The Calling

Chapter 2: Sarah Hawks

Yuri's Pov

The cafeteria line moved the way it always did — slowly, like the food wasn't going anywhere and neither were we.

Ned had already claimed a table. Smart. He knew how these things worked — get the seat before the crowd does, hold it, wait. I was starting to think Ned understood more about survival than he let on.

Clyde moved up beside me in the line, lowering his voice.

"Hey. Did you see a vision? I mean — in two months of this friendship, you barely talk to anyone. Especially lately."

I kept my eyes forward. "The Calling whispered something.

About Molion and her friends." I paused. "They're going to beat someone up. A person with a disability, actually."

Clyde was quiet for a moment. "That's messed up."

"Yes."

"Okay but — how does it actually work? Like is it accurate? Are you sure they're really going to do that?" He shifted his tray.

"Because if I'm being honest, bro, how does some ability just know what someone's going to do? How can it be sure?"

I had answered this question before. Not to him — to myself, mostly. At 3AM. In the dark of the old hotel where sound carried too far and sleep came too rarely.

"When I was seven," I said quietly, "I saw a vision of my playmate killing his cousin. I didn't trust it. Didn't tell anyone." I moved forward in the line. "A few years later I saw him on the news. Juvenile detention. Murder charge."

Clyde stopped walking.

"Move," I said.

He moved.

We reached the counter. He ordered with the focused energy of someone who had strong opinions about cafeteria food — jelly, cheesecake, spaghetti, muffins. I ordered and paid and followed him toward the table.

"Okay," he said, keeping his voice low. "So one of your childhood friends was Jeffrey Tozer. The one from the news."

"Yes."

"And the vision was right."

"The vision is always right."

I sat down across from Ned. "But that doesn't mean I always know what to do with it. Sometimes The Calling just asks me to prevent something. And I try." I set my tray down.

"But here's what I don't understand, Clyde. Every time I prevent something — every time I try to help someone avoid the worst version of themselves — something worse replaces it. Always."

The table went quiet.

Ned was looking at me.

I had forgotten he was there.

"Sorry," he said, which was a very Ned thing to say when he hadn't done anything wrong. "I overheard a little. What's The Calling?"

Clyde and I looked at each other across the table.

"Errands," I said. "We have a system. Things we need to do. Study schedules, mostly."

"I hate studying," Clyde said immediately.

"I know you do."

Ned nodded slowly, in the way of someone who wasn't entirely convinced but was too polite to push. I made a note to be more careful.

Valerio arrived the way Valerio always arrived — like a weather event that hadn't been forecasted.

The cafeteria doors swung open. Curly hair, black sunglasses worn indoors, uniform protocol followed in spirit if not in practice, and a radio the size of a carry-on bag blasting Eminem loud enough to make three separate lunch tables look up in unified disgust.

"Yeah, Eminem, baby!"

He dropped into the seat beside Clyde and shoved the radio under the table like it was a completely normal object to bring to lunch.

"Good morning, friends. Always with the grumpy faces, eh?"

"Do you always have to make that entrance?" I asked. "We go to a private academy. How are you allowed in here."

"My dad founded this place." He pointed at me. "Technically I am the entrance."

He looked around the table and landed on Ned. "Who's the new fella? Since when do we have members?"

"We're not a club," I said. "This is Ned. Ned, this is Valerio. I apologize in advance."

Ned offered his hand. "Edmund Nicholas Hermit."

Valerio shook it with genuine enthusiasm.

"Anyone got news? I feel like I've been missing things."

He put his feet on the table.

"Feet down," I said.

He put his feet down.

"I talked to one of the most beautiful girls on campus," he announced.

Clyde didn't even look up. "Molion?"

"No. Sarah Hawks."

The name landed differently than he intended. At least for me.

"Sarah Hawks," Ned said carefully. "Isn't she dating that guy Alex? The one with the—"

"The gang, yes." Valerio grinned. "I flirted with her anyway. She invited us to her birthday party."

I looked at him. "In what exchange, exactly."

He started sweating.

"We'd have to bring alcohol."

The table went quiet again. Different kind of quiet this time.

"Val," I said. "We are sixteen to eighteen years old."

"Fake IDs."

"Fake IDs are a felony. One to three years."

"I have a lawyer."

"You'd also have a destroyed reputation and a criminal record."

"Yeah," Clyde said. "Hard pass."

"Kill joys." Valerio slouched back in his chair.

"All of you. Learn to live a little."

"Preferably not in prison," Clyde said.

Ned laughed — a quiet, surprised laugh, like he hadn't expected to find something funny today. I found I didn't mind the sound of it.

We finished eating. Clyde started stacking trays.

Valerio was mid-complaint about something when the cafeteria doors opened again and Sarah Hawks walked through with her friends, moving through the room the way people do when they're used to being watched.

"Hey, Sarah!" Valerio called out, waving like he hadn't just been voted down by the entire table.

She glanced over.

And then her eyes met mine.

The white came without warning.

It always does.

I was standing in a school corridor I didn't recognize — or maybe I did, maybe it was this one, but emptied out and wrong in the way dreams are wrong. Silent. No sound anywhere.

Sarah and Alex. Facing each other.

I couldn't hear what they were saying. The Calling never gives you sound — just images, just the horrible clarity of watching something happen that you cannot stop and cannot look away from.

I read it in their bodies. Her shoulders. His jaw. The way he stepped toward her and she didn't step back but should have.

She was ending it. I was sure of that.

Then his friends moved.

I ran. I screamed at them.

I threw myself between them and passed through like I was made of air because I was — I was nobody here, I was just a witness, just a boy forced to watch through a door he never asked to open.

They beat her with an iron pipe.

They wrapped her body.

They put her in the car.

Alex drove. Bribed the guard at the gate. Found somewhere quiet.

Burned the car.

No, I said, or tried to say. No, no—

"Yuri!"

The cafeteria came back. Clyde's hand on my shoulder. Valerio standing. Ned frozen across the table with his fork halfway to his mouth.

Everyone was looking at me.

I had been screaming.

"Alex is going to kill Sarah." My voice came out wrong — too loud, too raw, stripped of every layer of control I had spent years building. "Alex is going to kill Sarah—"

"Yuri." Clyde's grip tightened. "Hey. Hey, look at me."

I looked at him.

His face said: I know. I know something just happened. Hold on.

I held on.

Sarah was still standing near the door. She was looking at me the way people look at something they don't have the language for — not quite fear, not quite pity. Something in between.

"Your friend is something else," she said to Valerio, quiet and flat, and then she left with her friends without looking back.

The cafeteria noise slowly resumed around us. Gossip travelled fast here. By fourth period everyone would have a version of what just happened. None of them would be right.

Clyde didn't let go of my shoulder for a long time.

I let him hold on.

To be continued...