As the dorm room door creaked open, Simon hastily shoved the letter back into his desk drawer, careful to avoid the cobwebs and pockets of mold that coated every piece of furniture no matter how diligently he cleaned. He didn’t move hastily enough.
“Not the letter again?” Simon’s roommate at the Academy, George Lovelace, groaned. He flung himself down on his bed, sweeping an arm melodramatically across his forehead. “Oh, Isabelle, my darling, if I stare at this letter long enough, maybe I’ll telepathically woo you back to my weeping bosom.”
“I don’t have a bosom,” Simon said, with as much dignity as he could muster. “And I’m pretty sure if I did, it wouldn’t be weeping.”
“Heaving, then? That’s what bosoms do, isn’t it?”
“I haven’t spent much time around them,” Simon admitted. Not much that he could remember, at least. There had been that aborted attempt at groping Sophie Hillyer back in the ninth grade, but her mother busted him before he could even find the clasp on her bra, much less master it. There had, presumably, been Isabelle. But Simon tried very hard these days not to think about that. The clasp on Isabelle’s bra; his hands on Isabelle’s body; the taste of—
Simon shook his head violently, almost hard enough to clear it. “Can we stop talking about bosoms? Like, forever?”
“Didn’t mean to interrupt your very important moping-about-Izzy time.”
“I’m not moping,” Simon lied.
“Excellent.” George grinned triumphantly, and Simon realized he’d fallen into some kind of trap. “So then you’ll come out to the training field with me, help break in the new daggers. We’re sparring, mundies versus elites—losers have to eat extra helpings of soup for a week.”
“Oh yeah, Shadowhunters really know how to party.” His heart wasn’t in the sarcasm. The truth was, his fellow students did know how to party, even if their idea of fun usually involved pointy weapons. With exams behind them and only one more week before the end-of-year party and summer vacation, Shadowhunter Academy felt more like camp than school. Simon couldn’t believe he’d been here the whole school year; he couldn’t believe he’d survived the year. He’d learned Latin, runic writing, and a smattering of Chthonian; he’d fought tiny demons in the woods, endured a full moon night with a newborn werewolf, ridden (and nearly been trampled by) a horse, eaten his weight in soup, and in all that time, he’d been neither expelled nor exsanguinated. He’d even bulked up enough to trade in his ladies’-size gear for a men’s size, albeit the smallest one available. Against all odds, the Academy had come to feel like home. A slimy, moldy, dungeonlike home without working toilets, maybe, but home nonetheless. He and George had even named the rats that lived behind their walls. Every night, they left Jon Cartwright Jr., III, and IV a piece of stale bread to nibble, in hopes they’d prefer the crumbs to human feet.
This last week was a time for celebration, late-night carousing, and petty wagering over dagger fights. But Simon couldn’t quite find the will for fun. Maybe it was the looming shadow of summer vacation—the prospect of going home to a place that didn’t feel much like home anymore.
Or maybe it was, as it always was, Isabelle.
“Definitely you’ll have much more fun here, sulking,” George said as he changed into his gear. “Silly of me to suggest otherwise.”
Simon sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”
George had a movie-star face, a Scottish accent, a sun-kissed tan, and the kind of muscles that made girls—even the Shadowhunter Academy girls, who until they met Simon had apparently never encountered a human male without a six-pack—giggle and swoon. Girl trouble, particularly the brand involving humiliation and rejection, was beyond his comprehension.
“Just to be clear,” George said, in the rich brogue that even Simon couldn’t help but find charming, “you don’t remember anything about dating this girl? You don’t remember being in love with her, you don’t remember what it was like when the two of you—”
“That’s right,” Simon cut him off.
“Or even if the two of you—”
“Again, correct,” Simon said quickly. He hated to admit it, but this was one of the things about demon amnesia that bothered him the most. What kind of seventeen-year-old guy doesn’t know whether or not he’s a virgin?
“Because you’re apparently running low on brain cells, you tell this gorgeous creature that you’ve forgotten all about her, reject her publicly, and yet when you pledge your love to her in some goopy romantic letter, you’re surprised when she’s not having it. Then you spend the next two months mooning over her. Is that about right?”
Simon dropped his head into his hands. “Okay, so when you put it that way, it makes no sense.”
“Oh, I’ve seen Isabelle Lightwood—it makes all the sense in the world.” George grinned. “I just wanted to get my facts straight.”
He bounded out the door before Simon could clarify that it wasn’t about how Isabelle looked—although it was true that she looked, to Simon, like the most beautiful girl in the world. But it wasn’t about her curtain of silky black hair or the bottomless dark brown of her eyes or the deadly liquid grace with which she swung her electrum whip. He couldn’t have explained what it was about, since George was right, he didn’t remember anything about her or what the two of them had been like as a couple. He still had some trouble believing they ever were a couple.
He just knew, on a level beneath reason and memory, that some part of him belonged with Isabelle. Maybe even belonged to Isabelle. Whether he could remember why, or not.
He’d written Clary a letter too, telling her how much he wanted to remember their friendship—asking for her help. Unlike Isabelle, she’d written back, telling him the story of how they first met. It was the first of many letters, all of them adding episodes to the epic, lifelong story of Clary and Simon’s Excellent Adventure. The more Simon read, the more he remembered, and sometimes he even wrote back with stories of his own. It felt safe, somehow, corresponding by letter; there was no chance that Clary could expect anything of him, and no chance that he would fail her, see the pain in her eyes when she realized all over again that her Simon was gone. Letter by letter, Simon’s memories of Clary were beginning to knit themselves together.
Isabelle was different. It felt like his memories of Isabelle were buried inside a black hole—something dangerous and ravenous, threatening to consume him if he got too close.
Simon had come to the Academy, in part, to escape his painful and confusing double vision of the past, the cognitive dissonance between the life he remembered and the one he’d actually lived. It was like that cheesy old joke his father had loved. “Doctor, my arm hurts when I move like this,” Simon would say, setting him up. His father would answer in an atrocious German accent, his version of “doctor voice”: “Then . . . don’t move like that.”
As long as Simon didn’t think about the past, the past couldn’t hurt him. But, increasingly, he couldn’t help himself. There was too much pleasure in the pain.