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to hold back from saying it, but when the urge becomes overpowering, I lose the fight. Only it comes out as
fu fu fu fu fu,
as though I’m stuttering.
    My father knows right away what I’m almost saying.
    “What’s that about?” he wants to know with a disappointed expression.
    “I’m not sure. It just came out.”
    “Where did you hear that word?”
    “Nowhere . . . I guess.”
    He starts to tell me not to do it anymore but then stops short. He knows the first rule: telling me not to do something only makes me want to do it more.
    “Sorry, Dad. Sorry. Sorry, Dad.”
    “That’s okay, don’t worry about it,” he says. Shifting topics, he goes on, “Have you seen anything that looks like this?” He points to a picture of a part in the car instructions.
    “Fu fu fu fu fu,” I answer.
    “I bet it’s in here somewhere,” he says, ignoring the near curse and digging into a new pile of loose screws and plastic pieces.
    I guess I’m lucky that I almost never feel the urge to curse in front of people like some kids do, and that when I start to, I can usually control it. If you have to curse out loud, you can’t be in a regular classroom or go to the movies or restaurants because people don’t understand. Just like when I give people the bird. No matter how many times my mother or father explains that I can’t help it, they don’t believe it.
    My father’s distractions help me forget the F word, and we spend a happy time putting most of the car together.
    “How’d you get so good at this?” he says when we’re done for the day.
    “Dunno,” I answer proudly.
    But I do. I can spend hours at a time doing something I love because it becomes an obsession. Sometimes obsessions can work for you.
    In bed that night, I can feel the medicine helping my mind shut down. I think about what a mostly good day I had with my father, and then I remember the one thing that wasn’t so good.
    Fu fu fu fu fu,
I say softly into the darkness.
Fu fu fu fu fu.
    I don’t think this is a regular tic. It’s more like a thought I have to act on. Or maybe that’s the same thing. And I suddenly recall where I first got the idea of having to say bad things and having no control over it.
    Our family had recently watched a comedy that made fun of different kinds of people with terrible conditions. One was a woman who kept cursing out loud, and she explained that it was because she had Tourette’s syndrome. I remember being so surprised.
    “Does Tourette’s make people say bad words?” I whispered to my father.
    He looked really angry, but not at me.
    “No, this is a bad movie, Cory. They make fun of people who can’t help themselves, and they shouldn’t.”
    And that was the way I learned about the cursing tic. It’s called
coprolalia.
    I go to sleep wondering why grown-ups would want to make a movie that pokes fun at people who can’t help themselves. And I wonder if they still would if there was somebody in their own family like me.

When Good Turns Bad

Chapter 15
    IT FEELS STRANGE and almost wrong to see the hallways so empty and silent at this time of day in such a big school.
    I’m late for class because the extra Benadryl I needed to take last night made me oversleep. It’s the end of fourth grade, and it’s getting harder to stay in school for the whole day, but I want to try. Yesterday I was twitching and jumping around so much that my shirt was soaking wet by sixth period.
    On the way to class, I see three girls around my age whom I haven’t noticed before. They use the word
like
about ten times in five seconds.
And I, like, go with him, and, like, oh my God! That’s, like, so awesome.
    I wonder — do they have tics? Is saying
like
really a tic? If so, I know an awful lot of other kids who have it.
    As they pass by me, I bend at the waist and jerk my head to one side. The girls stop their conversation and smile as they go by, but after they’re farther down the hall, I can hear them giggling. I don’t know