Budi grinned. “That’s not just correct. That’s the whole point of Chapter 17.”
Slowly, she erased her blank space. Then she wrote:
Alya looked back at the first idiom she had been stuck on: “Even a fool has one talent.”
“My answer key,” Budi said. “For Chapter 17, the teacher asked us to explain those idioms by using them in a real situation. So I drew these. The frog in the well? That’s me when I refuse to ask for help. The traveler with the lantern? That’s anyone who keeps walking even when they can’t see the whole path.”
Chapter 17 was about kanyōku — idioms. But not the easy ones. These were the kind that didn’t translate literally: “Even a fool has one talent.” “A frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean.” She understood the words separately, but together? They slipped through her fingers like water.
Budi smiled. He reached into his bag and pulled out an old, folded piece of paper — yellowed, with coffee stains. “I kept this from last year. My own Jawaban for Chapter 17.”
“This is it,” she whispered to herself. “If I don’t pass the final, my parents will ground me forever.”
“Then why not look?” Budi asked, pointing at the key.
“I thought I was a fool because I couldn’t memorize the answers like everyone else. But my talent is that I never give up. I have been sitting here for two hours, and I am still trying. That is my one talent.”
She didn’t get a perfect score on the final. But she passed Chapter 17 — not because she found the answers, but because she learned how to find them herself. Moral: The real jawaban (answer) isn't the one in the back of the book — it's the one you arrive at after your own struggle.
She looked up at Budi. “Is that… correct?”
Budi leaned over, glanced at her workbook, then at the answer key she had hidden under a notebook. The official Jawaban Renshuu B Bab 17 — the answers — sat there, untouched. Alya had a rule: never check the answer key until she had tried everything.
The Answer for Chapter 17
