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Alona’s Quest for the Golden Tree
Chapter 17: Your Fault
I BLINKED confusedly.
“Alona?”
Our math teacher asked her question again.Â
“You’re taking way too long. What is the answer to the question written on the board?”
Teacher Marana thumped the board in a really menacing way. I looked at the blackboard.Â
Maliksi and Maganda are siblings. Malakas is 20 years old. Maganda is Âľ his age. How old is Maganda?
I blinked again. And my mind came up empty.
How am I supposed to know, I wanted to ask my teacher.
“Alona?!”
I jumped.
I made my teacher mad. I could hear it from her voice.
“I don’t know, Ma’am,” I answered truthfully, though foolishly, addressing the floor.
Ms. Marana sighed irritably.
“You don’t know?” she exclaimed, fire coming out of her eyes. “How could you not know? We’d been studying this problem for three days now! What’s wrong with you?”
“Ma’am,” I said, “why couldn’t Malakas and Maganda just tell their age upfront?”
I immediately regretted I said that.Â
My teacher’s eyes grew wide in extreme annoyance.
“How dare you!” she said. “Sit down! I wouldn’t take your cheek, I wouldn’t. Do you think what we’re studying here has no relevance? Do you?”
I didn’t say that. I did not say that at all.Â
I sat down; looking, and feeling, bad.
“Who knows the answer to this equation?” she barked at the entirety of the class.
Everyone jumped. Nobody raised their hands. Everyone did their best to avoid Teacher Marana’s eyes.
That earned us another hour of hellish lecture.
Alona wished dearly that she had not spoken. Judging from the dirty looks of her classmates, they thought so, too.
“IT WAS all your fault!”
I was eating my snack, a dried-up pan de sal, when Clara and her gang of girls rounded up on me.
I looked up, confused.
 “It was your fault that Teacher Marana lectured us all morning,” Clara accused. “You should apologize!”
I swallowed my food awkwardly.
“Maybe Teacher Marana was just in a bad mood,” I reasoned.
“No, she’s not!” spat Clara. “She was angry because you are a disrespectful brat!”
“I’m not!” I protested.
“Oh yeah,” said Clara, malice contorting her angelic face ugly. “You are! You’re just like your mother! You’re insane! You’re crazy!”
“I’m not!”
Something caught in my throat. My eyes got wet. I blinked fast, to prevent the tears from falling.
Clara snorted.
“Where is your mother going this morning huh, Alona? Is she finally going to the mental hospital?”
Everyone who could hear laughed.
I felt suffocated, the taunts and the sneers and the laughs choking me.
I had no strength to fight back.
I gathered my things, and ran out.
“IGNORE THEM!”
It was a familiar voice. She was giving me a handkerchief.Â
 “Clara was just being mean. Ignore her,” said Ate Rachel. “Where did your Nanay go to this morning, anyway?”
“To the hospital. But it was not for my mother. My brother is sick,” I answered.
I looked at Ate Rachel gratefully.
She was still wearing her dirty uniform. She was still not-as-pretty. But, she was tough. She was my tough best friend.
I frowned.
“What happened to your eye?”
She had a black eye. It was purple, and ugly.
“This,” she asked. “Nothing. I rolled down the stairs.”
Except there were no stairs in her house.
It was her father again, I knew it.
I silently grimaced.
It was obvious she didn’t want to talk about it, so I let go.
“I’m so glad you’re talking to me again,” I said, smiling.
Ate Rachel frowned.
“I’m not,” she declared.
She turned her back. And walked away.
(c) 2016, Herbel Santiago