My Childhood Best Friend Hid a Kidnapping Plea in Our Made-Up Alien Language, and I Was the Only One Who Could Decode It

When my childhood best friend Maya and I were eight, we invented a secret alien language that ended up changing our lives forever.

We were completely obsessed with space movies back then, so at night we’d flash hand signals through our bedroom windows and make up nonsense words for everything. Zorblacks meant pretending I’m okay. Meling meant I need help. Purple galaxies meant not alone.

We used it constantly when our parents weren’t paying attention, mostly to communicate in private, but also because it made us feel special in that weird, magical way childhood things do.

Then my family moved across the country during sophomore year of high school, and over time we slowly lost touch. By the time we were 22, we were really nothing more than old friends with a shared past.

Around then, Maya went from barely posting at all to posting every single day. Stories, regular posts, captions full of excitement. One of them said, “I’ve met the most amazing local here in Brazil. He’s showing me parts of the country tourists never see.”

Under normal circumstances, for a normal girl, that would have sounded fine.

But these were not normal circumstances, and Maya was not a normal girl when it came to travel. She had always told me she never wanted to move out of state. She was a New Yorker through and through, the kind of person who treated crossing boroughs like an adventure.

The posts kept coming, several a day, and every caption sounded more enthusiastic than the last. “Can’t believe how lucky I am.” “Some days I feel like I’m living my best Zorblax life.”

The second I saw that, my stomach dropped.

Zorblax was one of our code words. It meant pretending I’m okay.

At first I tried to talk myself out of it. Maybe Brazil was making her weird. Maybe she had randomly remembered something from childhood and tossed it into a caption as a joke.

But that night I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At 3:00 a.m., still wide awake, I grabbed my phone and stalked the absolute hell out of her account.

That’s when I saw it.

“This place has major Moon Whisper energy,” appeared in three different captions. Moon Whisper meant I’m scared. All of her story highlight covers were labeled with melling, which meant I need help.

That was the moment it finally clicked. Someone was forcing her to post those updates, and Maya was using our childhood alien language to tell me she’d been kidnapped.

I started commenting casually under her posts, trying to subtly signal that I understood what she was saying, but I had no idea whether she was even seeing them. So I turned on post notifications and started tracking every new caption like my life depended on it.

With every post, her messages got more specific.

“This reminds me of when we used to play astronauts,” was under a beach photo, except we never played astronauts at the beach. We only played astronauts at Riverside Park.

Another caption said, “Feeling like I’m 13 again.” Maya was 13 when I went with her to visit her aunt in Rio for spring break.

Then she posted a sunset photo with the line, “Missing my collection of 23 purple galaxy stickers back home.”

I read that one over and over.

Purple galaxies meant not alone. But why 23? Why mention stickers we never even collected?

Then it hit me. Riverside. Rio. 23.

She was trying to tell me she was near a riverside area in Rio, possibly somewhere connected to the number 23.

I thought about going to the police, but the only evidence I had was a made-up alien language from childhood, and I wasn’t eager to get written off as insane. So instead, I called Maya’s aunt in Rio.

She recognized my voice immediately. I told her I believed Maya was in trouble and might be held somewhere near the riverside area. The first thing she said was, “I felt God telling me something was wrong.”

Maya’s aunt was deeply spiritual, which in this case turned out to be a gift because she did not dismiss me as a lunatic.

Together we searched every building numbered 23 along the water. There were only three possibilities.

I maxed out my credit card on a flight to Rio. Maya’s aunt picked me up from the airport, and we drove to each location ourselves. The first two were residential buildings. The third was an old warehouse that looked abandoned, the kind of place that made the back of my neck prickle the second I saw it.

We called the police from the car and told them we suspected kidnapped tourists were being held inside. I don’t know whether they believed us or whether they just decided it was worth checking, but they went in.

Twenty minutes later, they came back out with Maya and four other young women.

Maya looked pale and exhausted, almost ghostly, but she was alive.

I didn’t even get time to hug her because the ambulance took her straight to the hospital. Maya’s aunt and I followed behind in the car, both of us trying to process what had just happened, when my phone buzzed.

Maya had somehow posted one more time just seconds earlier.

The caption was a single word in our alien language.

Blash.

It meant it’s not over yet.

I stared at my phone in the back seat of Maya’s aunt’s car while my hands started shaking. The police had just pulled her out of that warehouse. She didn’t have her phone on her. I checked the post again.

It was definitely from her account.

The timestamp showed it had been posted two minutes after they brought her out.

My brain went into overdrive. Someone else had access to her account. Someone who knew our language.

That should have been impossible. We made it up when we were eight. No one else was supposed to know any of it.

Maya’s aunt kept praying in Portuguese while she drove. I couldn’t understand every word, but I understood enough to know she was thanking God and asking for protection.

When we got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let us see Maya right away. They said she needed to be examined first. The other rescued women were somewhere in the same wing, and I spent what felt like hours pacing the waiting room, jumping every time a door opened.

Finally, a nurse came out and said we could go in.

Maya was sitting up in bed with an IV in her arm. She looked so small. The second she saw me, her eyes filled with tears, and I ran over and hugged her as tightly as I could.

Then she whispered something in my ear that made my blood run cold.

“They have my sister.”

I pulled back and stared at her.

Maya didn’t have a sister. She was an only child. I had known that since we were six.

She gave me a look that said, play along.

So I nodded like I understood.

The nurse was still in the room checking Maya’s vitals while Maya kept talking out loud about how worried she was about her sister and how badly she hoped her sister was okay. The second the nurse left, Maya grabbed my hand and silently mouthed, “They’re listening.”

I looked around the room. It looked like an ordinary hospital room.

Then Maya started squeezing my hand in a pattern.

Three short. Three long. Three short.

SOS.

I pulled out my phone, opened the notes app, and typed, “What’s going on?”

She took the phone and typed back: “The guy who took me has people everywhere. Hospital staff. Police. He let us get rescued on purpose.”

My stomach dropped so hard it almost hurt.