hide your wives, hide your kids, and hide your husbands.

I've terrified everyone one at the Marseille community center. In Advanced French today the teacher handed out an exercise where we made up answers to questions like this one:

Is Fatima a taxi driver?

He turned to Marina, a tiny woman in her 50s, to answer this one, but she wasn't having any of it.

"How should I know?" asked Marina. "I've never met Fatima, I don't know what her job is."

"Well of course you don't, it's just made up. So just make up an answer"

But Marina continued to object, insisting she had never met Fatima. She sounded more like a murder suspect than a French student. "Fatima? I never knew her, I swear! She could have been a taxi driver, she could have been a pastry chef, I have no idea. Ok, fine, FINE! We were neighbors. But that's all, and I never would have killed her! Ask Jean-Paul, she owed him money for taxi repairs!!!"

Next it was time for me to answer a question.

Jean-Paul, was your car expensive?

I wrote the French equivalent of "Nope, I got the five-finger discount."

The teacher stared at me with concern. "You what?"

"Not me, Jean-Paul. Weren't we we just supposed to make something up?"

It was uncomfortably quiet for a while.

"Well class," he said, watching me from the corner of his eye. "It looks like the American has... an imagination." As though it were some sort of horrible rash.

Good thing he never asked me where Jean-Paul hid Fatima's body.