By Simon Lewis
This summer, I lived in Brooklyn. Every morning I ran through the park. One morning, I met a nixie who lived in the dog pond. She had—
Simon Lewis paused to consult his Chthonian/English dictionary for the word for “blond”—there was no entry. Apparently words relating to hair color were a nonissue for creatures of the demon dimensions. Much like, he’d discovered, words relating to family, friendship, or watching TV. He chewed his eraser, sighed, then bent over the page again. Five hundred words on how he spent his summer were due to his Chthonian teacher by morning, and after an hour of work he had written approximately . . . thirty.
She had hair. And—
—an enormous rack.
“Just trying to help,” Simon’s roommate, George Lovelace, said, reaching over Simon’s shoulder to scrawl in an ending to the sentence.
“And failing miserably,” Simon said, but he couldn’t suppress a grin.
He’d missed George this summer, more than he had expected to. He’d missed all of it more than he’d expected—not just his new friends, but Shadowhunter Academy itself, the predictable rhythms of the day, all the things he’d spent months complaining about. The slime, the dank, the morning calisthenics, the chittering of creatures trapped in the walls . . . he’d even missed the soup. Simon had spent most of his first year at the Academy worrying that he was out of place—that, any minute, someone important would realize they’d made a terrible mistake and send him back home.
It wasn’t until he was back in Brooklyn, trying to sleep beneath Batman sheets with his mother snoring in the next room, that he realized home wasn’t home anymore.
Home, unexpectedly, inexplicably, was Shadowhunter Academy.
Park Slope wasn’t quite the same as he remembered, not with the werewolf cubs frolicking in the Prospect Park dog run, the warlock selling artisanal cheese and love potions at the Grand Army farmers’ market, the vampires lounging on the banks of the Gowanus, flicking cigarette butts at strolling hipsters. Simon had to keep reminding himself that they’d been there all along—Park Slope hadn’t changed; Simon had. Simon was the one who now had the Sight. Simon was the one who flinched at flickering shadows and, when Eric had the misfortune of sneaking up behind him, instinctively yanked his old friend off his feet and slammed him to the ground with an effortless judo flip.
“Dude,” Eric gasped, goggling up at him from the parched August grass, “stand down, soldier.”
Eric, of course, thought he’d spent the year at military school—as did the rest of the guys, as did Simon’s mother and sister. Lying to almost everyone he loved: That was another thing different about his Brooklyn life now, and maybe the thing that made him most eager for escape. It was one thing to lie about where he’d been all year, to make up half-assed stories about demerits and drill sergeants, most of them cribbed from bad eighties movies. It was another thing altogether to lie about who he was. He had to pretend to be the guy they remembered, the Simon Lewis who thought demons and warlocks were confined to the pages of comic books, the one whose closest brush with death involved aspirating a chocolate-covered almond. But he wasn’t that Simon anymore, not even close. Maybe he wasn’t a Shadowhunter, not yet—but he wasn’t exactly a mundane anymore either, and he was tired of pretending to be.
The only person he didn’t have to pretend with was Clary, and as the weeks passed, he’d spent more and more time with her, exploring the city and listening to stories of the boy he used to be. Simon still couldn’t quite remember what they’d been to each other in that other life, the one he’d been magicked into forgetting—but the past seemed to matter less and less.
“You know, I’m not the person I used to be either,” Clary had said to him one day, as they nursed their fourth coffee at Java Jones. Simon was doing his best to turn his blood into caffeine, in preparation for September. The Academy was a coffee-free zone. “Sometimes, that old Clary feels just as far away from me as the old Simon must from you.”
“Do you miss her?” Simon asked, but he meant: Do you miss him? The old Simon. The other Simon. The better, braver Simon, who he was always worried he no longer had it in himself to be.
Clary had shaken her head, fiery red curls bouncing at her shoulders, green eyes glinting with certainty. “And I don’t miss you anymore, either,” she’d said, with that uncanny knack to know what was going on in his head. “Because I have you back. At least, I hope . . .”
He’d squeezed her hand. It was answer enough for both of them.
“Speaking of what you did on your summer vacation,” George said now, flopping back on his sagging mattress, “are you ever going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Simon leaned back in his chair—then, at the ominous sound of cracking wood, abruptly leaned forward again. As second-years, Simon and George had been offered the opportunity to claim a room aboveground, but they’d both decided to stay in the dungeon. Simon had gotten rather attached to the gloomy damp—and he’d discovered there were certain advantages to being far from the prying eyes of the faculty. Not to mention the judgmental glares of the elite-track students. While the Shadowhunter kids in his class had, for the most part, come around to the slim possibility that their mundane peers could have something to offer, there was a whole new class now, and Simon didn’t relish teaching them the lesson all over again. Still, as his desk chair decided whether or not to split in half and something furry and gray scampered past his feet, he wondered if it was too late to change his mind.
“Simon. Mate. Toss me a bone here. Do you know how I spent my summer vacation?”
“Shearing sheep?” George had sent him a handful of postcards over the last two months. The front of each of them had borne a photograph of the idyllic Scottish countryside. And on the back, a series of messages circling a single theme:
Bored.
So bored.
Kill me now.
Too late, already dead.
“Shearing sheep,” George confirmed. “Feeding sheep. Herding sheep. Mucking about in sheep muck. While you were . . . who-knows-what-ing with a certain raven-haired superwarrior. You’re not going to let me live vicariously?”
Simon sighed. George had restrained himself for four and a half days. Simon supposed that was more than he could have asked for.
“What makes you think I was doing anything with Isabelle Lightwood?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because last I saw you, you wouldn’t shut up about her?” George affected an American accent—poorly. “What should I do on my date with Isabelle? What should I say on my date with Isabelle? What should I wear on my date with Isabelle? Oh, George, you bronze Scottish love god, tell me what to do with Isabelle.”
“I don’t recall those words coming out of my mouth.”
“I was paraphrasing your body language,” George said. “Now spill.”