My Performance Feature: Tic

By Cathy Caudill

Stage 1: Her hands clench the chair. She lowers her head, her chestnut bangs obscuring her tightly-closed eyes. She looks as if she is about to be swept away by a cyclone or sucked into a vortex, desperately grasping her stronghold (that flimsy plastic chair), her eyes shielded from the imaginary swirling debris that whisks and whirls through the study hall.

Stage 2: She begins to shimmy—not like a dancer, rather she looks like she is struggling to forcibly cast a demon out of her body. Her shoulders move back and fourth, rapidly accelerating: left shoulder, right shoulder, left, right, left, right, left-right-left-right-left-right. Her head is still lowered, her body is hunched. Her hands are still clenching, her arms rigidly straight, moving mechanically like a set of pistons.

Stage 3: She begins to emerge from the mire: the shaking ceases and her eyes reluctantly reopen. One hand pries itself from the chair and seizes a blue click-top pen. She bashes the top of the pen against her open notebook in a rapid-fire of clicking: tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic-a-tic.... Then she stops and stretches, tilting her head far far back, forcing her shoulders out of the hunch by rolling them back, as if to flex the entire length of her spine. At last, she relaxes into a normal posture and returns to her homework.

Each stage lasts a little more than ten seconds; altogether, the spasms do not amount above a minute. She recedes into these tics once every few minutes, but somehow she is able to keep them well enough controlled that the other 30 students busily studying in the room fail to notice the girl with Tourette Syndrome.