Free Pale Kings and Princes by Cassandra Clare, Robin Wasserman

What I Did on My Summer Vacation
    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 Cthonian/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 was due to his Cthonian 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