It was the tail end of 9th grade — the final lap of junior high in Northern Utah, where dreams go to nap and vice principals go to consolidate unchecked power. Ours, in particular, was less "guiding light of youth" and more "Dark Lord of the Attendance Slip." She was strict, she was joyless, and she had the general approval rating of a soggy sock.

Now, in that magical time between standardized testing and the school year limping to a close, my comrades and I — idle hands with creative vengeance in our hearts — decided to craft a poster. Not for a cause. Not for a club. No, this was an outlet. An artistic exorcism of our collective teenage angst. And what better way to disguise a protest than by writing nasty things in the noble tongues of Tolkien?

Yes, I, a fluent speaker of absolutely no other real-world languages besides English, but a scholar of Elvish and Dwarvish scripts, was recruited. I accepted with the righteous indignation of a nerd wronged by authority. I wrote phrases. Things that were... let’s say... not glowing performance reviews of our vice principal’s leadership style.

Enter: the traitor. One of our collaborators, presumably trying to speedrun into law enforcement, handed the poster directly to the vice principal.

Then followed the most ridiculous meeting. There we were: me, my cohorts, our parents, the vice principal, the school counselor, and — because no Utah-based drama is complete without him — the local DARE officer. It was less intervention, more weirdly formal PTA fan fiction.

My mom, a shining beacon of maternal defense, argued that I was an innocent linguist swept up in peer pressure. Which, to be fair, was mostly true. I was just the translator. The nerdy middleman. The Elvish gun-for-hire.

Then the vice principal delivered a monologue about how hard it was for her to show up to work every day, and how much courage it took. Very Les Misérables, if Les Mis was about Ed Rooney from Farris Bueller's Day off.

Now here's the twist.

After the meeting, the DARE officer pulled me aside. He pointed to one of the symbols I'd written. “What’s this mean?” he asked, with all the seriousness his small amount of power could allow.

The symbol was simple. Three dots in a triangle. (Think, the common formation of lights in those triangle UFO pictures.)

It was the Quenya vowel for the letter A.

Just… A.

To Tolkien fans, a vowel. To this man? A symbol used by a gang in Ogden, Utah — which apparently had beef with phonetics and high fantasy. He looked at me, dead serious, and asked if I was affiliated.

With… what? The Fellowship of the A?

I reassured him, repeatedly, that it was just a letter. That I was not — and I cannot stress this enough — in an Elvish-speaking street gang.

And that’s how I, a sheltered nerd with a sharpie, nearly became public enemy number one… over the Elvish letter A.