My friend and I, we had this thing, it was called “The Code.” So the initial reason the code was developed is because my middle school had made a rule that we were going to do 10 minutes of silent reflection at the end of lunch. And our lunch was only 20 minutes long. So having to do 10 minutes of silent reflection during lunch to like, reflect on how the class had been misbehaving for the entirety of the Lenten Church season was a big ask. So, we wanted to develop our own sign language, and we didn’t want to speak in normal sign language because that would be way too easy for the lunch staff to decipher what we were doing. And we also wanted to be able to talk without any of our friends knowing what we were saying, so we created this thing called the code. So I don’t remember all of the hand symbols of the code, but essentially, we had written out everything on a small sheet of paper, but we needed a place to like hide our code like decipher key.
So, we thought that it would be really funny to hide it like obviously somewhere that looks like it could be inconspicuous like in a piece of school supplies. And what we determined was the best was a glue stick, so we like used up the glue in the glue stick, and we took off the top, put the code in and then like, would put the like mostly empty glue stick top back on. So it looks like it was a normal glue stick. The other thing is, we would often have issues with the code getting stuck inside the glue stick. And I remember the only way to actually get the decipher key out of said glue stick is you had to like throw it at the wall a couple of times and then it would pop up. And there was our code.
But yeah, honestly, we didn’t really speak in it that much, but it became a whole game of our other friends trying to like, guess where we had hidden the code because they were aware of its existence but didn’t know like where the decipher key was. So that was pretty fun.