Simon went out the door, and ran down the stone corridors of the Academy. He knew Isabelle was fast, so he ran, faster than he’d ever run on the training grounds, and he caught up to her in the hall. She stopped in the dim light of the stained-glass window as he called her name.
“Isabelle!”
She stood waiting for him. Her lips parted and gleamed, like plums under a winter frost, ready to be tasted. Simon could see himself running up to her, catching her in his arms, and kissing her mouth, knowing what it had taken for her to do that—his brave, brilliant Isabelle—and carried away in a whirl of love and joy, but he saw it as if through a pane of glass, as if looking into another dimension, one he could see but not quite touch.
Simon felt a hot pang of grief through his whole body, not just through his chest, as if he had been struck by lightning. But he had to say it.
“I’m not your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he called out.
She went white. Simon was horrified by how badly his words had come out.
“I mean, I can’t be your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he said. “I’m not him—that guy who was your boyfriend. That guy you want.”
He almost said: I wish I could be. He had wished he could be. That was why he had come to the Academy, to learn how to be that guy they all wanted back. He’d wanted to be that way, be an awesome hero like in a game or a movie. He’d been so sure, at first, that was what he wanted.
Except wishing he could be that guy was like wishing to obliterate the guy he was now: the normal, happy guy in a band, who could still love his mother, who did not wake up in the coldest, darkest hour of the night weeping for dead friends.
And he did not know if he could be that guy she wanted, whether he wished it or not.
“You remember everything, and I—I don’t remember enough,” Simon went on. “I hurt you when I don’t mean to, and I thought I could come to the Academy and come back better, but it’s not looking good. The whole game has changed. My skill level has decreased and the difficulty level has been jacked up to impossible—”
“Simon,” Isabelle interrupted, “you’re talking like a nerd.”
She said it almost fondly, but it freaked Simon out more. “And I don’t know how to be smooth, sexy vampire Simon for you, either!”
Isabelle’s perfect mouth curved, like a dark half-moon in her pale face. “You were never that smooth, Simon.”
“Oh,” said Simon. “Oh, thank God. I know you’ve had a lot of boyfriends. I remember there was a faerie, and”—another flash of memory, this time most unwelcome—“a . . . Lord Montgomery? You dated a member of the nobility? How am I ever going to compete with that?”
Isabelle still looked fond, but it was diluted with a good deal of impatience. “You’re Lord Montgomery, Simon!”
“I don’t understand,” said Simon. “When you’re made a vampire, are you also given a title?”
Maybe that made sense. Vampires were aristocratic.
Isabelle put her fingers up to touch her brow. It was a gesture that seemed like disdainful weariness, like Isabelle was tired of all this, but Simon saw the way her eyes closed, as if she could not look at him when she spoke. “It was just a joke between you and me, Simon.”
Simon was tired of all this: of knowing pieces of her so well and others not at all, of knowing he was not what she wanted.
“No,” he said. “It was a joke between you and him.”
“You are him, Simon!”
“I’m not,” Simon told her. “I don’t—I don’t know how to be, that’s what I’ve been realizing all this time. I thought I could learn to be him, but since I got to the Academy I learned that I can’t. I can’t experience everything we did over again. I’m never going to be the guy who did all that. I’m going to do different things. I’m going to be a different guy.”
“Once you Ascend, you’ll get all your memories back!” Isabelle shouted at him.
“If I Ascend, it will be in two years. I’m not going to be the same guy in two years, even if I do get all the memories back, because there will be so many other memories. You’re not going to be the same girl. I know you believed in me, Isabelle, I know you believed because you—you cared about him. That means more than I can tell you. But, Isabelle, Isabelle, it isn’t fair of me to take advantage of your belief. It isn’t fair to keep you waiting for him, when he isn’t ever coming back.”
Isabelle had her arms crossed, fingers curled into the dark plum velvet of her own jacket as if she was offering herself comfort. “None of this is fair. It isn’t fair that part of your life was ripped from you. It’s not fair that you were ripped away from me. I’m so angry, Simon.”
Simon took a step toward her and took one of her hands, uncurling her fingers from her jacket. He did not take her in his arms but he stood a little distance away from her, their hands linked across the distance. Her trembling mouth sparkled, and so did her eyelashes. He did not know if this was indomitable Isabelle crying, or whether it was sparkly mascara. All he knew was that she shone, like a constellation in the shape of a girl.
“Isabelle,” he said. “Isabelle.”
She was so much herself, and he had scarcely any idea who he was.
“Do you know why you’re here?” she demanded.
He just looked at her. There were so many things that question could mean, and so many ways to answer.
“I mean at the Academy,” she said. “Do you know why you want to be a Shadowhunter?”
He hesitated. “I wanted to be that guy again,” he said. “That hero that you all remember . . . and this seems like a training school for heroes.”
“It’s not,” Isabelle said flatly. “It’s a training school for Shadowhunters. And yeah, I think that’s a pretty cool thing, and yeah, I think protecting the world is pretty heroic. But there are cowardly Shadowhunters and evil Shadowhunters and hopeless Shadowhunters. If you’re going to get through the Academy, you have to figure out why you want to be a Shadowhunter and what that means to you, Simon. Not just why you want to be special.”
He winced, but it was true. “You’re right. I don’t know. I know that I want to be here. I know I need to be here. Believe me, if you’d seen the bathrooms, you’d know I didn’t make this decision lightly.”
She gave him a withering look.
“But,” he said, “I don’t know why. I don’t know myself well enough yet. I know what I said to you, at first, and I know what you hoped. That I could turn back into who I was before. I was really wrong and I am really sorry.”
“Sorry?” Isabelle demanded. “Do you know what a big deal it was for me to come here, to make a fool of myself in front of all these people? Do you know—of course you don’t. You don’t want me to believe in you? You don’t want me to choose you?”
Isabelle pulled her hands away from him, turned her face away as she had in the garden of the Institute that was her home. This time Simon knew it was absolutely his fault.
She was already leaving as she said:
“Have it your way, Simon Lewis. I won’t.”