It has been four days, sixteen hours, and ten—she checks a clock in the window of an antique store, assuming it's correct—thirty-nine minutes since she set foot inside her mother's house.
That is what she calls it now, inside her head, when she remembers: her mother's house. She calls it that because no matter how hard she tries, she can think of it as home. She can. And she shouldn't. But when did that ever stop anyone?
Aladdin was her favorite character when she was growing up. (Her mind is doing more and more of this random skipping thing these days, uncontrollably, like a wild animal searching for a resting place it can't find, and the thought that her mind is a wild animal is another one of those restless motions her thoughts make. But she's always done that. Always made up ways to describe herself, and then wished someone would apply them to her so she wouldn't have to. Always been her own best friend.)
Aladdin was her favorite character when she was growing up, and she remembers him now because she and her friends are street rats, shooting up and smoking and snorting and stealing, but this isn't Agrabah and there aren't guards patrolling the streets unless you count cops in donut shops or well-meaning quasi-authority figures with too little to do and too much money to do it with. And no matter what she does, there isn't some fucked-up version of Princess Jasmine ready and waiting to take her away from this life of crime someday soon. So she leaves the Disney movie to rest in peace in the ashes of her childhood. But it hurts a little more than expected.
Everything here makes her feel just a little more than expected.
So her fingers start to shake and she starts feeling the need of it, and despite knowing this is wrong and that she needs to escape the vicious cycle she's getting trapped in day by day, she takes one last look at the sky and one more breath of pollution to carry the burn in her lungs back down to the underground world where her fellow street rats live.
Peter Pan had the right way of thinking. She doesn't ever want to grow up. And maybe that's what keeps her, and Lolli, and Luis, and Dave, and everyone else, in this weird antithesis to Never Never Land.