Free The Lost Herondale by Cassandra Clare, Robin Wasserman Page A

real life. The one where he’d been turned into a vampire and his mother had called him a monster and barricaded him from the house. Sometimes, Simon thought he would do anything to get back the memories that had been taken from him—but there were moments when he wondered whether some things were better left forgotten.
    Scarsbury, more demanding than any drill sergeant, made his young charges do two hundred push-ups every morning . . . but he did, at least, let them eat breakfast first.
    After the push-ups came the laps. After the laps came the lunges. And after the lunges—
    “After you, hero,” Jon sneered, offering Simon first shot at the climbing wall. “Maybe if we give you a head start, we won’t have to wait around so long for you to catch up.”
    Simon was too exhausted for a snarky comeback. And definitely too exhausted to claw his way up the climbing wall, one impossibly distant handhold at a time. He made it up a few feet, at least, then paused to give his shrieking muscles a rest. One by one, the other students scrambled up past him, none of them seeming even slightly out of breath.
    “Be a hero, Simon,” Simon muttered bitterly, remembering the life Magnus Bane had dangled before him in their first meeting—or at least, the first one Simon could remember. “Have an adventure, Simon. How about, turn your life into one long agonizing gym class, Simon.”
    “Dude, you’re talking to yourself again.” George Lovelace, Simon’s roommate and only real friend at the Academy, hoisted himself up beside Simon. “You losing your grip?”
    “I’m talking to myself, not little green men,” Simon clarified. “Still sane, last I checked.”
    “No, I mean”—George nodded toward Simon’s sweaty fingers, which had gone pale with the effort of holding his weight—“your grip.”
    “Oh. Yeah. I’m peachy,” Simon said. “Just giving you guys a head start. I figure in battle conditions, it’s always the red shirts who go in first, you know?”
    George’s brow furrowed. “Red shirts? But our gear is black.”
    “No, red shirts . Cannon fodder. Star Trek? Any of this ringing a . . .” Simon sighed at the blank look on George’s face. George had grown up in an isolated rural pocket of Scotland, but it wasn’t like he’d lived without Internet and cable TV. The problem, as far as Simon could tell, was that the Lovelaces watched nothing but soccer and used their Wi-Fi almost exclusively to monitor Dundee United stats and occasionally to buy sheep feed in bulk. “Forget it. I’m fine. See you at the top.”
    George shrugged and returned to his climb. Simon watched his roommate—a tan, muscled Abercrombie-model type—swing himself up the plastic rock handholds as effortlessly as Spider-Man. It was ridiculous: George wasn’t even a Shadowhunter, not by blood. He’d been adopted by a Shadowhunting family, which made him just as much a mundane as Simon. Except that, like most of the other mundanes—and very un like Simon—he was a near perfect specimen of humanity. Repulsively athletic, coordinated, strong and swift, and as close to a Shadowhunter as you could get without the blood of the angels running through your veins. In other words: a jock.
    Life at Shadowhunter Academy was lacking in a lot of things Simon had once believed he couldn’t survive without: computers, music, comic books, indoor plumbing. Over the past couple of months, he’d gotten mostly used to doing without, but there was one glaring absence he still couldn’t wrap his head around.
    Shadowhunter Academy had no nerds.
    Simon’s mother had once told him that the thing she loved most about being Jewish was that you could step into a synagogue anywhere on earth and feel like you’d come home. India, Brazil, New Zealand, even Mars—if you could rely on Shalom, Spacemen! , the homemade comic book that had been the highlight of Simon’s third-grade Hebrew school experience. Jews everywhere prayed with the same language,