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with the band?” she asked. “Anything new? There was a lot of yelling in the background when I talked to you earlier.”
    Simon’s face lit up. “Things are great,” he said. “Matt says he knows someone who could get us a gig at the Scrap Bar. We’re talking about names again too.”
    “Oh, yeah?” Clary hid a smile. Simon’s band never actually produced any music. Mostly they sat around in Simon’s living room, fighting about potential names and band logos. She sometimes wondered if any of them could actually play an instrument. “What’s on the table?”
    “We’re choosing between Sea Vegetable Conspiracy and Rock Solid Panda.”
    Clary shook her head. “Those are both terrible.”
    “Eric suggested Lawn Chair Crisis.”
    “Maybe Eric should stick to gaming.”
    “But then we’d have to find a new drummer.”
    “Oh, is
that
what Eric does? I thought he just mooched money off you and went around telling girls at school that he was in a band in order to impress them.”
    “Not at all,” Simon said breezily. “Eric has turned over a new leaf. He has a girlfriend. They’ve been going out for three months.”
    “Practically married,” Clary said, stepping around a couple pushing a toddler in a stroller: a little girl with yellow plastic clips in her hair who was clutching a pixie doll with gold-streaked sapphire wings. Out of the corner of her eye Clary thought she saw the wings flutter. She turned her head hastily.
    “Which means,” Simon continued, “that I am the last member of the band
not
to have a girlfriend. Which, you know, is the whole point of being in a band. To get girls.”
    “I thought it was all about the music.” A man with a cane cut across her path, heading for Berkeley Street. She glanced away, afraid that if she looked at anyone for too long they would sprout wings, extra arms, or long forked tongues like snakes. “Who cares if you have a girlfriend, anyway?”
    “I care,” Simon said gloomily. “Pretty soon the only people left without a girlfriend will be me and Wendell the school janitor. And he smells like Windex.”
    “At least you know he’s still available.”
    Simon glared. “Not funny, Fray.”
    “There’s always Sheila ‘The Thong’ Barbarino,” Clary suggested. Clary had sat behind her in math class in ninth grade. Every time Sheila had dropped her pencil—which had been often—Clary had been treated to the sight of Sheila’s underwear riding up above the waistband of her super-low-rise jeans.
    “That
is
who Eric’s been dating for the past three months,” Simon said. “His advice, meanwhile, was that I ought to just decide which girl in school had the most rockin’ bod and ask her out on the first day of classes.”
    “Eric is a sexist pig,” Clary said, suddenly not wanting to know which girl in school Simon thought had the most rockin’ bod. “Maybe you should call the band the Sexist Pigs.”
    “It has a ring to it.” Simon seemed unfazed. Clary made a face at him, her messenger bag vibrating as her phone blared. She fished it out of the zip pocket. “Is it your mom again?” he asked.
    Clary nodded. She could see her mother in her mind’s eye, small and alone in the doorway of their apartment. Guilt unfurled in her chest.
    She glanced up at Simon, who was looking at her, his eyes dark with concern. His face was so familiar she could have traced its lines in her sleep. She thought of the lonely weeks that stretched ahead without him, and shoved the phone back into her bag. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to be late for the show.”

3
SHADOWHUNTER
    B Y THE TIME THEY GOT TO JAVA JONES, ERIC WAS ALREADY onstage, swaying back and forth in front of the microphone with his eyes squinched shut. He’d dyed the tips of his hair pink for the occasion. Behind him, Matt, looking stoned, was beating irregularly on a djembe.
    “This is going to suck so hard,” Clary predicted. She grabbed Simon’s sleeve and tugged him toward the