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you’re having a baby, he said.
    I tried screaming into the t-shirt the way that women do on TV but something about doing this actually sucks the breath right out of you. It was hard to get any air in through my nose, lying on the floor all tied up and with Asher kneeling next to me. His collarbone stood out under his shoulders and he had tiny pink nipples. He shoved my shoulder.
    Come on, Asher said. Do something. Try and escape. Try it, try it, he said and he kept shoving at me. I was choking a little and I couldn’t stop him pushing me because I was all tied up. We were both doing what we were supposed to do but the way he was pushing at me was the same way you kill a bug that you’re a little afraid of. Where you need to get it into the Kleenex but it might jump on your hand and really scare you. He started yelling, You want me to untie you, you want me to untie you, pig? and I nodded my head and made some sounds into the t-shirt but then he changed it like we planned and said, I’ll untie you but you have to kiss me, get it?
    I didn’t want to kiss him. I just wanted the t-shirt out of my mouth and I started shaking my head. I had tears in my eyes because I couldn’t breathe and I could see Asher starting to panic because I wasn’t playing along.
    You have to say yes! Asher said. You have to say yes or I can’t let you go!
    I kept shaking my head and crying and Asher pushed his hands on my shoulders and my head banged off the hard ground and he started to cry too. He ripped the shirt out of my mouth.
    His mouth was dry and mine was all wet from drooling into the shirt. I coughed against his lip. What the two mouths had in common was not wanting to be there, but we didn’t know how else to end the game. If we’d just stopped it would have felt like hitting pause on a tape recorder. No matter what other game we played, the ending to Lock-Up would have hung over our heads like we’d stolen something and had to figure out how to put it back.
    It was hard to stop crying. I was sucking at air in big gulps in a gaspy, sorrowful way. Jesus, Jesus, shut up! Asher said, working his fingers over the knot around my hands. My mother’s going to hear you! Shut up, shut up!
    I coughed a lot while he was untying me. Asher’s mother called out: she wanted us to come upstairs and help her fold bedsheets. I turned back for a second on the way up. Asher’s t-shirt was all wrinkled and spitty in the middle, where it had been bunched in my mouth, and he was trying to flatten it down against his chest. The whole upstairs was warm from the oven; his mother was baking something. I sat on the couch and folded the pillowcases into squares and stacked up the squares on the coffee table. Asher sat next to me. We didn’t look at each other. I was afraid if I looked at his mother I’d start crying again. I didn’t want to go back downstairs and I didn’t want to go home either.
    Asher’s mother said, What you playing in the storeroom for? All that dust gonna kill you!
    When it was dinner time Asher walked me back to my grandmother’s. It was still raining so we had our hoods on. I kicked him once and then he shoved me and I said, Don’t. We got in the wrong elevator by mistake. It was Shabbat. One of the elevators was pre-programmed to stop on every floor, so you don’t have to press buttons on the sabbath. All the way to the fifteenth floor, the doors lurched open and closed.
    Are you okay? Asher said.
    I looked at myself in the mirrored walls.
    This elevator sucks, I said. Oh no, I pushed a button! God’s going to kill me!
    It was your stupid game, he said.
    When I got inside I went into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I didn’t know why I was sick.
    I make you a cream-of-wheat! my grandmother called through the door.
    The floor was cold and I sat there for a while with my hands on the white toilet seat. The whole room smelled like Oil of Olay.