When I get to know him, he tells me there were worlds I can't see. The mirror at the top of the stairs, he says, is a portal to a place of magic. 

The boy stands alone on a platform that connects two side stairways to one sweeping central stair. It descends to the center of a large, marbled ballroom. He isn’t walking down, though. He is staring into a door-sized mirror, edged by an ornate gold frame, that hangs in the center of the wall, just an inch above the ground. His whole self is reflected in it.

“Lu! Over here! The portal is open again!” His hand hovers over the surface of the mirror as if the glass is a waterfall that he yearns to walk through. Lu runs over, smiling. She doesn’t see anything, but Faris swears, and she believes, that the mirror is a window into the world of fairies. 

“Describe them! Tell me what you see!” Lu says. The gap between her teeth makes a whistle sound. Her brown curls bounce as she jumps up and down, peering into the mirror. “I can’t see them! What do they look like? Who’s in there this time?”

“It’s a library. And there are the nice creatures in it today! They look almost like dinosaurs―the ones with the long necks. How they gaze around, you can tell they are kind. And they only have two legs, silly short legs!” Faris giggles. “Get a pencil and I’ll draw them for you.”

“Ok!” Lu runs to her mother’s office and pulls her small body onto her mother’s leather office chair. She braces and yanks at the oak-desk drawer to open and grabs a yellow pencil. She pushes the drawer in and runs back. 

Faris bends down to sketch on the floor. “Here’s the head, and… that’s a tail. It’s blue.”

“Are you sure?” Lu bends over his shoulder to get a closer look.

“Yes! I’m not making it up!”

They dissolve into giggles, only to be gathered up and swept away by a harried maid.