Not Everyone Is Called

Not everyone is called. Nobody agreed to ask why.

At Devereux Academy, being Called is the highest honor a student can receive. Ask anyone. They'll tell you it's a celebration - the whole valley turns out, the whole school rises to its feet, and once a year, one student is chosen to "secure the endowment" in a ceremony a hundred and forty years old.

Nobody can actually tell you what that means.

Cordelia "Delia" Devereux has spent her whole life being exactly what this place wanted: competent, composed, ready. Her family's name is on the building. Her whole future is riding on one more perfect year.

Then her best friend is Called instead of her.

And Delia realizes she has no idea what happens next. Nobody does. The file just says RESOLVED - and the harder she pushes for what that word is hiding, the more she understands that an entire town agreed, generations ago, to stop asking.

The deeper she digs, the more the ground gives way: a photograph that shouldn't exist. A family that may have decided who she'd become before she ever got a say. And an offer from someone she trusts completely - one that would let her stop asking questions forever, and start being one of the people who never has to.

All she has to do is stand at a podium and say the sentence everyone's waiting to hear.

She just has to decide whether she can still say it and mean it.

Perfect for readers of The Grace Year and Sawkill Girls - a Southern Gothic YA horror novel about institutional complicity, the cost of belonging, and the terrifying ease with which good people keep bad traditions alive.