Simon shrugged. “It didn’t work out.”
“Didn’t work out?” George’s eyebrows nearly rocketed off his forehead. “Didn’t work out?”
“Didn’t work out,” Simon confirmed.
“You’re telling me that your epic love story with the hottest Shadowhunter of her generation that spanned multiple dimensions and several incidences of saving the world is over with a shrug and a”—his voice flattened again to an American accent—“?‘didn’t work out.’?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m telling you.” Simon tried to sound casual about it, but he must have failed, because George got up and gently slugged his roommate’s shoulder.
“Sorry, mate,” George said quietly.
Simon sighed again. “Yeah.”
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
By Simon Lewis
I screwed up my chances with the most amazing girl in the world.
Not once, not twice, but three times.
She took me on a date to her favorite nightclub, where I stood around like an idiot clod all night and once literally tripped over my own two feet. Then I dropped her off at the Institute and shook her hand good night.
Yes, you read that right: Shook. Her. Hand.
Then I took her on date number two, to my favorite movie theater, where I made her sit through a Star Wars: The Clone Wars marathon and didn’t notice when she fell asleep, then I accidentally insulted her taste because how was I supposed to know she once dated some warlock with a tail and not that I wanted to know that anyway and then: Zoom in on yet another good-night handshake.
Date number three, another of my genius ideas: double date with Clary and Jace. Which maybe would have been fine, except for how Clary and Jace are more in love than any people in love in the history of love, and how I’m pretty sure they were playing footsie under the table, because there was that one time when Jace started rubbing his foot against my leg by accident. (I think by accident?) (It better have been by accident.) And then we got attacked by demons, because Clary and Jace are apparently some kind of demon magnet, and I got knocked down in about thirty seconds and just kind of lay around in a corner while the rest of them saved the day and Isabelle did her amazing warrior goddess thing. Because she’s an amazing warrior goddess—and I’m a weenie.
After that they all went off on some super-awesome cross-country road trip to chase down the demons that sent the other demons after us, and they wouldn’t let me come. (See above re: my weenie-ness.) Then when they came back, Isabelle didn’t call me, probably because what kind of warrior goddess wants to date a cowering-in-the-corner weenie? And I didn’t call her, for the same reason . . . and also because I thought maybe she’d call me.
Which she didn’t.
The End
Simon decided to ask his Chthonian teacher for an extension.
The second-year curriculum, it turned out, was much the same as the first—with one exception. This year, as the months ticked down toward Ascension day, the Shadowhunter Academy students were expected to learn current events. Although judging from what they’d learned so far, Simon thought, their current events class could just as easily be titled Why Faeries Suck.
Every day Shadowhunter and mundane second-years crowded into one of the classrooms that had been locked down the year before. (Something about a demonic beetle infestation.) Each squeezed into a rusty chair-desk combo that seemed designed for students half their size, and listened as Professor Freeman Mayhew explained the Cold Peace.
Freeman Mayhew was a scrawny, bald man with a graying Hitler mustache, and though he started most of his sentences with “Back when I was fighting demons . . .” it was difficult to imagine him fighting so much as a cold. Mayhew believed it was his responsibility to persuade his students that faeries were shrewd, untrustworthy, coldhearted, and—not that the “lily-livered politicians” running the Clave would admit it any time soon—worthy of extinction.
The students quickly realized that disagreeing—or even interrupting to ask a question—drove up Mayhew’s blood pressure, an angry red blotch blooming across his skull as he snapped, “Were you there? I don’t think so!”
This morning Mayhew ceded the classroom to a girl a few years older than Simon. Her white-blond hair fell in ringlets around her shoulders, her blue-green eyes sparkled, and her mouth was set in a grim line that suggested she’d rather be anywhere else. Professor Mayhew stood beside her, but Simon noticed the way he kept his distance and was careful not to turn his back on her. Mayhew was afraid.
“Go on,” the professor said gruffly. “Tell them your name.”
The girl kept her eyes on the floor and mumbled something.
“Louder,” Mayhew snapped.
Now the girl lifted her head and faced the class full on, and when she spoke, her voice was loud and clear. “Helen Blackthorn,” she said. “Daughter of Andrew and Eleanor Blackthorn.”
Simon gave her a closer look. Helen Blackthorn was a name he knew well from the stories Clary told him about the Dark War. The Blackthorns had all lost quite a bit in that fight, but he thought Helen and her brother Mark had lost most of all.
“Liar!” Mayhew shouted. “Try again.”
“If I can lie, shouldn’t that prove something to you?” she asked, but it was clear she already knew the answer.
“You know the conditions of your presence here,” he snapped. “Tell them the truth or go home.”
“That’s not my home,” Helen said quietly but firmly.
After the Dark War, she had been exiled—not that anyone officially used that term—to Wrangel Island, an Arctic outpost that was the hub of the world’s protective wards. It was also, Simon had heard, a desolate frozen wasteland. Officially, Helen and her girlfriend, Aline Penhallow, were studying the wards, which had to be rebuilt after the Dark War. Unofficially, Helen was being punished for the accident of her birth. The Clave had decided that despite her bravery in the Dark War, despite her impeccable history, despite the fact that her younger siblings were orphans and had no one to care for them but an uncle they barely knew, she couldn’t be trusted in their midst. The Clave thought that even though her skin could bear the angelic runes, she wasn’t a real Shadowhunter.
Simon thought they were all idiots.
It didn’t matter that she had no weapons, was clad in a pale yellow shirt and jeans, and had no visible runes. It was clear, simply from her posture and the control she exerted over herself, transforming rage into dignity, that Helen Blackthorn was a Shadowhunter. A warrior.
“Last chance,” Mayhew grumbled.
“Helen Blackthorn,” the girl said again, and tucked her hair back, revealing delicate pale ears, each of which tapered to an elfin point. “Daughter of Andrew Blackthorn the Shadowhunter and the Lady Nerissa. Of the Seelie Court.”