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"Also because of the rats," he added. He and George had gone on an expedition down this corridor in search of the supposed slug . . . they gave up after the third rat dropped from the ceiling and somehow found its way down George's pants.
Isabelle breathed a heavy sigh.
"Come on, Izzy, hold up."
Somehow, he'd stumbled on the magic words. She spun around to face him. "Don't call me that," she hissed.
"What?"
"My friends call me Izzy," she said. "You lost that right."
"Izzy--Isabelle, I mean. If you'd read my letter--"
"No. You don't call me Izzy, you don't send me letters, you don't follow me into dark corridors and try to save me from rats."
"Trust me, we see a rat, it's every man for himself."
Isabelle looked like she wanted to feed him to the giant slug. "My point, Simon Lewis, is that you and I are strangers now, just like you wanted it."
"If that's true, then what are you doing here?"
Isabelle looked incredulous. "It's one thing for Jace to believe the world revolves around him, but come on. I know you love fantasy, Simon, but the suspension of disbelief can only go so far."
"This is my school, Isabelle," Simon said. "And you're my--"
She just stared at him, as if defying him to come up with a noun that would justify the possessive.
This wasn't going the way he'd planned.
"Okay, then, why are you here? And why are you being so nice to all my, uh, friends?"
"Because my father's forcing me to be here," she said. "Because I guess he thinks some delightful father-daughter bonding time in a slime-covered pit will make me forget that he's a deadbeat adulterer who ditched his family. And I'm being nice to your friends because I'm a nice person."
Now it was Simon who looked incredulous.
"Okay, I'm not," she admitted. "But I've never actually been to school, you know. I figured if I have to be here, I might as well make the best of it. See what I'm missing. Is that enough information for you?"
"I get that you're mad at me, but--"
She shook her head. "You don't get it. I'm not mad at you. I'm not anything at you, Simon. You asked me to accept that you were a different person now, someone who I don't know. So I've accepted that. I loved someone--he's gone now. You're nobody I know, and, as far as I can tell, nobody I need to know. I'll only be here a few days, and then we never need to see each other again. How about we don't make it harder than it has to be?"
He couldn't quite catch his breath.
I loved someone, she'd said, and it was the closest she--or any girl--had ever come to saying I love you to Simon.
Except that it wasn't close at all, was it?
It was a world away.
"Okay." It was the only word he could force out, but she was already walking on down the corridor. She didn't need his permission to be a stranger; she didn't need anything from him. "You're going the wrong way!" he called after her. He didn't know where she wanted to go, but there seemed little chance she wanted to go slug-ward.
"They're all wrong," she called back, without turning around.
He tried to sense some subtext in her words, a glimmer of pain. Something that would give the lie to her claim, betray the feelings she still harbored for him--prove this was as hard and confusing for her as it was for him.
But the suspension of disbelief could only go so far.
*
Isabelle had said she wanted to make the best of her time at the Academy, and she'd proposed they not make it any harder than it needed to be. Unfortunately, Simon soon discovered, these two things were mutually exclusive. Because Isabelle's version of making the best of things involved Isabelle stretched out like a cat on one of the student lounge's musty leather couches, surrounded by sycophants, Isabelle partaking in George's illicit supply of scotch and inviting the others to do so as well, so that soon all of Simon's friends and enemies were drunk and giddy and in much too good a mood for his liking. Making the best of things apparently meant encouraging Julie to flirt with George and teaching Marisol how to smash statuary with a whip and, worst of all, agreeing to "maybe" be Jon Cartwright's date for the end-of-year party later in the week.
Simon wasn't sure whether any of this was harder than it needed to be--who knew what qualified as needed to be?--but it was excruciating.
"So, when does the real fun start?" Isabelle finally said.
Jon waggled his eyebrows. "Just say the word."
Isabelle laughed and touched his shoulder.
Simon wondered whether the Academy would expel him for murdering Jon Cartwright in his sleep.
"Not that kind of fun. I mean, when do we sneak off campus? Go party in Alicante? Go swimming in Lake Lyn? Go . . ." She trailed off, finally noticing that the others were gaping at her like she was speaking in tongues. "Are you telling me you don't do any of that?"
"We're not here to have fun," Beatriz said, somewhat stiffly. "We're here to learn to be Shadowhunters. There are rules for a reason."
Isabelle rolled her eyes. "Haven't you ever heard that rules are meant to be broken? Students are supposed to get into a little trouble at the Academy--at least the best students are. Why do you think the rules are so strict? So that only the best can get around them. Think of it like extra credit."
"How would you know?" Beatriz asked. Simon was surprised by her tone. Usually, she was the quietest among them, always willing to go with the flow. But there was an edge in her voice now, something that reminded him that, gentle as she seemed, she was a born warrior. "It's not like you went here."
"I come from a long line of Academy graduates," Isabelle said. "I know what I need to know."
"We're not all interested in following in your father's footsteps," Beatriz said, then stood up and walked out of the room.
There was silence in her wake, everyone tensely waiting for Isabelle to react.
Her smile didn't waver, but Simon could feel the heat radiating from her and understood it was taking a great deal of energy for her not to explode--or collapse. He didn't know which it would be; he didn't know how she felt about her father once being one of Valentine's men. He didn't know anything about her, not really. He admitted that.
But he still wanted to scoop her into his arms and hold her until the storm passed.
"No one has ever accused my father of being fun," Isabelle said flatly. "But I assume my reputation precedes me. If you meet me here at midnight tomorrow, I'll show you what you've been missing." She took Jon's hand in her own and allowed him to pull her off the couch. "Now. Will you show me to my room? This place is simply impossible to navigate."
"My pleasure," Jon said, winking at Simon.
Then they were gone.
Together.
*
The next morning the hall echoed with yawning and the groan of hangovers in (fruitless) search of grease and coffee. As Robert Lightwood launched into his second lecture, some tedious disquisition on the nature of evil and a point-by-point analysis of Valentine's critique of the Accords, Simon had to keep pinching himself awake. Robert Lightwood was possibly the only person on the planet who could make the story of the Circle drop-dead boring. It didn't help that Simon had stayed up till dawn, tossing and turning on the lumpy mattress, trying to drive nightmare images of Isabelle and Jon out of his head.
There was something going on with her, Simon was sure of it. Maybe it wasn't about him--maybe it was about her father or some residual homeschooling issues or just some girl thing he couldn't fathom, but she wasn't acting like herself.
