"Yeah."
On the way to the hotel he sees a box labeled 'Take A Book Leave A Book.'
"...what's this?"
"Book exchange box — it's supposed to be like the thing where a group of friends might trade books with each other so everyone can read them, but for a whole neighborhood."
Leo opens it up.
"Imagine having so many books that you can just give away books."
"You get a free book in exchange, I think of it more like a library with a limited selection and an entry fee."
There's Stephen King and John Grisham and Fern Michaels and a book about scoring well on the GRE and a guide to becoming an FBI agent and an extremely scribbled-on coloring book.
"...so I should not just take all the books."
It is taking a literal physical effort not to shove all of them into his bag right now.
"...do you want to use my laptop to go on Libgen and download twice that many books."
"Nope. Libgen is a mildly sketchy Russian website where very helpful people upload books and then anyone can download them for free."
Leo very regretfully closes the take-a-book-leave-a-book box, pauses, then reopens it to take out the coloring book.
"I don't want to use your laptop if you're busy with it."
You don't have to give books you own back, he doesn't say.
"The coloring book is for Alma," Leo says. "He likes coloring."
"Okay," Sasha says, and doesn't say anything about leaving a book behind.
Leo goes back to the hotel room and borrows Sasha's laptop and opens the Libgen page and then stares in confusion, completely uncertain of what books he wants to read.
(Marlo and Sasha might notice that Leo seems to only own three or four outfits, and all of them are almost worn out.)
Yeah, they've noticed that.
"You liked Neil Gaiman, you could look for more of his books — or maybe you'd like —" and he lists off a few other writers.