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him, but I couldn’t respond. I smiled. I know I was smiling,
but my eyes were closed and would not open.
    Through my tube socks, I could feel the Lego pieces I was stepping on.
Every corner of my room had wandering pieces that never made it back to the
shoebox.
    I was standing against the wall. I was standing in my bedroom. I mostly
knew that this was the case. And Ezra’s hands were pressed against my chest.
I could feel the heat from his palm, though that heat seemed to come from
some kind of fire inside of me.
    There was also a part of me that wasn’t in my bedroom, was floating with
the clouds and looking down at our houses, free from everything I wanted to
be free from. The clouds were fluffy and cartoony, the kind you can really
lounge around on.
    Ezra and I were about ten at the time, and he lived across the street
from me. We played together every day after school—at his house, at my house,
in the forest, wherever—until we each had to go home for dinner. That day,
he had just learned this cool trick, one we had been trying on each other
all afternoon.
    Here were his instructions: Lean against the wall. Bend over with your
head hanging upside down for at least three minutes. Stand up faster than
hell and hold your breath while the other person presses both their hands
as hard as they can against your chest. If things go well, then you go limp
within twenty seconds.
    “I promise I’ll catch you if you fall over,” Ezra said to me. And when
I didn’t respond, he said, “Trust me, you won’t die. I’ll even go first.”
    I was thinking that this was the coolest thing I’d ever heard anyone
tell me. I loved how it went when people blacked out in the movies, the look
in their eyes like they just came back from being a different person from
a different world. I was thrilled with the idea of having that moment where
I’m so lost that I need to say, “Where am I? Who am I?”
    We fought over who would go first. He argued that it was his idea to
do this in the first place, and I couldn’t refute that. But I still couldn’t
get him to black out no matter how hard I pressed on his chest. And then he
couldn’t get me to black out. And then I tried it on him again. And so on,
until my third time, when I hovered over those cartoony clouds in my semiconscious
trance.
    When I came to, Ezra told me that I was in a trance for a full minute.
He said I was smiling this goofy smile like I was dreaming about Nari Tanaka.
Nari was the Japanese girl in my class that I was in love with that year—and
for six more years— without ever doing a thing about it.
    As a kid, I worried. There were always at least one or two horrible,
embarrassing things that kept me up at night. At various times, these worries
included: too much hair growing out of my armpits, too ticklish to ever have
a girlfriend, a tumor in my brain/arm/leg/butt, a crooked penis, a crooked
stream of piss, being Jewish around a bunch of beautiful suburban WASPs, an
inability to kick a kickball, having skin the color of a Middle Eastern terrorist,
and my dumb smile.
    For one minute, this trance made my world of armpit hair, crooked penises,
and dumb smiles completely disappear. I let myself slowly fall down to a squatting
position and stared at Ezra like he and I were both dead and calmly waiting
for whatever was to happen next.
    “You have GOT to tell me what that felt like.”
    I was still smiling and spaced out and had barely said a thing when my
mother stormed into the room, claiming that she had been calling for us for
five minutes. Apparently Ezra’s mother was in the car outside, pissed and
waiting for him. And just like that, he was gone, with me still dazed on the
floor and my mother looking at me with that what-the-hell-were-you-two-up-to
look. I told my mom that we were just playing with Legos. I picked up some
of the pieces that were under my butt. “Oof!”