Amira sat at the kitchen table, trying to prepare a traditional Middle Eastern dish—grape leaves wrapped around a filling of ground lamb and rice. The Lebanese singer Fairouz was playing in the kitchen, her lovely old-fashioned voice swooping and leaping as she sang about her broken heart. Sami’s mother had come to the States when she was fifteen—not much older than Sami was now. Whenever Amira told her the story about how her mother, Sami’s grandmother, or sitti, had made them move, Sami couldn’t imagine doing such a thing—ripping up her whole life to fly to a place where she didn’t know a single person. Whenever she thought about her brave, smart mother getting on that airplane with her own mother and going off, just the two of them, it made Sami want to cry, and she almost forgave Sitti for calling her by her formal Lebanese name, Samar, and harassing her about her grades and daydreaming and all of it.

“Samar! Come in here, habeebti, and tell me about your day,” Amira called to Sami. Sami’s mother was sitting at the kitchen table still wearing her suit from work. About once a month, Amira would try to come home early from her law firm to take a stab at preparing a Lebanese dinner for her children, instead of grabbing the usual pizza or Chinese takeout. She was a much better attorney than cook, though. Plus, Tony always had to leave early for basketball practice and Sami would get into an fight with her aunt. Amira would end up upset that they didn’t all suddenly behave like her idea of a happy family.

Sami rolled her eyes and slouched into the kitchen. “Hi, Ma,” she groaned and gave her mother a fleeting kiss on the top of her head.

“Oh! How do they get the rice to stay in such a nice shape?” Amira was trying to roll up the grape leaf, but the filling kept scattering.

“Scootch over,” Sami muttered and sat next to her mother. “Look, for the ten- millionth time, you’ve got to press the filling together before you start rolling.”

“Oh…right, right, right,” Amira said, tiredly. “Just like your sitti used to.”

Sami shook her head and rolled another grape leaf.

“So…how was school today?” Amira asked tentatively: they both knew this was dangerous territory.

“Stupid,” Sami said matter-of-factly. She finished rolling three more grape leaves while her mother struggled with the first. “Hyacinth Somerset started a Blue Eyes Gang.”

“A what? What’s that?” Amira tried to redo her leaf.

“A club that I can’t get into,” Sami said, widening her hazel eyes. “That’s all any of them even care about—what things look like, how pretty you are, and who’s in the talent show. They’re all such idiots!”

“Sami.” Amira stopped her messy assault on a grape leaf. “That attitude won’t help you make any friends.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but they are, Mom,” Sami said regretfully. “They’re a bunch of total loser morons.”

Back at her old school in Ithaca, the kids wore quirky hand-me-down clothes and homemade stuff their parents gave them; they ate organic fruits and let their hair grow wild and loose. Tony used to call them “granola kids” but at least they were nice. Sami hated the kids at Sunny Isles Middle, with their shiny cars and expensive clothes, so smug and proud of themselves. The Sunny Isles kids all acted like they were in training to be movie stars. She hadn’t had a close friend since they’d left Ithaca, and sometimes she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be really close to someone, to talk and laugh freely, to feel at ease and set free in another person’s presence.

“Oh, Samar, come on.” Her mother put down her leaf and propped her chin on her fist. “You can’t just dismiss people—you’ll never get anywhere if you scorn the world. I’m sure there must be one nice person in that great big school.”

Sami could hear her attempting to keep the edge out of her voice—it was always like that between her and Amira, always dancing around each other, trying not to upset each other. Sami didn’t know why things had to be so difficult for the two of them. She stared miserably at her plate of neatly rolled grape leaves. There was no point in even trying to answer her mother sometimes.

“By the way—we’ve got a couple of house guests coming. I’m sure you remember that Aunt Elicia is coming tomorrow, and—”

“What?” Sami interrupted, although she remembered then that she’d already known about this. “That old witch? No way.”

“Samar, you knew she was coming,” Amira snapped, her eyes hard black mirrors.

“Why do you always have to invite her here? Why don’t you ever care about my feelings?” Sami threw back at her.

“I do care,” her mother said, her tone somewhere between pleading, exasperation, and anger. Sami knew her mother’s anger was what made her such a great lawyer. Amira defended battered women and censored artists and all sorts of people who ordinarily had no one to stand up for them. She was angry at bullies and unfairness; she was angry at the people who destroyed Beirut, the ones who forced her to rip up her life and start over in a strange place. She became a defense attorney, she said, to protect the underdog. And Sami was proud of her mother, but sometimes she was also afraid of that big current of anger.

“But you don’t care—not really,” Sami threw out—the anger in her own voice matching her mother’s. “If you did, you wouldn’t invite her here!”

“What would you have me do, Samar?” Amira demanded. “Elicia is your father’s last living relative—she’s the only link we have to him. Do you honestly expect me to turn her away?”

“Whatever!” Sami jumped up from the table and left the room, too frustrated and upset to make much sense of the way she was feeling. It was almost as if she were too upset about this thing—that it shouldn’t have mattered so much. But it did—it mattered so much to her that she felt as if she couldn’t stand it. As if it were all just more evidence of her mother’s ongoing yet intangible betrayal—more proof that, after Sitti’s and her father’s deaths, Sami could never really trust anyone at all.

Later the next morning, a Saturday, Sami stretched out on her bed.

“She doesn’t listen!” Amira’s voice was audible through her bedroom door, across the hall, and into Sami’s room. “Her grades are just getting worse all the time—she’s been skipping classes and she just doesn’t pay attention to anyone. Yes…I try to understand her—but her head is off in the clouds.”

There was a long pause; then Sami heard her mother saying, “Yes, I know. You’re right…Sometimes I do—sure. Even send her to Lebanon for a while. Old-fashioned discipline, tradition. Wake her up a little. Yes…you’re right…Well, she needs a mother and a father. Oh, I know—I’m just not home enough.”

Sami got up and closed her door firmly, trying to block out her mother’s complaints. It was always the same thing: nothing she did seemed to please her mother, anyway. Defeated, she stared at the piles of algebra, French, and English homework on her desk and drifted back to her mirror.

First, she pulled her hair back in a clip. Then, she put her hands flat on the dresser to hold herself steady. Then, she looked straight into her eyes.

She hated her green eyes. They were too muddy and plain. Her father’s had been clear, blue-sky blue. And her skin was almost soap-white. She wished it were smooth brown satin like her mother’s. Having an American father and an Arab mother should have given her elusive, exotic looks; instead, Sami groused, it just meant she didn’t really look like anybody. Next in her catalog of unsatisfactory traits were her knobby, flat feet from her mother’s grandfather and her horrible nose with the bump in the middle (her aunt called it “the Jameson Bump”) that came from her father’s father.

As she stared, though, she gradually forgot to analyze her appearance. Instead, her eyes unfocused, and other pieces of thoughts, memories, and bits of her day began to glide by. Sitti had taught her the mirror-staring game. Sitti claimed she found all sorts of answers to things there, and she said that someday Sami would too. Though she never explained what the questions would be.

Sami thought about how terrible things were these days between her and her mother. It hadn’t always been like this, but first her father had died, then her grandmother. And with each loss, Amira became stiffer, sharper, more anxious about everything, until Sami could barely remember the sound of her mother’s laughter. Sami started to feel like she presented a sort of emotional problem for her mother—like she was a puzzle Amira couldn’t figure out. And then Tony became worried about their mother’s grief; pretty soon, Sami felt like all three of them were tiptoeing around, trying so hard not to upset each other that they barely even knew each other. Sami learned that people don’t have to die in order for you to lose them. The world seemed like such a crummy place, Sami thought. You learned to love people just to have them taken away. Scream or cry, it didn’t matter. Just like homes: Sitti’s beautiful old Beirut one was ruined; and lovely Ithaca was replaced by horrible Florida.

Sami suspected that everyone would just be a whole lot happier if they didn’t have to worry about her. She knew that she was grumpy and not a lot of fun to be around. It used to be that Sami, her father, and her grandmother were—as Amira said fondly—“the family dreamers.” Amira, Tony, and Morticia were the practical, efficient ones. Everything seemed to be fine as long as they’d had that balance. But Amira no longer said the word dreamer with any fondness.

Sami’s gaze shifted to her mirror: it was one of the few things that could make her feel a little better.

It was almost useless as a mirror, though, so ancient that the glass was streaky and warped and tarnished. If Sami stood closer to the left than to the right side of the mirror, her features would stretch like the reflections in a fish bowl. If she stood on tiptoe to the right, her features more or less settled into the right places.

The long mirror hung in a wooden frame carved into the shapes of lions and tigers and nameless animals with fierce eyes and curling tails, all creeping along the edges of the glass. When Sami put her nose to the frame, she caught a faint whiff of something lovely, close yet ineffable, like a forest full of cedar trees four thousand years ago on a windy day.

Her mother kept that saying the mirror belonged in the junkyard. But somehow she never got around to throwing it out. Sami’s grandmother, her sitti, had brought the mirror from Lebanon years ago.

Sitti used to tell Sami that the mirror was from Ancient Times and had belonged to one of their ancestors, a beautiful woman named Magali of Palmyra, who was half Phoenician royalty and half magic jinn. “Half and half. Like you,” Sitti’d said.

Sitti had been fairly magical herself. She made soups that could cure headaches and teas that brightened bad moods, and said that she could mix herbs that made people fly or tell the truth or turn invisible. She did palm readings, coffee-ground readings, and mirror gazing. She taught Sami nursery rhymes in Arabic that, she said also, worked as incantations. These sorts of claims made her daughter, Amira, crazy. Sami’s mother called it “backwards, Old World superstition.” Amira said that Beirut was more modern and advanced than most of the countries in the world, that they’d left such stuff behind when they’d moved to the United States. Sitti would say, well then, you can leave me behind as well. She said it was better to gaze into the mirror than to gaze into that “idiot box” where Amira watched the evening news.

Now Sami kept her grandmother’s mirror in her room. When she missed her Sitti or her father too much, she’d drag her desk chair over, look into the mirror, and mutter to her grandmother about how much she hated her school. Or she’d complain to her father about how childish all the other kids were.

Sometimes she heard them whispering back. “You’re stronger and braver than you know. Hang on—you’ll get through all of this.”

Sami glared at herself. She grabbed her hair with both hands and tried to press it flat, but it just came springing back. She had the worst hair in ninth grade—long brown corkscrews all over the place. She was too tall, too skinny, and too scrappy. And of course, her brother Tony was perfect. He had straight, shining black hair like their mother’s. Her big brother didn’t have to comb his hair: he literally didn’t have to look in the mirror. He had wheat-colored skin and pure black eyes. All mirrors bowed down and worshipped him.

Sami was in the midst of scowling at her reflection when Tony poked his head in the door. “Hey, sis,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen. “Mom’s trying to make grape leaves again.”

“Oh no,” Sami said. “Why does she do that?”

Tony tossed back his shiny hair. “Aw, you know she’s just trying to do the family thing—get back to our roots and all that. It’s like she can’t help herself.”

Pouting, Sami turned back to the mirror. She could see the reflection of approximately twenty stuffed animals lining the shelves of her room—blue rabbits and yellow horses, snugly frogs and soft porcupines. After Sami’s father died, Amira started buying Sami stuffed animals, as if they could somehow compensate. Sami turned back to her brother. “Why can’t she just worry about her own roots?”

Tony shrugged, then glanced at the mirror. “See anything in there lately?”

It was something no one else knew about. For as long as Sami could remember, she had believed that, if she only tried hard enough, she would see or hear things in the mirror. From time to time, she seemed to have inklings of a secret world—things that moved quickly as shooting stars, like flashes in the corners of her eyes. Sometimes she thought she saw faces or hands or heard low voices, murmuring like water, their words indecipherable.

Sami was very young when she began to sense these things. She’d report to Sitti what she’d seen, and her grandmother would clap her hands together, her eyes sparkling. “You have the gift of Sight!” Sitti would position the two of them in front of the mirror, with little Sami on her lap, and together they’d stare into the glass. Even if Sami knew it was only a fantasy, she still loved to play make-believe games with Sitti. Her grandmother always said to Sami, “I know all the old stories, and you can see into the Other World.”

There was something about Sitti’s tone that made Sami feel very quiet and somber, as if she were being entrusted with something important, something that she wasn’t really sure that she wanted to have. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” she’d once whispered.

Sitti had taken Sami’s hand, her expression sweet and sad all at once. “You’ve been entrusted with something special—to possess the past, to contain l’autre. It’s a great responsibility.”

Sami’d bit her lip. “What about Mom?” she asked. “Can she see other worlds as well?”

Sitti smiled and shook her head. “None of us know that much about Le Demimonde, but it was something that my grandpere told me about. Legends about that secret world have been passed down in our family for centuries. Your mother, on the other hand... Well, she’s very practical. She doesn’t really care much for things she doesn’t understand. Better not to mention this to her, I’d say. No, if you need to tell someone about the mirror, tell Tony. He’s not as…nervous.”

That was a good word for her mother sometimes—nervous.

Now Tony waved to Sami and thundered down the stairs, admonishing, “Don’t stare at that too long or you’ll turn Lebanese!”

It was their joke. “Turning Lebanese” meant acting as crazy as some of their relatives—or the way they were portrayed on American TV—hectic and scary and strange. What could that mean, Sami wondered, to turn Lebanese? Would it be like claiming the self she saw in the mirror? Would it really be all that bad, or could it actually be a tiny bit better than the life she had now?

She closed her eyes and quickly turned away from the mirror.