The house was quiet and empty when Sami went back inside. A note on the kitchen table said that her mother had taken Teta to a doctor’s appointment. It didn’t matter, Sami thought despondently. She just wanted to hide in her room, anyway. There, she pouted at her mirror, scowled fiercely, hands on her hips.

After a moment, her shoulders lowered and she plopped on her bed. Tilted against the wall and framed by a frill of silver waves, the mirror gazed back at her. Its glass was so old, it looked blue and weathered in long strips across its surface. Teta said it was created by mermaids, before the creation of glass itself, and had been handed down through the family from an Ifrit, courageous Magali of Palmyra—that it was an enchanted mirror, a doorway to other lands. And, Teta always added, it must never, under any circumstances, ever be covered up.

“They brought it for me on an airplane,” Teta had said, lifting her knobby hands in the air. “All the way from Lebanon. Three strong men carried it in a big crate right up to our house.” She smiled. In those days, her teeth were magically white, her skin still smooth. “That was your father’s idea. Joe knew how much it meant to me. He found a way to save it.”

A couple of years after Joe died, Teta told Sami she wanted her to have it. “When you miss him, you look right here.” She’d pointed to the silver surface. “You can talk to him and he will hear you.”

Sami was only six at the time, but she had still wondered how her daddy could be in the mirror. She kept thinking: He’s just gone.

Teta had hugged her and said, “Think of it as a window. He’s not in the glass, but you can speak through it to wherever he is.”

Now Sami glanced at herself in the mirror. Did her face seem brighter? Was there an unusual sort of gleam on her skin and hair? She slid off her bed, crouched next to the mirror, and whispered to her grandmother’s double, “Ashrafieh, why can’t I have someone like you? Someone who would make me strong or smart or something?”

For a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she seemed to see reflected blue dots twinkling in the air. But they vanished as soon as she turned. Sami closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to clear out all the shadows and cobwebs. Seeing things. Teta often talked about spells and trances, people who were haunted by genies. She knew all the ways someone could be inhabited or spellbound. Born into a Bedouin tribe, Teta said she had sand and sunlight in her blood, that she’d been a desert dweller for many, many lifetimes. She wore a necklace of silver coins and told her grandchildren that she’d grown up crossing the desert, learning about potions and herbs.

But then everything changed. The magic stopped. A handsome man from Beirut had won her heart and moved her to his house. Her daughter, Alia, was raised in the city, and then Teta’s grandchildren were all the way Americans. Sometimes it seemed as if Teta was still back there, crossing the desert in her mind, living among the Bedouin legends and charms, while the rest of the world had moved on. In fact, Sami wasn’t always sure if her wonderful grandmother really was still entirely there—inside her body, still the Teta she had always known. She’d gotten shrunken, secretive, her eyes full of a mysterious fear.

Worrying, Sami felt her own breath catch in her throat. She looked up again at the mirror and this time she felt distinctly as if her reflection was gazing at her. It wasn’t just the reflection of her eyes, but more as if there was someone else inside there, looking back. That’s when she had a new idea: what if Teta believed she was under one of those Bedouin spells? There were the princesses mesmerized by their own reflections in gazing pools, young sailors who fell under the whispered incantations of mermaids, entire families lost and wandering in the wilderness of the genies.

Sami got slowly to her feet. She didn’t necessarily believe in magic, but Teta surely did. What was that old quote her grandmother loved? There is far more unseen than seen in the natural world. And hadn’t they learned in health class just last week that a person could make themselves sick simply by thinking they were sick? Psychosomatic, the teacher had written on the whiteboard. It was sort of a weird idea, but maybe, she thought…just maybe…Sami could convince Teta that she knew how to break the hex.

She put her hands on her hips, thinking and pacing. If there was one thing she knew for certain—Teta’s charm book was the one source of all things enchanted. Sami had to find it. It was an old book with a cracked leather cover that Teta had brought with her from Lebanon. She told people it was just a diary. But she’d admitted to Sami, with a finger to her lips, that it was really a book of great and magical powers. She kept it hidden away, and she had instructed Sami that she must never touch or even look at it if Teta wasn’t with her. Teta promised that once Sami turned twelve, she’d begin revealing the book’s secrets to her. But her birthday was still weeks away, and judging by her mother’s determined expression, Sami sensed there was no time to spare: Sami would have to search for the book. And she would have to do it quickly.