When did a joke go way too far?

The Pizza Shop Incident and the Academic Storm

“Keshvara to Mongala.” Ryan said, pointing at the last slice of pizza. “Nay to farco,” I said.

“Groma Steven.” The guy at the next table stood up so fast his chair fell over.

“Where did you learn protosumerian?” “Learn what?” I asked.

“That language you’re speaking,” he said, his hands actually shaking. “It’s been dead for 4,000 years.”

“No, this is our own language. We made it up in high school,” Ryan said.

The guy pulled out his phone and called someone. “David, get to Mario’s pizza right now. I found speakers.”

“Yes, speakers. Three of them. They’re fluent.”

He hung up and sat at our table without asking. “I’m Professor Mills from Columbia Linguistics.”

“What you’re speaking is a dialect that’s been extinct since 2000 BC.” “No, it’s not,” I said.

I was already getting that sick feeling when things are about to go sideways. “We literally invented it in detention because we were bored.”

“Say something else,” Mills demanded. “Please.”

“Kesh Tanara,” Ryan said to me, which meant, “Is this guy crazy?” Mills started crying.

He was actually crying in a pizza place at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Perfect.

“The pronunciation is perfect.” A van pulled up and three people ran in with recording equipment.

They surrounded our table setting up microphones while Mills pointed at us like we were zoo animals. “We need to document everything,” a woman said.

“This is the discovery of the century.” “It’s not a discovery,” I said.

I was getting annoyed now because our pizza was getting cold. These people were acting like we’d found Atlantis.

Ryan came up with kesh for what? Because it sounded funny.

“I did,” Ryan confirmed. “In Miss Sim Garcia’s history class.”

Mills grabbed Ryan’s shoulders. “You! You must be the origin. Please teach us Proto Sumerian.”

“I’m not anything,” Ryan said, panicking. “They came up with it with me. Ask them.”

We all started talking over each other, trying to explain that we just made this dumb language up. We invented it one word at a time whenever we thought of a new funny sound.

But no one would listen to us. They made us speak for 2 hours while they recorded everything.

I kept waiting for someone to tell us we were being pranked, but everyone seemed deadly serious. “Look, we have a notebook,” Steven said.

He pulled out the composition book where we’d written down our vocabulary from high school. “See, we made up grammar rules and everything.”

Mills looked at the notebook and his eyes got wider with every page. “This is impossible.”

“You’ve recreated the exact grammatical structure. Even the conditional tenses we only theorized about.”

“We made those up because they were funny,” I said. I specifically remembered how we decided that past conditional should have a stupid whistling sound.

We did it just to make each other laugh in the hallway. “Show me your conditional past,” Mills said.

“Uh,” Steven said. I could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to remember what conditional even meant.

“Moraesh Tanu belevara,” he said, which meant I would have been eating. Mills played a recording from his phone of some ancient clay tablet reconstruction.

It sounded exactly like what Steven had just said. My skin went cold because that wasn’t possible.

We’d made that up. I was there.

I remember Steven suggesting the vara ending while we were hiding behind the gym. “This is a coincidence,” Ryan said.

“It has to be.” The next day Mills brought Yale’s ancient languages department head then Harvard’s.

Then someone from the British Museum arrived. Our apartment was full of academics shouting about verb conjugations.

We sat on our own couch like strangers in our home. “They need to come to Oxford,” the British guy said.

“They’re coming to MIT first.” Another said, “We’ll pay.”

“Pay?” I said. “The Smithsonian will give you each 50,000 to spend a month teaching our researchers.”

“To speak our madeup language,” I said, though I was starting to doubt everything. Had we made it up?

The notebook was real. Our memories were real.

But so was that recording. “It’s not made up,” Mills insisted.

“One of you must have learned it somewhere.” “From who?” Ryan said.

“Ancient Sumerians? We’re from New Jersey.”

Mills pulled me aside. “Did your grandmother ever sing to you in a strange language? Did you have dreams where people spoke differently?”

“No,” I said. “We sat in detention making up funny sounds.”

But even as I said it, I was trying to remember if that was true. Had we made it up or had it just come to us?

When Ryan said kesh that first time, had he invented it or remembered it? “Then explain this,” Mills said.

He showed me a tablet from 2000 BC. When he played the audio reconstruction, it was word for word a joke song.

Steven had made it up about Ryan’s ex-girlfriend. “That’s impossible,” I said.

Something about those symbols seemed familiar, even though I’d never studied ancient languages.

“The entire song,” Mills said, “including the part about her unibrow of destiny. That’s what these symbols mean.”

Steven and Ryan were looking at the tablet now, too. “We made that up junior year,” Steven said.

“In Ryan’s basement.” “Did you?” Mills asked.

“Or were you channeling ancient memories?” “We were high,” Ryan said.

“Not channeling anything.” Mills’s phone rang.

When he came back, his face was pale. “I need you three to come with me right now.”

“Where?” I asked. “Someone needs to verify your identities,” he said.

“Why?” Steven asked. “Because the Venezuelan government is claiming you’re spies using an ancient language as code,” he said.

“And the State Department wants to know how three kids from Jersey learned a dead language.”

We looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Groma Hella did,” which meant we’re screwed.

Mills herded us into the van before we could process what he just said about the State Department.

I found myself sitting with recording equipment pointed at my face. All I could think was that our pizza was definitely cold by now.

Mills kept asking us to repeat phrases while his colleagues frantically typed notes on their laptops.

One guy adjusted a microphone boom so close to my mouth I could smell the foam windscreen.

A woman in a Columbia sweatshirt filmed everything on her phone. Another person scribbled in a notebook like we were in an archaeological dig.

I realized this wasn’t going to blow over like a normal Tuesday weirdness. This was something else entirely.

Mills sat across from me, practically vibrating with excitement. He asked us to say random things in our madeup language.

Ryan leaned over and whispered to me in a quiet voice. He said the phrase we used for, “Is this guy crazy?”

We’d made it up specifically for talking about teachers behind their backs. Mills literally gasped like Ryan had just recited Shakespeare.

His hand flew to his chest and his eyes got all wet and shiny. The woman with the microphone started crying, too.

Actual tears ran down her face while she held the recording equipment steady.

I got that sick feeling you get right before everything in your life changes forever. It was the kind of feeling I’d only had when my grandmother died.

My stomach twisted and I wanted to throw up, but I just sat there frozen. These people treated our stupid detention joke like it was the most important thing.

I finally managed to interrupt and told them we needed to leave. Mills grabbed my arm and begged us to stay just 10 more minutes.

His fingers dug into my forearm hard enough that I could feel them through my jacket. He promised it would be quick.

Those 10 minutes turned into 2 hours of us speaking our dumb, madeup language while they recorded every sound.

They made us conjugate verbs we’d invented as jokes. They asked us to describe objects in the van using our vocabulary.

They wanted us to have a conversation about what we’d eaten for breakfast. Steven kept checking his phone.

I could see him getting more stressed as time passed. Ryan looked like he wanted to punch someone.

The whole time they treated us like we were archaeological artifacts instead of people trying to eat lunch.

The woman filming kept asking us to repeat things slower, clearer, with more emotion.

Mills pulled out a tablet and showed us symbols from ancient clay tablets. He asked if they looked familiar.

They didn’t, but he seemed disappointed every time we said no.

When we finally escaped back to our apartment, Ryan immediately called his parents.

I could hear his mom freaking out through the phone from across the room. Her voice kept getting higher and louder.

She kept asking if we were safe, if we needed a lawyer, or if we’d been arrested.

Steven pulled out our old composition notebook from high school. The cover was bent and stained with what looked like old coffee rings.

Inside, our handwriting from junior year looked so young and messy. It was full of crossed-out words and doodles in the margins.

We started going through it trying to figure out how this was even possible.

There were pages of words we’d made up and grammar rules we’d invented. I remembered writing most of this stuff.

I remembered the day we spent an entire lunch period figuring out the past perfect tense.

But looking at it now with Mills’s voice still in my head, I felt less certain about everything.

The next morning, I woke up to 17 missed calls. My phone was blowing up with texts from numbers I didn’t recognize.

Someone from Yale wanted to interview us. A professor from Berkeley offered to fly us to California.

A guy from Oxford sent a long text about how we were the most important linguistic discovery in a century.

Mills had apparently given out our contact information to every linguistics department on the east coast.

My phone kept buzzing with new messages and I finally just turned it off. I couldn’t handle it anymore.

Ryan’s phone was doing the same thing and Steven’s too. We sat at our kitchen table with our dead phones in front of us.

The apartment felt too small suddenly, like the walls were closing in. Ryan suggested we just ignore all of it.

He said we could block everyone’s numbers and go back to being normal college students.

Steven pointed out that Mills knew where we lived. He probably wasn’t going to leave us alone.

He reminded us that the State Department wanted to talk to us. You couldn’t just ignore the State Department.

We spent an hour arguing about what to do. Ryan thought we should hire a lawyer.

Steven thought we should talk to our professors at the school. I didn’t know what I thought except that I wanted to go back to Tuesday.

Finally, we decided we needed to at least figure out what Mills thought he’d discovered. We didn’t even understand what we were dealing with.

Mills showed up at our door at 9:00 in the morning without calling first. He brought three other professors.

I was still in my pajamas when I answered the door. Mills was grinning like we were old friends.

They walked in without asking if it was okay. Mills spread everything across our coffee table like he owned the place.

Papers covered the surface, some with ancient looking symbols and others with dense academic text.

He started explaining how our language matched a dialect that died out 4,000 years ago.

He pointed at charts and linguistic trees that meant nothing to me. The other professors nodded along.

One of them set up a laptop and pulled up a PowerPoint presentation about ancient Mesopotamia.

I kept trying to explain that we made it up in Garcia’s history class when we were bored. I told them about detention.

Mills just smiled like I was a confused child. He started talking about our subconscious accessing genetic memory.

He suggested we’d inherited the language through our DNA somehow. It sounded like complete nonsense.

He said it with such confidence that for a second I almost believed him.

Ryan actually laughed in his face, which made the tension in the room even worse.

The other professors looked uncomfortable. One of them tried to change the subject by pulling out more papers.

One of the other professors played a recording from a clay tablet reconstruction. The sound came out of his phone tiny and strange.

It sounded exactly like the conditional past tense we invented because the whistling sound made us crack up.

My skin prickled with cold sweat and I felt dizzy. I remembered Steven suggesting that ending while we were hiding.

I remembered laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe because it sounded so stupid. But now I was wondering if I really remembered it.

Maybe we’d heard this recording somewhere. Maybe Mrs. Garcia had played it in class and we’d forgotten.

The professor played it again and it matched our language perfectly. Every whistle and vowel sound was in exactly the right place.

Mills pulled out the composition notebook and started photographing every page. His phone camera clicked over and over.

Steven tried to grab it back, but Mills insisted he needed to document everything.

He held the notebook out of Steven’s reach like a kid keeping a toy away from his little brother.

Our private joke from high school was treated like ancient scrolls found in a cave.

Mills photographed the cover, the table of contents, and every page of vocabulary.

He even took photos of the doodles and stupid jokes we’d written in the margins.

The other professors crowded around to look at the photos on his phone screen.

They pointed at specific words and argued about pronunciation and meaning.

We just stood there in our own apartment watching strangers turn our teenage boredom into something unrecognized.

A woman from Yale with gray hair stepped forward and started asking about our families.

She wanted to know if anyone at home spoke unusual languages. I told her we were just regular kids from New Jersey.

All our grandparents spoke English. She looked disappointed, like our boring family history was ruining her theory.

Ryan confirmed his family was from Jersey, too. Steven said his grandparents were from Pennsylvania and also spoke only English.

The woman made notes, but her shoulders slumped. We were letting her down by being normal.

Mills kept trying to redirect to the language itself, but she was fixated on finding a mysterious origin story.

Another professor suggested maybe we’d been exposed to recordings as children. We all shook our heads.

The apartment felt smaller with all these people in it asking questions that had no interesting answers.

Finally, after what felt like hours, they started packing up their recording equipment and papers.

Mills made us promise not to speak to any other researchers. We didn’t promise anything, but nodded just to get them out.

The door closed behind the last professor and we sat in stunned silence for 20 minutes.

Ryan finally broke the quiet by saying we should call a lawyer. Steven said that was overreacting.

He didn’t think we needed legal help for speaking a language we made up.

But I was starting to agree with Ryan. This felt like it was spiraling into something we couldn’t control.

Mills had mentioned the State Department and Venezuela and spies. Those weren’t words that went with normal college life.

Steven argued that lawyers cost money we didn’t have. Ryan said we could find someone who did free consultations.

I sat between them feeling the weight of whatever this was becoming. My phone started buzzing with an unknown number.

I answered and a man introduced himself as calling from Harvard.

He said they wanted to offer us $50,000 each to spend a month teaching their researchers.

I felt my brain stutter trying to process that number. I was thinking about my student loans and my rent.

$50,000 sounded like a solution to every problem I had. But something about it felt wrong.

It was like taking money for a magic trick after someone figured out how you did it.

The Harvard guy was still talking about travel arrangements and stipends. I told him we needed time to think about it.

He said we had 48 hours to decide. I hung up and told Ryan and Steven about the offer.

Ryan’s eyes got huge and he said we had to take it. Steven immediately pushed back.

He said we didn’t even know if what we were speaking was actually protosumerian or just a coincidence.

Ryan said it didn’t matter what it was if Harvard wanted to pay us.

Steven said it absolutely mattered because we’d be lying if we pretended to know something we didn’t.

They started arguing for real. Ryan accused Steven of overthinking everything like always.

Steven fired back that Ryan just wanted to cash in on something we didn’t understand.

Their voices got louder and I tried to interrupt. Ryan said Steven was being stupid about turning down the money.

Steven said Ryan was being greedy and dishonest. I finally yelled that both of them needed to shut up.

They stopped and looked at me. I said I was torn because $50,000 would change my life.

The Harvard guy had already emailed the contract. It said we had 48 hours to decide.

This felt like pressure tactics but also like an opportunity we’d be stupid to pass up.

Steven started reading over my shoulder and pointing out clauses about intellectual property and exclusive rights.

Ryan paced around the living room saying we were idiots if we didn’t take this.

My phone rang again and I saw it was Mills. His voice sounded worried.

He said the State Department wanted to talk to us about how we learned the language.

I asked why the State Department cared. He mentioned international security concerns.

Those words made my stomach drop. I thanked him and hung up.

Ryan’s face went pale when I told them about the State Department call.

Steven immediately pulled out his laptop and Googled Proto Sumerian State Department. Nothing came up.

Steven said that somehow made it worse. It meant this was serious enough that it wasn’t public information yet.

We spent the whole night trying to figure out what international security had to do with our detention language.

Steven suggested maybe they thought we were using it as some kind of code.

That sounded insane until we remembered Mills mentioning Venezuela claiming we were spies.

Ryan said there was no way the actual government thought we were spies. My hands were shaking.

Governments made mistakes all the time. We were three nobody college students with no resources to fight back.

We stayed up until 3:00 in the morning googling language-based espionage and government investigations.

Some articles mentioned how intelligence agencies tracked unusual communication patterns. I barely slept.

When I did, I had dreams about being interrogated in a room with no windows.

The next morning, my phone rang from another unknown number. A woman introduced herself as Gail Quinn.

She said she was an attorney specializing in government inquiries and academic disputes.

Someone from MIT had recommended her. She offered a free consultation to explain what we were dealing with.

I put her on speaker so Ryan and Steven could hear. We agreed to meet her that afternoon.

Gail turned out to be maybe 40 with short dark hair. She was immediately more reassuring than anyone else.

She explained that the State Department probably just wanted to verify we weren’t actual foreign agents.

She said it sounded ridiculous, but it was apparently a real concern they had to investigate.

Gail asked if we’d been contacted by anyone from foreign governments. She asked if we’d traveled internationally.

She made notes and said this would probably be straightforward as long as we were honest.

She made it sound almost normal, like a Tuesday inconvenience. Gail pulled out a folder.

She told us not to sign anything from any university without showing it to her first.

The Harvard offer for $50,000 was real, she said. But we should ask for more.

She also said we absolutely should not meet with the State Department without her.

Ryan leaned forward and asked how much her services would cost us.

Gail said she’d work on contingency. She’d take a percentage of whatever money we ended up making.

Something about hearing that made it click in my head. This was actually a situation where we might make money.

We might actually profit from our dumb high school language. Steven asked what percentage she meant.

Gail said 20%. This seemed fair since we had no idea what we were doing.

We shook hands. Gail said she’d start reviewing the Harvard paperwork and reach out to the State Department.