The boy no longer on the stool looked startled, no doubt because he thought his new roommate was deranged and giggled over possums. Simon could not help it. He could not stop laughing.
Any of the Shadowhunters he knew back in New York would have dealt with the situation without blinking an eye. He was sure Isabelle would have cut off the possum’s head with a sword. But now he was surrounded by people who panicked and screamed and stood on stools, flailing disasters of human beings who could not cope with a single rodent, and Simon was one of them. They were all just normal kids.
It was such a relief, Simon felt dizzy with it. Or maybe that was because he’d hit his head.
He kept laughing, and when he looked over at his roommate again, the other boy met his eyes.
“What a shame our teachers didn’t see that awesome performance,” Simon’s new roommate said seriously. Then he burst out laughing too, hand against his mouth, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, as if he laughed all the time and his face had just grown used to it. “We are gonna slay.”
After the slight burst of possum-related hysterics, Simon and his new roommate got up off the floor and got to unpacking and introducing themselves.
“Sorry about all that. I’m not great with scuttling little things. I’m hoping to fight demons a bit higher off the ground. I’m George Lovelace, by the way,” said the boy, sitting on the bed beside his open suitcase.
Simon stared at his own bag, full of its many hilarious T-shirts, and then suspiciously at the wardrobe. He didn’t know if he trusted the possum wardrobe with his T-shirts.
“So you’re a Shadowhunter, then?”
He’d worked out how Shadowhunter names were constructed by now, and he’d already figured George for a Shadowhunter at first sight. Only that had been before Simon thought George might be cool. Now he was disappointed. He knew what Shadowhunters thought of mundanes. It would have been nice to have someone new to all this to go through school with.
It would be nice to have a cool roommate again, Simon thought. Like Jordan. He could not remember Jordan, his roommate when he was a vampire, all that well, but what he remembered was good.
“Well, I’m a Lovelace,” said George. “My family quit Shadowhunting due to laziness in the 1700s, then went and settled outside Glasgow to become the best sheep thieves in the land. The only other branch of the Lovelaces gave up Shadowhunting in the 1800s—I think they had a daughter who came back, but she died, so we were all that was left. Shadowhunters used to come knocking to past generations, and my brave ancestors were all like, ‘Nope, think we’ll stick with the sheep,’ until finally the Clave stopped coming around because they were tired of our layabout ways. What can I tell you? The Lovelaces are quitters.”
George shrugged and made a what can you do? gesture with his tennis racket. The strings were broken. It was still their only weapon in case the possum returned.
Simon checked his phone. Idris had no reception, big surprise, and he tossed it in the suitcase among his T-shirts. “That’s a noble legacy.”
“Can you believe, I didn’t know anything about it until a few weeks ago? The Shadowhunters came to find us again, telling us they needed new, uh, demon hunters in the fight against evil because a bunch of them had died in a war. Can I just say, the Shadowhunters, man, they really know how to win over hearts and minds.”
“They should make flyers,” Simon suggested, and George grinned. “Just a bunch of them looking very cool and wearing black. The flyer could say ‘READY TO BE A BADASS?’ Put me in touch with the Shadowhunter marketing department, I have more gems where that came from.”
“I have some bad news to break to you about most Shadowhunters and their abilities with a photocopier,” George told him. “Anyway, it turned out my parents had known the whole time and just not informed me. Because why would I be interested in a little thing like that? They said my grandma was insane when she talked about dancing with the faeries! I made myself very clear on the subject of keeping intensely cool secrets from me before I left. Dad said, in fairness, that Gran is completely out of her tree. It’s just that faeries are also real. Probably not her four-inch-tall faerie lover called Bluebell, though.”
“I’d bet against it,” said Simon, thinking over all he remembered about faeries. “But I wouldn’t bet a lot.”
“So, you’re from New York?” said George. “Pretty glam.”
Simon shrugged: He didn’t know what to say, when he had been casually comfortable with New York his whole life, and then found that the city and his own soul had turned traitor. When he had been so painfully eager to leave.
“How did you find out about all this? Do you have the Sight?”
“No,” Simon said slowly. “No, I’m just ordinary, but my best friend found out she was a Shadowhunter, and the daughter of this really bad guy. And the sister of this other really bad guy. She has the worst luck with relatives. I got mixed up in it, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really remember everything, because—”
Simon paused and tried to think of some way to explain demon-related amnesia that would not convince George that Simon had the same problems as George’s grandma. Then he saw George was looking at him, his brown eyes wide.
“You’re Simon,” he breathed. “Simon Lewis.”
“Right,” Simon said. “Hey. Is my name on the door, or—is there some sort of register I’m meant to be signing—”
“The vampire,” said George. “Mary Morgenstern’s best friend!”
“Uh, Clary,” said Simon. “Uh, yeah. I like to think of myself as the ex-undead.”
The way George was looking at him, as if he was seriously impressed rather than disappointed or expectant, was a little embarrassing. Simon had to admit, it was also a little nice. It was so different from the way anyone else had looked at him, in his old life or his new one.
“You don’t understand. I arrived in this freezing hellhole full of slime and rodents, and the whole Academy was buzzing with people talking about these heroes who are my age and actually went to a hell dimension. It gave real perspective to the fact that the toilets don’t work here.”
“The toilets don’t work? But what do we—how do we—”
George coughed. “We commune with nature, if you know what I’m saying.”
George and Simon looked out of their casement window to the forest below, leaves gently swaying in the wind beyond the diamond-shaped panes of glass. George and Simon looked, darkly, sadly, back at each other.
“Seriously, you and your hero group is all anybody talks about,” George said, returning to a more cheerful subject. “Well, that and the fact we have pigeons living in the ovens. You saved the world, didn’t you? And you don’t remember it. That’s got to be weird.”
“It is weird, George, thanks for mentioning that.”
George laughed, tossed his broken racket on the floor, and kept looking at Simon as if he was someone amazing. “Wow. Simon Lewis. I guess I have someone at Spinechilling Academy to thank for getting the cool roommate.”