The Broussards were a family of old southern money—most of it gone by the time Georgina Marie was born, but left behind were the dregs of status, and in New Orleans, usually that was as good as a bank account to back it up. It was enough that she was raised with certain expectations, not of herself but for the world around her. She was entitled, to the best toys, the nicest clothes, the fastest car her parents could afford, a full ride to Harvard University and eventually—to a man who was already spoken for, but whose wandering eye guaranteed her perfect streak of privilege wouldn't yet come to an end. One month into the relationship, and Georgina was smitten, having fully convinced herself that theirs was a romance to end all romances, that her beloved would leave behind his new wife, take Georgina into his arms, and carry her off into a tahitian sunset, aboard his personal yacht... or something. When he failed to present her with divorce papers and a diamond the size of her fist within a matter of weeks, she decided to hurry the process along by sabotaging her own birth control and showing up at his home, declaring herself pregnant with their forbidden love child—to an audience that included him and his (totally unimpressed, totally not divorced) spouse.

Which, as it turns out, wasn't the best or most fruitful of plans. Georgina was dumped, spectacularly, and for the first time in her young vapid life knew what it was like not to get everything she wanted. Devastated, she dropped out of school and ran back home to New Orleans and into the arms of her embarrassed, reputation-minded parents who encouraged her to meet some other sucker, marry him, and pretend the child—then barely qualifying as anything at all beyond a lima bean sized clump of cells—was his paternal burden to bear. It worked well enough. Georgina married Henry Albright six months later. He wasn't worthy of her, she was quick to remind him, before, during, after their wedding—he was only a middle-school science teacher, and he was lucky to have her.

Fortunately for Henry, despite learning early on that he despised Georgina and it'd been the haze of (temporary) elation over having a child together that'd convinced him to propose in the first place—he fell in love with 'their' kid, when he was born 2 months later.

Simon was every bit his son, or so he thought. From an early age he displayed an unquenchable intellectual curiosity that his father encouraged with no small amount of delight, offering him puzzles and games aimed at inspiring him to explore and question the universe around him. As he got older they watched Star Trek together, they played chess together, they collected owl pellets and dissected them together, they examined microorganisms in pond water under a microscope together—it was an idyllic childhood, and not even a persistently selfish mother and her pointed absence could ruin any of it. For Simon, that is. It took a gradual toll on his father, who, though never really having loved his mother couldn't exactly ignore the mounting evidence of her infidelity. When Simon was twelve, his father filed for divorce.

Apparently it'd been his hope to take Simon with him. But his mother's accidental negligence in failing to list Henry on Simon's birth certificate combined with an impressive legal team assembled by his grandparents was pretty much insurmountable, and after an emotionally draining year long affair that left Henry broke and heavily in debt, sole custody was granted to Georgina. Henry moved away after that, solo, despite Simon's attempts to stow himself away in the trunk of his car. Leaving Simon alone with a mother who never genuinely wanted him in the first place, beyond as something for leverage to force a relationship with a married man.

The next couple years were rough, though somehow Simon managed—puberty wasn't kind, he was lonely and intellectually stagnant given an underfunded public school system that couldn't cater to him like his father had, and his mother's physical and emotional distance had gotten inconceivably worse. Yelling 'I wish you were dead' and 'I want to go live with dad' whenever she bothered to look in his direction didn't help their bond, probably. Whenever he wasn't at school or following around his best friend, Simon locked himself in his bedroom and read for hours—typically science fiction, which filled his head with thoughts of space travel and time machines and if he was lucky he dreamt of something other than the sight of his dad's car pulling out of their driveway.

At fourteen, his best friend moved away and that, that was something Simon couldn't pretend away with Isaac Asimov. Cursory efforts to convince his mom to follow suit, to pack them up and move them to New York City where Ivy had ended up for the sake of his tenuous emotional well-being fell on deaf ears and, assuming life would generally be unbearable without her, Simon simply ran away after that. He hitched rides and caught buses all the way north to New York on his own, stumbled around the city and got his shit stolen on his own, ended up sprawled on Ivy's front porch with nothing beyond a crappy tracfone and the clothes on his back all on his own. But none of that mattered, he'd reasoned, because he had Ivy. And Ivy had him, too, obviously.

Though the following years saw Simon living predominantly on Ivy's bedroom floor, mooching free meals off of Ivy's lovely foster parents, leaving his valuables in a spare drawer in Ivy's closet because officially he was a runaway and living out of a local youth center when he wasn't in school and some of those kids were rough, he really preferred to pretend he was Ivy's sort of foster sibling instead. And her foster parents probably knew, given how much time he spent at their home, crawling up the fire escape into Ivy's bedroom, crawling back down again to pretend he wasn't just napping on her floor to 'pop by' for dinner and to help her study for her geometry exam. That's how he spent his entire four years of high school, pretending it was utterly normal to sleep in a sleeping bag on the sly, to text his dad and pretend he was still living in New Orleans with a mother who hadn't even bothered to report him missing, to occupy himself with every activity possible just to give himself somewhere to be, even if he genuinely enjoyed being a mathlete and a male cheerleader and a quiz bowl champion.

Early acceptance into Columbia University made it all worthwhile.

Until love got in the way.

Like any other stereotypical nerd, Simon was legitimately hopeless in the romance department. Access to attractive cheerleaders set his standards impossibly high, and though they all claimed to 'adore' their goofy, awkward teammate he was suddenly 'like a pervy little brother' each time he mustered the courage to ask one of them out. So. He did what any other millennial with access to AOL would do—he turned to the internet to find his one true love.

Her name was Ingrid. She was nineteen, Swedish, an aspiring model, and thought his prescription glasses and nerdy t-shirt collection were 'sexy.' Which, seriously, should've been red flags #1-4. They IMed and traded pics for six months, just long enough to convince Simon he couldn't live without her and that his Columbia acceptance letter was keeping them apart. He shredded it. Applied to Boston University instead, the closest possible college to Ingrid's apartment (according to mapquest.com.) When the time came to make the move, he said his goodbyes to Ivy, vowed to jump on a train every other weekend to visit her, to text her every spare moment his hands weren't up Ingrid's top, and promised that she, too, would find love some day—even if it wasn't with Simon.

Unfortunately, Ingrid Eriksson turned out to be Rita Williams, middle-aged soccer mom with access to a swedish modeling agency website and a serious fetish for robbing the cradle. Simon spent most of his first semester at BU drunk off of his ass, desperate to avoid the feelings of heartbreak and shame and angst and anything that wasn't persistent nausea. Then he got his shit together, made some really great friends, rediscovered his passion for academia thanks to the efforts of some seriously awesome professors, and stopped bemoaning the fact that he could've been at Columbia, sharing a tiny studio apartment with Ivy with (most) of his dignity still in tact.

Now, nearly two degrees later and a desk drawer full of half-completed grad school applications are all Simon really has to show for his tenuous plans for the future. Beyond wanting to be 'Scotty from Star Trek,' he really has no idea. At the moment he's working part time in a hospital lab, enjoying being all up in Ivy's personal space again, and covertly trying to quell his swedish model addiction.

Oh, and coping with the sudden unwanted revelation that his father isn't his father, and that he has a little (half) brother. Because his mom is a tramp.