A boy even younger than Zach came to the park and exchanged the trash bag full of cans for money. After getting over the initial shock of discovering she'd waltzed into Zach's past, she decided to follow him around until she fell asleep. Surely, she'd wake up back home.

"Why aren't you freaking out?" Bee asked the boy walking next to her while she seemed to float off the ground.

Teenage Zach shrugged. "You're either a ghost or I've gone nuts."

"And...these are groovy options to you?" Did groovy belong to the seventies or the nineties?

An overhead lamp blinked against the display window of a VHS store. A poster of Julia Roberts grinning next to Richard Gere screamed outdated.

Zach frowned." Well, it's nice to have someone to talk to."

Bee took in the shabby neighborhood. Quiet with apartments building with peeling plaster and graffiti. "You don't talk to your friends?"

Another shrug. "Not about the stuff that matters. Can't risk having them rat me out to the entire school."

That piqued Bee's interest. The boy version differed from the grown man who snapped and hid behind sarcastic remarks or half-truths. In the alternate universe she was stuck in, he was open wearing the gentleness she'd seen whenever his grown version protected her with nonchalance. She could coax a solution to her predicament.

"What are you up to?" She asked on a casual note.

Zach peered over his shoulder in the general direction of her voice. "Promise you won't laugh?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die."

The corners of Zach's lips twitched. "I'm saving up for a flight."

Not a magical portal, then. "Oh? Where do you wanna go?"

Zach's face lit up and Bee marveled at the sudden transformation. With sparking eyes and a lightness to his step, Bee found his happiness at the idea infectious and smiled back.

"Hurghada. I want to see the red sea." He scratched an eyebrow. "It's in Egypt, where I'm from."

"I didn't know you were Arabic," Bee didn't hide her surprise.

Zach laughed. "I assure you I'm not a language."

"Right, I mean like an Arabic speaker." Bee remembered the foreign stream of words the first time she caught him in her grandad's house.

"Don't worry about it, I probably don't know more than you do. All I know is Lapis City."

"You were born here?"

Zach nodded. "My parents were Egyptian, but I was a kid when they died."

Bee saw him at the restaurant telling her about the failed adoption and it filled her with dread. If she was back in his past then he would try to hurt himself. She couldn't fathom how the cheerful boy could consider such a grim fate.

"I keep having these dreams of putting my head underwater and swimming next to dolphins and turtles between corals." Zach carried on, oblivious to Bee's silence. "Always warm too! Like I can feel the sun as I come up for air."

He fell quiet, coming up the stairs to an unassuming apartment building. He clenched his fists.

"I know it's stupid," he muttered. "Plane tickets across continents..."

There it was. The underlying defeat.

"Hey," Bee said to his back as he climbed up the stairs. "Don't put yourself down. It's a great idea. I'd like to go too."

They stopped and Zach fished a key from the pocket of his faded jeans. A boy around Zach's age had the TV on MTV. He was built like a jock, tall with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. A little girl sat on the couch humming Backstreet Boy's As long as you love me.

"Where's Bill?" Zach said.

The teenage blond boy huffed. "Out on a business trip. Probably hitting the secretary."

"Is daddy hitting a girl?" The girl asked.

Zach glared at the boy. "No, pumpkin. Scott's being weird."

Scott flipped Zach off.

The girl tore her attention from the TV, unaware of staring match. Her toothless smile complimented the dimples decorating her cheeks. "I got a star today."

The other teenage boy scowled but Zach drove for the girl, picking her up in his arms. Zach's grey sweater hiked up, revealing a ghastly bruise the size of a baseball on his lower abdomen. It marred his exposed skin in shades of purple and green.

"Whoa, a star all by yourself, huh?"

The girl giggled and wrapped her slender arms around his neck. "They clapped for me in class!"

"As they should," Zach said then at Scott he said, "I'll tuck her in. Is the sink done?"

"How would I know?"

"It's your turn." Zach grumbled. "Did you at least feed, Millie?"

"Yeah, cereal." Scott propped his feet on the table already occupied with TLC's dance moves.

Millie yawned on Zach's shoulder and her turned away from Scott to a bedroom consisting of a bed and a green writing desk. Zach laid the sleeping child on the bed, unlacing her pink shoes and pulling the covers on the small sleeping form.

"She's beautiful." Bee said.

Zach's smile at that time didn't fully reach his eyes. "I don't know how I can leave her."

"Is she your sister?"

Zach shook his head. "Kind of. Not by blood but she's my sister in a way. Does it make sense?"

Bee nodded then realized he still couldn't see her. "Yeah"

Once Zach was satisfied Millie was comfortable, he tiptoed out of her room, did the dishes and ignored Scott's remarks which mainly consisted of calling Zach the help.

"Is he always like this?" Bee glowered.

"Yup," Zach waved a hand. "You learn to tune him out."

The bedroom the boys shared could've been divided in half. One side had a tidy bed and books piled high. The other end was a heap of dirty laundry and flaunted poster of mean wrestlers.

Under the bed, Zach knelt taking out a shoe box filled with Knick knacks and memorabilia. Under a few polaroid pictures, Zach took out a wad of dollar bills adding the money he made earlier in the park. Nothing in there reeked of magic. Bee was simply hanging out with a boy in a broken home full of dreams.