Tic Tock, The Clock Strikes Love

“Marcus, do you have something to say?” Mrs. Vickers asked rhetorically. It was her way of saying ‘stop talking’ to her students as well as embarrassing them.

“No, Mrs. Vickers,” I mumbled, looking down at my paper.

“Then stop talking,” she said, turning back to the board.

“Fuck you, Mrs. Vickers,”

“What?”

“I'm sorry,” I cringed. “I didn’t mean to –“

“Then you shouldn’t have said it!”

“I didn’t mean to say it!”

“How could you not mean to say it?”

“I can’t help it sometimes,”

“You can’t help it? You have to be able to help it, Marcus!”

“I really can’t, Mrs. Vickers. You have to understand that I can’t,”

“Marcus Hale, I have had enough of your back-talking. You’re going to the principal’s office right this second. Come on young man. Veronica, you’re in charge,” Mrs. Vickers snapped, taking me by the collar and dragging me out of my seat. She just didn’t understand what was happening. That was the bad thing about the first couple of weeks of every school year. My new teachers had to get used to my outbursts and, although most of them know right off the bat of my condition, some don’t find out until something like this happens.

Mrs. Vickers led me to the principal’s office and sat me down in front of Mr. Hanson’s desk, crossing her arms menacingly. Mr. Hanson looked up slowly from his papers asking, “Yes?” in a bored tone. “Oh, Marcus, hi. First verbal tic of the year?”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded. “I thought they were going away, but I guess not.”

“Mrs. Vickers, do you know what email is?” the principal asked, looking at my new history teacher as if he were taunting her in a way.

“Of course I do,” she scoffed.

“Have you checked yours since the school year started?”

“No, I-I don’t believe I have,”

“Well I suggest you come over here and read this email I sent to you that you have so far ignored.” He beckoned Mrs. Vickers over to his desk and clicked around a few times, showing her some email message.

Mrs. Vickers mumbled aloud half of the message as she read it. “Fourth period…disability…don’t punish…tourettes…unable to…can’t control…well hell,” she finally sighed, bowing her head in defeat. The message had to be about my condition, and I guess I never realized what extent the school went to ensure my fair treatment. The old hag turned to me and gave me a sympathetic look. “I'm so sorry, Marcus. I really didn’t know about that.”

“Most don’t,” I shrugged. I was really used to the whole going to the office on the first few days of school thing. I’d say I was brought to the office at least three times in the first week of every school year. Needless to say, I was quite used to this. “Though I don’t exactly know how. I've gone here since before I was even diagnosed with it; so you’d think people would know after ten years of this.”

“So you’ve had tourettes since you were, what? Six, seven?”

“I've been diagnosed since I was eight, but I've had the issue since before that. It’s gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still pretty bad, as you saw. I don’t usually have many verbal tics anymore, but obviously they are still there. I've tried to channel all of my tics to things like twitches, but I do slip up some times.”

“You can channel them?”

“If you try every time you feel one coming on, you can try to make them go somewhere else. I try to twitch my eyes or my nose or things like that,” I shrugged, ironically feeling a tic coming on. I scrunched my nose up and blinked hard. “Yeah, kind of like that.”

“That was a tic?” I could see Principal Hanson roll his eyes. He can actually be a pretty cool guy sometimes.

“Uh-huh,” I nodded. “But, uh, we should probably get back to class.”

“Oh, you’re right,” she gasped, looking at the clock above Mr. Hanson’s desk. “We’ve been here for near half the period. Again, Marcus, I'm really sorry about this.”

“Don’t be,” I shrugged, standing up. “It happens.”

So we went back to class and continued on with the day. For the rest of the class period, Mrs. Vickers kept giving me sympathetic looks, and by the time the bell rang, I really wanted to punch her. I don’t need people’s sympathy and I wouldn’t want it either way. I get it a lot when people find out that I actually have tourettes, but I've never like the special treatments.

After class, I headed to my locker to put away the new history book Mrs. Vickers passed out at the beginning of class. While I put the text in the top of my locker, I felt a pair of arms wrap around my waist. I knew who it was immediately and a smile crept onto my face.

“Hey Baby, how’s your first day of school going?”

“It’s alright,” I shrugged, turning to face my boyfriend Jared. “Mrs. Vickers set of a tic in History and didn’t know it was one, so she drug me to the office. But Mr. Hanson explained everything to her. The only problem is that now she’s getting all sympathetic and shit on me, which completely sucks.”

“Oh, I had her second period. I can’t stand that woman,” he grimaced.

“Yeah, me too,” I chuckled. “So what do you have next?”

“Uh,” he started, biting his lip and pulling out his schedule from his back pocket. His eyes scanned the page and he looked back to me, saying, “Lunch. What about you?”

“Same. Then English,” I nodded.

“Oh, me too,” he smiled, folding the paper back up and stuffing it in his back pocket again. I slammed my locker shut and laced my hands with Jared as we headed towards the cafeteria. This being our senior year of high school in a small town school, we really knew our way around this school like the back of our hands. We’ve been in the same routine since the middle of our sophomore year when we became really close friends.

Jared and I have known each other since we were in the seventh grade, but we only became great friends during our sophomore year. A mutual friend of ours named Zachary invited a select few of us to go with him to Disney World in Florida for holiday break. Zachary, Jared, Edmund, Marc and I stayed with Zach’s aunt and uncle in Orlando for a week and visited the parks from there. It was a lot cheaper than staying at a hotel, plus, it let us have more fun and get to know each other better. Before that trip, I’d never known a whole lot about Jared or Marc because we just never interacted much, but afterwards, all five of us were as close as brothers. Now, you may seem to think that a group of sophomore boys going to Disney is a bit fruity – and I guess it kind of was – but, well okay it was fruity. And we all knew it was, but we just didn’t care. It was what it was and we really could care less about what people saw it as.

During the trip, Jared and I especially hit it off, and we were just about inseparable; the absolute best of friends. It was a couple of months into our junior year that we got together as more than friends – October fourteenth to put an exact date on it. It came as a bit of a revelation to the both of us one night when we were studying. We were sitting on his bed with our science books and notes spread out around us, studying for a big test we had in a few days. My mind wasn’t really into it and started wandering furiously. One thought that I kept returning to was starting to almost haunt me. I laud down the notebook in my lap and leaned back on my hands, looking at him.

“Hey, Jared,” I started, biting my lip slightly.

“Yeah Marcus?”

“You’re single, right?”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded, setting his notebook down too and looking at me curiously.

“And I'm single,”

“Right…”

“We have a lot in common and we’re really close with each other,”

“These are facts,” he chuckled.

“So tell me this,” I shrugged, leaving the sentence open at the end.

“Alright,”

“Why aren’t we dating?”

“Because, well, I honestly couldn’t tell you,” he smiled.

“Exactly! I mean, we already seem like we are, minus the kissy-touchy stuff,” I shrugged again. He laughed when I said that, so I asked, “What? What’s funny?”

“I love that you said ‘kissy-touchy’,” he giggled. “That’s so cute.”

“Well,” I giggled, blushing a little bit. “I'm right. We do seem like we’re dating, subtracting all that stuff.”

Jared laughed again and then batted his eyelashes a bit. “So when you say kissy-touchy, do you mean like this?” he asked slyly, moving across the bed, inching closer to me. He leaned over me and kissed me softly, laying his hand on my lower abdomen. I smiled into our kiss and pulled away slightly.

“I was thinking more like this,” I smirked, sitting up on my knees and pushing him onto his back so I could straddle him. Luckily for me, Jared was wearing a pair of loose fitting basketball shorts, so I could easily slip my hand through one leg of the sleek fabric and grip his thigh. I captured his lips with mine and could feel the simple pleasure radiating off of him.

“I like your thinking Marcus,” he laughed dryly, lacing his arms behind my neck.

Nothing more than us making out happened that day, except for us officially becoming a couple, if you want to count that. We’ve been together since then and have been just as inseparable as we were before. Really, the only thing that changed between the two of us once we started dating was that we started getting very kissy-touchy, as I once phrased it.

We really have had the same daily routine at school since we became good friends. We’d meet each other at our lockers before the classes that we had together and would walk to those classes with each other. At the end of the day we would either walk to the buses together or to the parking lot once we started driving to school. Sometimes we would do things after school or go to one of our houses to study together or go out with a group of friends. But our lives have been fairly routine as far as school goes over the last couple of years.

The particular day, being the first day of our last year in this school, we went back to my house and took a bit of a celebratory walk in the woods in my back yard. We were having kind of an early fall that year, so the trees were unnaturally bare for that time of year. However far from the norm it was, the woods were really beautiful and very calming. After having a not-so-great first day of school (I got sent to the office a second time as well), it was wonderful to take a nice walk in the woods with the love of my life.

Jared and I were walking along a path through the trees, holding hands and talking about our days, when I had a sudden urge – almost like a tic – to pull him into me and kiss him. It really was very similar to a tic, because I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. It was like an itch I couldn’t help but scratch; just like a regular tic. I pulled my hand out of his grasp and spun to face him. I grabbed his white Fox Racing hoodie in two spots and pulled him towards me, kissing him hard. When we separated, we were both laughing.

“What was that for?” he asked, smiling.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged truthfully. “I just had a sudden urge to do it.”

“Like a tic?”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “I think we’ve just discovered the third category of tics. Love tics, such as sudden kissing.”

“Tic tock, the clock strikes love,” Jared said cutely, kissing me again.