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.
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.
Leo's best friend in the whole world is Jing Yi, who goes to the public school. Jing Yi likes books too, and history and science and math, and he likes playing horses with the girls. Jing Yi found out some boys were hitting Leo and made fun of them until everyone was laughing at the boys instead of Leo, and now Leo almost never gets black eyes anymore. Leo knows he's going to marry a Mormon, but maybe Jing Yi will convert, if Leo is very good and keeps sweet and gives a good testimony. Leo wants to wear a white dress and marry Jing Yi 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.
Jing Yi doesn't mind that Leo always has a baby along when they play. He's good with kids, and it's fun to have someone to pretend to rescue when they play knights.
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.
He hasn't talked to Jing Yi in months.
--
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 think about Jing Yi hardly at all anymore, 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 tolerant. 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 pushes them away. He's probably too slow and stupid to think about them anyway.
--
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 is twenty and Malcolm LaBaron is not kind or gentle or understanding or patient. He doesn't have a baby so he is always available for anything that Malcolm LaBaron's wives need, to clean their floors and cook their meals and watch their toddlers. He doesn't help the older kids with their homework. He's too stupid. He stays up all night with the most colicky of the babies so that the other wives can get some rest. He's the least favorite in the household, he knows. He's grateful that he's a boywife; he won't have children who are disadvantaged by him being stupid and ugly and awkward and shy.
Sex hurts more than anything he's ever felt. He smiles through it and keeps sweet. He feels himself floating somewhere to the left of his body.
All Leo has to do is cook and clean and change diapers and keep sweet, but he can't even do that right. The first time Malcolm hits him, he hopes it's because Malcolm had a bad day. The tenth time, he vows to try harder to please him. The twentieth, he accepts as the way that his life is.
He is too tired to doubt anything anymore, which is sort of like faith.
--
Leo is twenty-two, and Jing Yi whom he hasn't seen for a decade has somehow found his husband's phone number and called him asking if he can go out for lunch, and Malcolm is in a generous mood as he always is after a rage and he says yes.