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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--
Salt Lake City is enormous.
They go to the zoo and see animals from six different biomes, and to the planetarium and see the stars, and to the natural history museum and see fossils, and to the art museum and see paintings, and to the library and see more books than Leo has ever seen in one place at one time.
Marlo still seems more relaxed here than he does in their tiny little town; Sasha continues to compliment people on blue hair and tattoos and piercings and at one point looks just a little bit longingly at a girl in a crop top.
Huh. Sasha's into girls. That's interesting.
Leo tries to read all the signs in the art museum and ends up seeing maybe a quarter of it by the end of the day. He winds up spending two hours at the monkey house asking the zookeeper innumerable questions and then the entire way home won't stop talking about how smart monkeys are. He gasps at the planetarium show and cries when they talk about how old the universe is. He is confused when he discovers that the natural history museum doesn't have any history in it, but it has more monkey facts in it and that's even better. He spends twenty minutes just walking around the library running his fingers down the spines of all the books and exclaiming to Sasha and Marlo about all the things people write books about.
When he gets back to the hotel room, he borrows Sasha's computer and searches "middle school curriculum" and then "what you learn in middle school" and "middle school homeschool" and takes notes on the free hotel stationary.
Marlo makes careful notes of the things Leo likes — they can go back to the museum if he wants to see more of it — and looks up books about monkeys and books about astronomy for middle schoolers and bookmarks the more promising-looking results.
He cuddles Leo and Sasha at night and sends Sasha warning looks when he looks too desperately at short shorts and crop tops and dyed hair and tries not to be too obviously married to them both when they're out.
Marlo can try not to be married to both of them, but a man with long hair and modest clothing holding hands with or gazing longingly at another man can really only be one thing, and whispers and under-their-breath "plyg"s follow them around Salt Lake City.
Leo wants to see more of everything, but he does not especially like the art museum, unless Sasha is telling him about art. (He stares openly at Sasha when Sasha tells him about art.)
Leo loves restaurant food, particularly restaurant food that has lots and lots of calories, particularly particularly restaurant food that has endless refills. He thinks the Olive Garden's infinite breadsticks is the single greatest invention known to humanity.
Leo doesn't initiate sex with Marlo, not without permission from Marlo, but he's used to sharing small spaces, and he goes to the bathroom and thinks about Marlo's hands and Marlo's mouth and Marlo's dick, and all his old fantasies are much more real now that he knows what it's like.
At night he rests a hand on Sasha's shoulder or his hip or once, bravely, his thigh, and it sends electric shivers through his entire body. (He starts imagining Sasha, too, when he's in the bathroom, Sasha looking up at him through pretty lashes and kissing him between his legs--)
On Sunday, he braces himself to see what they're doing about services.
On Sunday morning Sasha says "So I thought maybe the aquarium today?" like services didn't exist at all.
"I'm complicated but I believe the word is agnostic. The aquarium sounds good to me if it sounds good to you two?"
Octopuses are SO COOL. they can CHANGE COLORS and PRETEND TO BE ROCKS and THEY'RE SMART ENOUGH TO ESCAPE THEIR TANKS AND THROW SHRIMP AT AQUARIUM WORKERS HOW COOL IS THAT.
This is a much better way to spend a Sunday morning.
It is extremely cool!
Aquariums also have employees that he can harass with extensive octopus questions.
Is it really harassment if the employees are enthusiastic about answering, though.
(Being obviously polygamists in an aquarium on Sunday morning gets them fewer judgemental stares and more confused ones. Marlo is still acutely aware of every single pair of eyes.)
When they leave, Leo says, "I haven't ever told anyone I'm an atheist before. Or skipped church."
"It's too bad we have to go to church while we live back in town. People would gossip."
"...yeah," very quiet. "But we have to stay or they'll start marrying more people to Malcolm again and I can't —"
Leo reaches out and squeezes his hand. "It's okay. I'll make faces at you during the dumb parts."
"Yeah." He holds Leo's hand very tightly. "And it's better with you two, I just. Miss being able to wear what I want and cut my hair if I want and spend my Sundays how I want."
"It is. — you don't really notice how heavy it is until you cut it off. Or how hot it gets in the summer, having all that hair on the back of your neck and all that fabric on your arms and legs, until your hair is short and you can wear short sleeves and shorts if you feel like it."
"I would, but I don't actually own... other underwear," he says. "I guess we could thrift some while we're here."
