Today Will Be Different Read Online Free Page B

decisions had been the right ones.
    So, with a perfectly timed cough, I grabbed that young mom’s ring of keys, dropped them in my purse, and slipped out.
    That’s right, I stole them.

Timby was lying on a cot in a corner of the office looking, to my trained eye, pretty darned pleased with himself.
    “Get up,” I said. “I’m officially sick of this BS.”
    On the downside, I’d said that. On the upside, it was so unnecessarily nasty that Lila and the other administrators pretended not to hear. Timby darkened and followed me out.
    I waited until we were standing at the car. “We’re going straight to the doctor’s. And you’d better pray there’s really something wrong with you.”
    “Can’t we just go home?”
    “So you can drink ginger ale and watch Doctor Who ? No. I refuse to reward you any more for faking stomachaches. We’re going to the doctor and straight back to school.” I leaned in close. “And for all I know, it’s time for you to get a shot.”
    “You’re mean.”
    We got in the car.
    “What’s this?” Timby asked with big eyes upon seeing the gift basket.
    “Not for you. Don’t get your paws near that thing.”
    Timby was crying now. “You’re getting mad at me for being sick.”
    We drove to the pediatrician’s in silence, me angry at Timby, me angry with myself for being angry at Timby, me angry at Timby, me angry with myself for being angry at Timby.
    His little voice: “I love you, Mom.”
    “I love you too.”
    “Timby?” said the nurse. “That’s an unusual name.”
    “I was named by an iPhone,” Timby said around the thermometer in his mouth.
    “ I named you,” I said.
    “No.” Timby glared.
    “Yes.” I glared back.
    When I was pregnant, we learned it was going to be a boy. Joe and I ecstatically volleyed names back and forth. One day I texted Timothy, which autocorrected to Timby . How could we not?
    The nurse pulled out the thermometer. “Normal. The doctor will be right in.”
    “Nice work,” I said after she left, “making me look bad.”
    “It’s true,” Timby said. “And why would an iPhone autocorrect a normal name to a name nobody’s ever heard of?”
    “It was a bug,” I said. “It was the first iPhone—oh God!” I’d just realized. “I think I insulted Alonzo.”
    “How?” Timby looked all sweet but I knew he just wanted to lure me in for ammo to use against me.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    It was the look on Alonzo’s face as I left the restaurant. Maybe he wasn’t sad to see me go. Maybe he was insulted that I’d called him “my poet.”
    Timby hopped off the table and opened the door.
    “Where are you going?” I asked.
    “To get a magazine.” The door slammed.
    My phone rang: Joyce Primm. As usual, 10:15 on the dot. I turned off the ringer and stared at the name.
    You know me from Looper Wash. And yes, I’m responsible for giving the show its retro-violent and sherbet-colored aesthetic. (I’d long been obsessed with the outsider artist Henry Darger. Lucky me, I bought one of his paintings while they were still affordable.) I’ll even concede that in the pilot script, the four lead girls were flat on the page. It was only when I dressed them in ’60s-style pinafores, gave them tangled hair, and, just for fun, put them on bored ponies that the writer, Violet Parry, understood what the show could be. She did a feverish rewrite and gave the girls nasty right-wing personalities, thus transforming them into the fabled Looper Four, who misdirected their unconscious fear of puberty into a random hatred of hippies, owners of purebred dogs, and babies named Steve. That said, Looper Wash wasn’t mine . Nobody’s ever heard of Eleanor Flood.
    I’d been semi-working, semi-broke, and living in New York. A children’s catalog I’d illustrated caught the eye of Violet, who took a gutsy gamble and made me her animation director.
    The first thing I learned about TV: It’s all about the deadlines. An episode not being ready for air? It