Free The Revealers by Doug Wilhelm

said.
    â€œWhy?”
    Another pause.
    â€œYou’ll see,” she said finally. “Tell me what you think … but wait till tomorrow. In school. Okay?” She sounded nervous.
    â€œWell, okay. Sure.”
    Â 
    I got on-line. Catalina’s message just said, “Please read this. I thought it was a good idea before. Now I don’t know.”
    KidNet downloaded the file she had attached to the message. I opened it. Here’s what it said:

    For some reason, sometimes when you are new or different in some way, people decide to tell lies about you. I don’t know why. Before I came to Parkland School I didn’t know people did that at all.

    My name is Catalina Aarons. I’m somebody people have been telling untrue things about. Maybe you have heard some things. In fact, if you are in seventh grade and you have heard anything about me, it’s probably not true. I haven’t really told people what is true, so maybe in a way it’s partly my fault.
    So here are some things about me that are true.
    I was born in the Philippines, on the biggest island, Luzon. My mother is a Filipina. My father is American. His company sent him to work in Manila, the capital city, and that’s where he met my mom. They got married, and they had me. So I am half-Filipina and half-American.
    Filipinos are a mix of types of people, just like Americans. Our ancestors include the people of our part of the Pacific, called Malays, and Chinese people, and also Spanish and Americans, because both of those countries used to control the Philippines. My mother’s name is Rosario. That’s Spanish. But everyone calls her by her American nickname, Rose.
    We lived near Manila but not right in it, in a house not that much different from the houses here. My dad went to work. He was gone a lot. My mom and I were best friends. My mom is really beautiful. Everyone said so! She is not as tall as me and she looks like a Spanish princess, with dark eyes, and she has long shining black hair like a Malay, and her eyes are almond-shaped like the Chinese. People used to tell me she got the best of everything.
    My mom teaches music, mostly piano but also singing, to kids and grownups who come to our home. She used to sing to me, since I was a baby. Her voice is like liquid silver.
    I rode to school and came home every day on a jeepney. That’s like an American school bus only it isn‘t—it’s a funny decorated contraption made from adding almost anything onto an old American jeep, or a small truck. There are jeepneys all over Manila. Some of them are incredible!

    Anyway, every day when the jeepney let me off after school I ran home, because my mom and I would have merienda.
    Merienda is an afternoon snack. It’s not like any American snack. We might have adobo, which is chicken or meat cooked in an incredible sauce—I can’t even describe how it tasted, tangy and just a little sweet. My mom would make panyo panyo, little pastries filled with banana and mango jam. They are fantastic! We’d have guapple pie, too. Guapple is a kind of hard fruit, like an apple but sweeter and softer in its taste. We’d have slices of mango with lime juice dripped over them, and hot chocolate whipped up smooth and frothy. And we’d have our own kind of limeade, which was incredible! My mom made it from our little calamansi limes, mixed up with melon juice and water.
    Every day my mom made merienda for her and me, and we would talk about everything. Everything! We were happy. But I guess my dad was not. I guess he missed America, and he did not like being a foreigner in Luzon. I guess he had some problems with my mom’s family. (He was the only one who was not Filipino.) When he was home he didn’t seem happy, and then my mom started to cry a lot. I would hear her playing the piano and crying. I didn’t really know what was wrong.
    One day they told me they were going to get a divorce, and I