The Calling

THE CALLING Chapter 1: The Calling

THE CALLING

Chapter 1

Yuri's POV

The hallways of Lancaster High Value Academy smelled like expensive cologne and fresh money.

I kept my eyes down.

Not because I was nervous. Not because I was intimidated by the marble floors or the way everyone here walked like they already owned something. I kept my eyes down because looking up meant making eye contact.

And making eye contact meant seeing something I couldn't unsee.

I adjusted my glasses and moved through the crowd like water around rocks.

"Yuri."

I heard him before I saw him. Clyde Debouis Hidgrin — same age as me, sixteen — materialized from the crowd like a disaster that had been scheduled in advance, cheeseburger in hand, ketchup on his cheek, completely unbothered by the fact that he was eating in a hallway full of people who probably had personal chefs.

"You're early," I said.

"I'm always early."

"You have fifteen traffic violations this month."

He pointed the burger at me. "That's not related."

"You're late every other day."

"Also not related." He fell into step beside me, chewing.

"Did you do the physics essay?"

"Submitted it last week."

He stopped walking. I didn't.

"Last week?" He caught up. "It was assigned yesterday."

"I know."

He stared at me for a long moment. Then he took another bite of his burger and accepted it, because that's the thing about Clyde — he had an extraordinary ability to just accept things and move forward.

It was one of the only things I genuinely admired about him.

We moved through the corridor together. I kept my gaze at shoulder level. Safe. Neutral.

Then my vision went white.

I didn't stop walking. I never stopped walking — that was the first thing I learned. You stop, people notice. People notice, you become the problem.

So I kept my feet moving even as the hallway disappeared and something else took its place.

A bathroom. Late at night. A boy on the floor — forearm crutches knocked sideways, books scattered. Three figures standing over him. Laughing.

I knew his face. Ned. Edmund Nicholas Hermit, transfer student, the one everyone called the Pimp Kid behind his back because they didn't have anything more creative than cruelty.

In the vision his nose was bleeding. In the vision one of the girls ground her heel into his palm while he tried to get up.

In the vision, he stopped trying to get up.

The white faded. The hallway came back. Clyde was saying something about a speeding ticket.

"— five minutes before school, which I think is genuinely impressive timing, like statistically—"

"Are you okay?" I asked.

He blinked. "I just told you I got a ticket."

"Are you physically okay. From the driving."

"Oh." He seemed touched that I asked. "Yeah, bro. I'm fine."

I nodded and kept walking.

The vision sat behind my eyes like a splinter. I turned it over carefully, the way you handle something sharp.

The bathroom in the vision — PWD access. The timing — today, lunch, when the main restrooms would be closed for maintenance. The figures — I had seen their faces.

I filed it away and said nothing.

That's the part no one understands. The part I could never explain even if I wanted to.

Knowing isn't the same as acting.

And acting without thinking is how you make everything worse.

We waited outside the classroom while Clyde finished his burger and the hallway filled around us.

I stood with my back against the wall, watching the floor, listening to the ambient noise of a school that had never needed to worry about anything.

Then the noise changed.

It didn't get louder. It got arranged — boys straightening ties, running hands through hair, producing flowers and chocolates from places that made no spatial sense. Even Clyde, mid-chew, somehow produced a chocolate bar.

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

He smiled like he'd been waiting for me to ask and had no intention of answering.

I looked up.

Molion Sabrina Fahrenheit moved through the hallway the way weather moves — you didn't watch her walk so much as you noticed the effect she had on everything around her. Half-British, half-Thai. Daughter of a politician and a CEO with international branches. The kind of beautiful that Lancaster was full of, except that Lancaster was full of it and she still stood apart.

Every boy watched her. Every girl recalibrated.

I looked back at the floor.

Not because she wasn't beautiful. Beauty was abundant here and mostly irrelevant.

I looked away because the first time I had ever made eye contact with Molion Sabrina Fahrenheit, the Calling had shown me things I still hadn't figured out what to do with.

Things that didn't match the girl who walked like she owned the hallway. Things that didn't match anyone who smiled that easily.

I didn't look at her.

I thought about Ned.

Physics passed the way good classes do — quickly, with the sensation of something actually happening in your brain. Ms. Dubois called on me about magnetic fields and I answered and Clyde whispered something about his grocery list being technically part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which wasn't wrong, which was the most annoying kind of wrong.

By the time the bell rang I had made a decision.

I was going to find Ned before lunch.

The vision hadn't shown me a time — they never did, not exactly. But the maintenance announcement had gone out that morning. The PWD bathroom. Today.

I packed my bag. Clyde was still organizing his tablet, earphones already half-inserted, i********: open, somehow simultaneously present and completely elsewhere.

"Do you know Ned?" I asked. "The transfer. Forearm crutches."

"Ned? Yeah." Clyde didn't look up. "He eats in the PWD bathroom. Every day. I don't know why, seems like he's scared of something."

"Can we invite him to lunch?"

Clyde looked up then. Something passed across his face — not surprise exactly. More like recognition. "Yeah," he said. "Obviously yeah."

I told him to find Valerio and the others and left before he could ask me anything else.

I found Ned at his locker.

He was struggling with the books, trying to balance them against his forearm crutches, jaw set with the particular determination of someone who was used to managing things alone and had made peace with it.

He didn't look like he'd made peace with it. He looked like he was fighting a war no one else could see.

I knew something about that.

"Excuse me—" he started, sensing me behind him.

"Yes. At your service." I reached past him and opened the locker.

He turned, startled. Then careful. The way people get when they're not sure if kindness is real or setup.

"Thank you. Your name is—?"

"Yuri. Yuri Noahson Froster."

He shifted his grip on the crutches and offered his left hand. I met it properly.

"Edmund Nicholas Hermit. Ned."

"Would you want to eat lunch with us? Me and Clyde."

His eyes changed. Just slightly. The careful look didn't disappear entirely — it had been there too long for that — but something underneath it shifted. Like a light in a room that had been dark for a while.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, bro. That sounds good."

I carried his tray to the cafeteria.

The Calling stayed quiet.

For now, I had done what I could. And for now — just for this one lunch, in this one afternoon — that felt like enough.

I knew it wouldn't last.

It never did.

To be continued...