Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She waited for it to blare, slapped the snooze button before Roy could complain, and got up to turn the alarm off properly. Her morning routine was a constant: brush teeth, shower (two options: wash hair or not; today was a wash hair day), put on whichever from her nicely consistent set of work outfits she had chosen the night before, go downstairs, cook breakfast.

Wait.

Because the one variable in her mornings was engaged to her, and its--his--name was Roy Anderson. Today he’d apparently decided that the lack of a snoozed and blaring alarm meant not that his loving fiancee had gotten up (as she did every morning) and started preparing for a new day, and that he should join her, but that he got to keep on sleeping. Finally she had to go up and prod him awake, which she would swear took longer every time she did it, and he grumbled and rolled out of bed into the bathroom significantly later than normal, if there even was a normal.

Normal or not, this was not a good morning to be running so far behind. Michael had planned some kind of unknown camaraderie event for this afternoon and evening--unknown as in secret, intentionally unknown, as opposed to most of Michael’s plans, which were unknown because he didn’t actually plan them. At least she assumed so, since he’d been making such a big deal of this one, rubbing his hands together and cackling in the office at odd times. Although Michael was quite capable of doing that with nothing to back it up, or just because it was Thursday. Still, she believed there was something coming, and she wanted to make sure she (and Roy) were able to get through a full day’s work before Michael Michaeled his way into messing up any chance they might have of being productive.

Not that she really wanted to be productive, of course, but she didn’t want to have to double up a day’s work on Friday either. 

And this was a weird event, or at least Michael had strongly implied it was. He’d sent out a memo a week before insisting they bring a bag packed with a swimsuit, a toothbrush, rubber-soled shoes, and a ski mask. She and Jim had had a fun week trying to guess what they might be doing. Jim’s best suggestion had been “rob a bank, and then escape through the sewers,” which she thought was clever: it explained the ski mask, the swimsuit, and the toothbrush (after all, he’d pointed out, there wasn’t a snorkle, so you’d get sewer water in your mouth). That last point always cracked her up--”and brush our teeth” indeed. Her own best effort paled in comparison--he was so funny!--but she was still partial to the suggestion that they were going to go to a retreat in the Poconos or somewhere else with skiing, hot tubs, and a dance floor (for the shoes). It would obviously be overnight, hence the toothbrush, but she was a little concerned that Michael hadn’t specified extra clothing. It wasn’t as clever as Jim’s, and sadly she was pretty sure Michael wasn’t thoughtful enough to put together something like that that they’d all actually enjoy, but she felt good that she’d covered all the items. 

Since it was a camaraderie event, which was to say a party, they were also welcome to bring plus ones. This wasn’t an issue for her anyway, because her eternal plus one was right now occupying the shower and supposed to have been driving her to work fifteen minutes ago, but it would be interesting to see who other people brought. Would Dwight and Angela show up as a couple? Though, she supposed, just like her and Roy, it wouldn’t be that easy to tell if they did.

Not that she and Roy were like Dwight and Angela! They’d been together ten years, and engaged three, and they had none of the ridiculous sneaking around going on that Dwangela (their celebrity couple name, thanks to Kelly, with whom she’d shared her suspicions but who was sure that “ew no” they were not actually a couple) had been doing. She was proud of being with Roy for ten years. 

One time Jim had brought his sister Larissa as his plus one. She’d been like a little mini-Jim, minus the slacker attitude, a slim buzzing waif of an architecture student at Marywood. Pam wondered if he’d bring her again. It would be cool to hang out with her, and hey, if they were going to rob a bank maybe an architect would have some kind of skills in helping them get into or out of the vault. Or the sewers.

Speaking of sewers, Roy must be clogging one because he was still in the bathroom even after she’d finished eating, cleaning up her plate, and finally putting his breakfast in a Tupperware for him to take to work, which she thoughtfully slipped into his bag for the camaraderie event. Finally she heard a flush and...yes, thank god, the actual sound of running water that indicated he’d chosen to wash his hands this time. He barreled out of the bathroom at a full run, uniform for the warehouse already on, scooped up the bags (with Michael’s weird requests included--though she was sure in retrospect at least one of them was a red herring) and headed for the truck, not even looking to see if she was following. She was, of course. It was time for work. Past time, really.

They got to the office a bit late--by a miracle not actually late, Pam thought, though late enough that Dwight would usually yell at her, and today just late enough that Jim had already started the morning’s prank without her. She’d forgotten about it, really, in the rush to get out of the house (or rather, the wait that Roy had forced her into instead of the rush she had wanted). But in addition to the mysterious camaraderie activity, whatever that was, Jim had planned the payoff to a longstanding prank preparation. Years ago (or maybe months, but it felt like years in the Scranton Business Park) he’d befriended Steve, the guy who filled their vending machine. It had been a convenient friendship; Steve was really into scrapbooking, so Jim had gotten him some great cardstock on the downlow, and Jim (and Pam) were really into certain candies (100 Grand) and really not into certain other (ugh, circus peanuts), so it was nice to have some input into what went into the machine. But all along Jim had promised her there was a megapayoff coming someday, and today was that day.

Today, Dwight’s stuff was going in the machine.

She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten, even for a moment. Yesterday she and Jim had found excuses to work later than Dwight (in his case, she had no idea; in hers, unfortunately, the completely legitimate excuse that Roy had been playing Michael-face-darts with the warehouse boys and forgotten about her). After Dwight had left they’d carefully scooped up everything on his desk (and somehow--she had no idea how--Jim had made sure that had magically included his wallet) and left it in a carefully marked box for Steve to find when he did his 5am restocking run that morning. And here she was running late!

Hurrying up the steps into the office, she saw Dwight standing in front of the machine, talking angrily and animatedly to Jim. She spotted an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, getting in on the prank while distracting Dwight from her tardiness. Barely pausing to drop her bag at her desk, she headed straight into the break room.

“Sorry.” She brushed past Dwight, making sure he knew she was present and accounted for at work that morning. “What do I want? What do I want..” She decided not to go too hard in the first round, after all, he might get really angry if she grabbed, say, his wallet. “Oh, it's a pencil cup!”

“Nononono, that’s my pencil cup.” Dwight was glaring at her, and she was really glad she hadn’t chosen something bigger--or something explicitly tied to him. The pencil cup was generic anyway. She’d ordered them for the office by the dozen, but apparently Dwight was attached.

Still, it was key to keep up the spirit of the prank after all the work that had gone into it. “Um, I don't think so, I just bought it.”

“Uh, I think so, and you're going to hand it over to me.” Classic Dwight. There was no way she was giving up on Jim’s masterpiece that easily.

“I love these,” she bubbled, smiling at Jim and feeling her face stretch wide as he met her eyes. She wasn’t even sure if she meant the pencil cup--though she brandished it to make sure Dwight registered that no, she was definitely not giving it to him--or the prank itself. Because she loved the pencil cup in that it was part of the prank, but she loved the prank for itself all the more. He was so pissed, and they hadn’t even gotten to the good stuff yet. She let her eyes drop from Jim’s; there was too much danger that he’d make her giggle or laugh, and that would set Dwight off without getting to the best part of the prank.

Speaking of which…he was about to try to buy his stuff back before she could get it, and he’d only just noticed he didn’t have his wallet. How had he gotten home last night, or back this morning? Oh my god, Angela must have driven him! She kept this revelation to herself, though, as Jim was busy telling Dwight that his wallet was right there in J-1. She smiled up at him. How was he keeping a straight face through all this? He was so brilliant.

And then the masterstroke. Just as Dwight realized he couldn’t buy the stuff without money, Jim handed him a giant bag of nickels--the exact same bag he’d once used to make Dwight smack himself in the face with his phone. A prank callback! See?

So brilliant.

It was only mildly wasted in that Dwight didn’t seem to realize. She grimaced lightly. Time to go clean up her workspace before Dwight remembered she’d been late. She skipped out with Jim, who had apparently also decided the fireworks were over, and booted up her computer, reveling in the sound of nickels plunking into the vending machine in the background. It was almost as good as the fwip-fwip-fwip of a victorious game of solitaire.

She and Jim didn’t actually talk about the success of the prank. They didn’t need to. They’d both been there, and more to the point their friendship bond was strong enough that they could communicate perfectly well without the mundanity of words. She twinkled her eyes across the gap between their desks, he waggled his eyebrows back, and they both knew they’d congratulated each other on a job well done.

About half an hour later, Michael showed up. Phyllis asked him the eminently sensible question of where they were going this afternoon, bringing Pam back to the reality of the unknown nature of the camaraderie event, but he just cackled weirdly and went back to his office. 

About an hour later, she and Jim conspired to convince Stanley to go in and dig out of Michael what the camaraderie event actually was. Why Stanley? Because Michael was, as she had noticed over time, slightly afraid of him, or at least of annoying him, and so he would probably actually tell him. Usually the difficulty would have been motivating Stanley to actually get up and deal with Michael, since he’d turned avoiding him into an art form, but Pam had reminded him sweetly that the toothbrush might imply an overnight, and his wife Teri would not appreciate a surprise overnight with work the next morning. 

Stanley reported back that it was going to be a “Booze Cruise” on Lake Waullenpaupack, “in January because apparently it’s cheaper.” He rolled his eyes, accepted the newly printed New York Times crossword puzzle Pam had prepared as a thank-you offering for bearding Michael in the lion’s den, and settled down to work on it.

So, now they knew. 

Fortunately, knowing already what the party was going to be meant that they weren’t too disappointed when Michael called them all into the conference room and made his stupid announcement. Dwight, being the brown noser that he was, cheered. Everyone else was silent, because the news had already traveled all around the office. Michael did confirm it was a booze cruise, so at least one more person was happy, Meredith, but otherwise they were all busy contemplating the lake in January weather. Ugh.

She watched Ryan try to get out of it, pleading business school, which usually worked, but apparently this stupid cruise was important enough to Michael (or Ryan’s presence at it was--Michael did seem oddly obsessed with Ryan) that he got shot down. She and Jim exchanged a little glance at that--or rather, Jim twitched his head slightly and she noticed, because she was sitting right behind him, but she knew what he meant--followed by another when Kelly piped up to object to the red herring of the bathing suit. Pam would have felt worse for Kelly having bought a suit for this if she hadn’t known her friend had five suits, and had bought this one “because it’s cute for Ryan” on impulse last week. 

Michael introduced “Brenda something” from corporate and Pam felt a flash of sympathy. What must it be like to come from corporate, where as far as she could tell actual work got done by actual professionals, and then have to deal with Michael Scott out of the blue? It was almost unfair. No one should have to do that. Michael said something ridiculous about how Brenda was there to learn from him, but Pam was pretty sure that she was there to rein in whatever excesses he was planning. She shared another “glance” with Jim, or at least she thought she did. They’d have to make sure Brenda didn’t get thrown totally to the...well, Michael really wasn’t a wolf, per se, but to the overly enthusiastic dogs with no idea what they were doing. She felt they had a duty, as the most normal people in the office, to help someone like Brenda who had no idea what she was getting into.

Not that Jim was normal as in ordinary or boring. She might be--she hoped she wasn’t, but she had to admit the possibility--but he was definitely well above average in most departments. Including (she almost blushed, though thankfully she didn’t since they were still sitting in the conference room and her fiance was right next to her) looks. But he was--they were--normal in the sense that they still knew Michael was crazy. They hadn’t become institutionalized yet. And so they owed Brenda some help.

Not that there was much they could do as Michael started his terrible teamwork lecture about ships. He clearly hadn’t prepared at all. Darryl tried to help, but Michael of course didn’t understand what sails were, and was apparently incapable of recognizing someone else’s play on words.

It was time to derail him before he spent the next hour regaling them with terrible ship metaphors. Fortunately, Jim was apparently on the same page, because he chose that moment to object to the reality of the movie “Titanic.” Which was fair, because seriously, who used a ship metaphor from the most famous shipwreck in history? She was right behind him metaphorically as well as literally, suggesting “Hunt for Red October” as the movie Michael might have meant. Derailment achieved, as Phyllis joined in by pointing out that the engine room people all died, and Michael said something offensive about the warehouse staff and Darryl took the opportunity to get offended (not really--he was close with Roy so Pam knew he wasn’t that touchy, he was just smart enough to manage upwards) and that was that. Out they were.

As they boarded the boat (ship? She was never sure about the difference) Michael was once again on his terribly-inappropriate-ship theme, this time singing the lyrics to Gilligan’s Island. More shipwrecking, naturally. He said something about Jim being “the Professor and Ginger” and Pam glanced back and realized that he’d been joined by Katy. Purse-Katy, Pam 6.0. She was disappointed it wasn’t Larissa--just because Larissa was so cool, of course. She waved as she and Roy turned into the cabin, but wasn’t sure they’d been seen.

Michael did the “king of the world” thing from Titanic (what was with him and bad omens today?) and she saw Jim tap his watch and note that it had taken only about five minutes. She wondered what there was to wait for in the remaining two hours fifty-five...assuming the Gilligan’s Island reference had been a real time estimate, of course.

More Michael, of course. He inserted himself into the captain’s safety speech, which was doubly awkward because while most of the people on the cruise were Dunder Mifflin employees, he’d been too cheap to buy the whole cruise out so there were people there (like Brenda, back in the conference room) getting their first, awful taste of Michael Scott. And no, she decided, that was definitively not what she said.

She and Roy found themselves sharing a booth in the cabin with Katy and Jim. Normally that would have been ideal--sitting with Jim was about 90% of how she got through her day, at least the parts where she was sitting with anyone--but Katy made a joke about sitting at the cool table in high school, Roy followed it up by saying she was “little miss artsy-fartsy in high school” and she was flashing back to how Roy had never wanted to hang out with her friends in high school, only his, and how that had meant she’d gradually shed friends until now basically all of her friends were actually his. Well, except the one sitting across from her, so she supposed she shouldn’t be too grumpy. After all, now they were sitting with her friends, and not Roy’s, and it was still the cool kids table, right?

Oh my god, of course Katy was a cheerleader. Of. Freaking. Course. At least she still had one friend at the table, right? Though maybe that was unfair to Katy, who did seem genuinely nice when guys weren’t slobbering all over her--she assumed, given that she’d literally never seen it, since her fiance was currently staring at her doing her little cheer with barely disguised lust. God, Roy...at least she had Jim, who was clearly surprised at Katy’s revelation and who was looking at her with the same embarrassed mirth she knew was radiating from her eyes. She couldn’t help herself--while Roy nattered on about high school football (eight or more years ago, Roy, she thought) she did a little headbob to mimic Katy’s cheer and grinned at Jim’s discomfiture. Serves him right for not bringing Larissa. Not that it was her business who he brought, of course.

Before the conversation could turn to...wherever it would have gone after that moment, Michael was back, and starting his presentation. She could see Brenda trailing behind him, clearly uncomfortable. Oh God, please tell her he hadn’t been hitting on her...but no, it wasn’t disgust in her eyes, just normal awkwardness. So far.

And Captain Jack’s limbo couldn’t come soon enough, even if he and Michael did seem to be fighting--and then Michael was dancing and no one really needed to see that. Well, other than Jim, who was staring over at Michael with a face full of wonder and then glanced back at her--not at Katy, not at Roy, at her--and raised an eyebrow, conveying with just that little twitch the sense of sheer ridiculousness that made life livable at work. It let her get through most days, and now it let her get through watching her boss do the worm. Valuable, that.

But this was not an evening to be survived, apparently, without alcohol. It was a booze cruise, after all, and Captain Jack and his crew were very conscientious about that. She missed the first offer of alcohol because she was absolutely certain she’d seen Angela go out to Dwight who was steering the ship, but everyone else was so distracted no one could confirm it. By the time she got a beer (two, one for her, one intended for Roy) her fiance was doing shots down a snorkel while the cheerleader and Darryl yelled...well, “Snorkel shots.” Not the most original cheer, but then neither was the “A-W-E-S-O-M-E” one from before. At least Katy could spell. And identify snorkels, she supposed.

Roy did notice her after the shot, but only to offer up the snorkel to her, which...no. She was still holding both beers, which meant one was going to waste (no way she could doublefist and stay upright) so she tried to get Roy away from the shots to a quieter place where they could maybe hang out, talk, drink the beers--like a couple. Also, she figured, she knew exactly how much shots (as opposed to beer) went straight to Roy’s head, and that was not a good idea in the confined space of a boat. Ship. Whatever. 

But of course he shrugged her off to go watch Darryl (“Darryl, Darryl,” again with the originality) do his shot with the cheerleader. So she put down the beers and grabbed her coat--Roy might not want to go somewhere quieter, but she wasn’t going to just watch people drink shots all evening, and she knew “just watching Darryl do his” was going to turn into more for Roy, and she didn’t want to be the nag who kept him from his fun. Even if, she thought, he should know himself well enough by not to be his own damn nag.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Jim, who had apparently had the same idea as her and was also shrugging into his coat and headed out the door with her. “It's getting kind of rowdy down there” she said, trying to avoid letting her frustration with Roy color her enjoyment of the evening.

“Yeah,” he replied, chanting in imitation. “Darryl! Darryl! Darryl!” It was nice to see that he could laugh at his girlfriend’s foibles (was that what they were? She’d never actually asked him to label his...whatever with Katy and he’d never volunteered. She really didn’t want to know, actually, if she was honest with herself, but she was avoiding being honest with herself right now). The thought made her realize that she couldn’t laugh at Roy’s foibles right now. If she was honest with herself, again. 

“Sometimes, I just don’t get Roy.” Did she actually say that out loud?

“Well…” She could tell Jim was uncomfortable. But he didn’t finish the thought, and now she was the one uncomfortable with the silence around what she’d said. “I mean, I don’t know…” She tried to get them back on track.What had they been talking about? Oh, the Darryl chant. “So... what's it like dating a cheerleader?” And there she was, asking him to put labels on the thing she had so emphatically been avoiding labeling. 

It worked for a moment, though. He laughed, she giggled. He started to say something, but all that came out was “oh, um…”
And then he looked at her, a smile on his face, and she could feel another stretching across her lips. But neither of them spoke. And as they didn’t speak and didn’t speak it became harder to break the silence. Because there wasn’t any other topic to go back to. She wasn’t going to talk to him about Roy, and apparently he wasn’t going to talk to her about Katy. And why not?

It occurred to her suddenly (or perhaps not so suddenly) that she knew why not.

She knew why they never really talked about Roy, why even though he’d been with Katy (off and on? Consistently? She hadn’t been at his barbecue after all) for months, she had no idea what they called their whatever it was. She looked into Jim’s eyes for what felt like an eternity and she discovered something about herself. Well, two things about herself, but one that she was capable of and willing to accept, even if it hurt: she was a coward. She wasn’t going to break the silence with anything meaningful, anything that answered the light shining in his eyes and the corresponding brightness she knew it triggered in hers. She was going to break this silence by walking away, by wimping out, by saying

“I’m cold.”

And with a shrug that even she knew looked pathetic, she went back into the cabin. It was time for two beers, and to hell with whether Roy was doing shots. They had a couple of hours of cruise left (oh God). She’d sober up, or he would (she would) and they’d be fine. They’d be fine.

Most of two drinks later, Katy wasn’t any more fun to be around, but the alcohol was making it take longer for Pam to process her words and that helped. “I’d like to be engaged. How did you pull that off?” Pam scoffed in response. “How did you pull that off?” Three years ago she’d have said “by finding the right man.” Now? She’d ‘pulled it off’ by not getting married for three years. It was like the old saying about gambling: how do you make a small fortune in Vegas? Start with a large fortune. How was she engaged? Because they still weren’t married. “Uh, I've been engaged for three years, and there's no end in sight. So... you don't wanna ask my advice.” Especially you, Katy, she thought. Especially Jim’s...whatever you are. Do not ask me how you get Jim Halpert to propose. 

Apparently that was enough answer, though, because Katy turned the subject to Legally Blonde, which they both apparently loved--they’d found that out at the office the day Katy had been there during the fire, which Pam was desperately not thinking about because of a certain game of Who Would You Do--and Katy was doing a spot-on Elle Woods. Maybe, like Elle, there was more than her than met the eye. “Yeah, like it’s hard?” Classic comedy.

God, where was Roy? At least he wasn’t sitting there drooling over Katy anymore. Maybe that was why Katy seemed more...tolerable now. When it was just them, when there weren’t the boys, she was pretty all right. Or maybe it was the two beers talking. Well, one and a half. She wasn’t finished with this one yet.

But here the boys came, or at least here one boy came. One man, rather, because Jim was looming over her and at first she assumed he was there to excavate Katy out of the booth where she was sitting next to her, maybe take her dancing or something, but then his eyes weren’t on Katy they were on her, and he was starting to say something...and then there was Roy, loud over the shipboard sound system and she couldn’t listen to them both so she listened to Roy.

Later, she wouldn’t be able to remember exactly what he said. It was something about what was important to him, and “enough is enough” and “how ‘bout June 10” and Katy was hugging her and she was still giggling and the whole ship/boat/thing was clapping all was right with the world. She was starting to cry as she walked across the empty dance floor and gave Roy a big kiss on the lips. He tasted of snorkel shots, but who cared? He’d set a date. There was finally, what was it, an “end in sight.” Apparently it had something to do with being on the lake, but whatever caused it she was glad he’d figured out that he ought to make the proposal real, ought to pick a date. Finally she felt really engaged.

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that Captain Jack (and maybe Michael too?) had apparently talked Roy into it somehow, but it didn’t matter. She was so happy. Again, maybe it was the alcohol speaking, but it all seemed so perfect, and she hadn’t drunk that much, had she? At least, not enough to let Captain Jack marry them right then and there. That wasn’t the “end in sight” she wanted. Sure, she was glad Roy had set a date, but she wanted to do this right, not drunk, well tipsy, on a boat without her family and friends.

Speaking of friends, Jim was making a toast, although it didn’t seem like his heart was really into it. Something about a “whirlwind courtship”--hah--and how she was his best friend and awesome (but not, she found herself thinking, A-W-E-S-O-M-E) and it was making her cry again. But then Dwight grabbed the mic and the moment was broken, and for some reason she felt oddly relieved.

The rest of the night was a blur. She slow-danced with Roy, and she didn’t even mind (too much) that Michael did something crazy and almost caused a panic. She was sorry for Brenda, obviously, but even that couldn’t put a damper on her joy.

The one thing that did stick with her a little after she got home was the scene when they finally disembarked (by which time, for better or for worse, she was totally sober--the two beers had worn off and for some reason she hadn’t had any more after their, or rather Roy’s, announcement. The same could not be said of him). While walking to the truck (having cajoled the keys from Roy) she noticed Katy walking deliberately away from Jim and getting into her own car. She wasn’t sure why it struck her that they weren’t driving together; after all, she hadn’t known Katy was there before getting on the boat, so she’d clearly come separately from Jim as he had come directly from Dunder Mifflin. But there was something about it...and then, halfway home in the truck, it clicked. They hadn’t said goodbye to each other. She wondered what was up with that. Maybe Katy was following him home, so they didn’t need to say goodbye, but then why didn’t they even make eye contact? It was strange. 

She tried to put it out of her mind as she rolled Roy into bed. She wasn’t sure whether she should be glad or unhappy that he was so out of his mind on snorkel shots and whatever else that there was definitely going to be no celebratory sex. Well, she knew she ought to be annoyed with him, but with tomorrow being a workday anyway she was glad to get into bed and have a chance to sleep. She made him take painkillers and drink a glass of water before letting him snore away, in the hopes that tomorrow wouldn’t be a big hangover day for him, although Roy always bounced back better than he had any right to. She herself was bone-tired for some reason. Maybe all the excitement. Whatever it was, she slid in next to him and, despite his active snoring, fell quickly into a deep and dreamless sleep. She didn’t even remember which of her work outfits she’d chosen to put out for the next morning.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She waited for it to blare, slapped the snooze button before Roy could complain, and got up to turn the alarm off properly. Her morning routine was a constant, and almost automatic.

Today, however, was not a constant day. Today, she was Roy’s fiancée! Well, of course, she’d been that yesterday, and the day before, and for three long years. She thought about the way she’d complained about that yesterday to Katy and blushed. It wasn’t like the first time didn’t count. It was just that the last three years she’d gotten worn down from the initial excitement, and it had become routine. Now, she had a date. They were getting married on June 10. Sure, she hadn’t actually had any input into the date, but she’d gladly forgo a prolonged negotiation about dates for an actual wedding. June was far enough away, right? She thought back to Jim’s abortive toast—“a whirlwind courtship” indeed—and smiled. June was perfect. It was enough time to plan the actual wedding without pretending they needed a lot more time to get used to the idea of getting married. After all, they’d been engaged for three years. Five months was just right.

She swung her legs out and started her morning routine humming softly to herself. Very softly, because she was well aware that Roy had had a few too many drinks last night, and he positively hated noise in the morning when he was hungover.

Actually, it was kind of odd that he hadn’t woken up screaming with the alarm. Well, thank heaven for small mercies.

She puttered about after the shower (today was a not-wash-hair day, since she’d washed it yesterday—though there must have been something in the air on Lake Wallenpaupack that was bad for hair, because it didn’t feel like it usually did on a not-wash day) and then stopped short when she looked at the clothes she’d set out on the dresser last night.

Soft gray sweater. Light purple striped button-down shirt. Black slacks.

All in all, not an unusual ensemble for her, especially in the winter, when she was definitely going with pants and not a skirt given the likelihood (in Scranton, call that a certainty) of cold weather. She’d been glad to have pants on last night on the booze cruise, for instance. But that was exactly the problem. Sure, she had more than one pair of black slacks, since they were a basic staple (she could hear Kelly’s voice in the back of her head: “Ohmigod, Pam, you can’t wear the same black pants to everything. You need a wardrobe upgrade, girl!”). And she even had more than one gray sweater, though this one was definitely the softest of her three, the one she’d had the longest and refused to give up even as it got a little threadbare because it just felt like being hugged by her little sister when she wore it. But she definitely had only one purple striped button-down. And she would have sworn she wore it yesterday. Along, in fact, with that exact gray sweater and one of her interchangeable pairs of black pants.

She glanced at the clock. She did not have time for this. Maybe she was misremembering, maybe she’d forgotten another purple shirt (unlikely), maybe in her slightly tipsy, super-excited mood last night she’d somehow forgotten to put out new clothes and put the old ones in the hamper. But the shirt wasn’t wrinkled. The sweater looked fresh. The pants were still creased. So they didn’t look like yesterday’s clothing would have, especially after a night like last night. On the other hand, Kelly would definitely, 100%, both notice and have a conniption fit if she saw Pam in the same clothes on two days in a row. On the other hand...there was no other hand, since she only had two, but she really didn’t have the time. Not if they were going to get into work anything like on time, and...oh god, she could not be late to work today of all days. Not because she was so excited about work, but because everyone knew that yesterday Roy had set a date. And if they were late, everyone would assume it was because they were, ahem, celebrating. Not because she’d had to frantically find new clothes and Roy still hadn’t woken up. She blushed all over. She was not going to walk into work and have Angela and Dwight look at her that way. No. She’d deal with Kelly, but she was not going to make herself any later than she had to be because of Roy.

She dressed hurriedly and went about the rest of her morning routine, still smiling but not humming anymore. She heard Roy get up and shower, and wondered idly why there were two bags sitting by the door, but she didn’t really have time to ponder it because there he came, full speed ahead out of the shower just like yesterday, grabbed his breakfast from her, and scarfed it down. Then he scooped up the bags—apparently one was for her, though she didn’t remember either of them packing it last night—and slid into the front seat of the truck. They were running a little later than yesterday because he’d eaten his breakfast, but not too horribly so, she thought. They made it into the office park, he tossed her a “Love ya, Pammy” over his shoulder, and then he disappeared into the warehouse.

She trudged up the stairs—the elevator was at the top, she saw, so it would take longer to wait for it to make a roundtrip than just to climb—and wondered where the excitement of last night had gone. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk about plans for June 10 or anything. God, she hadn’t even called her mother to tell her. But she didn’t have time for that now, of course. She had to get into the office before people started winking and nudging her about something that hadn’t even happened.

She pushed open the door to the office and breathed out a sigh of relief. Dwight wasn’t at his desk, just as he hadn’t been yesterday, and so once again she’d (perhaps) made it through a late entrance without his derision. She slipped the bag—she still wasn’t sure what was in it, but Roy had thrust it into her hands and she’d taken it instinctively—behind her desk and frowned. Jim wasn’t at his desk either. In fact, no one was at their desks. Where was everyone?

She looked around and noticed that there was a commotion of some kind going on in the break room. The door opened a crack as Phyllis slipped out towards the bathroom and she heard shouting. Approaching the door she saw Jim holding a bag of some kind and Dwight yelling at him as the rest of their coworkers looked on.

What was going on? Had Jim pulled the same prank twice in a row? She glanced over at Dwight’s desk and noticed what she had failed to before: it wasn’t just Dwight who wasn’t at the desk, none of his things were there. She turned further and looked at her own desk, fearing what she would see. Just as she thought: the pencil cup she’d bought yesterday and ostentatiously placed on the top of her desk wasn’t there.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she thought. “I knew Dwight would grab it back as soon as my back was turned.” But of course, it wasn’t on Dwight’s desk either.

She slipped into the break room to the sound of shouting.

“I don’t need your charity, Jim,” Dwight sneered. “I’m a sheriff’s deputy. I can have officers here like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They’ll be happy to arrest you for theft, burglary, and petty larceny.”

Jim cocked an eyebrow. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dwight,” he said, raising his arms as if to calm a wild animal. “No one here thinks your possessions are petty.” Pam felt herself grin. Of course this was how Jim would deal with the situation. Jim continued on as she thought. “But aren’t you a volunteer deputy? I’m not sure that means you can call in an emergency.”

“I’ll have you know I have a genuine Lackawanna County sheriff’s radio.” Dwight preened. “I bought it from the sheriff’s department surplus sale last month.” Pam—and, more surprisingly, Jim—refrained from pointing out that if he had to buy it from a sale they probably didn’t want him using it to interfere with official business. Pam did, however, notice that Dwight was pushing himself up against Jim’s chest, a sure sign that his anger was going to boil over. She slipped behind him into the space he’d vacated and stood in front of the machine. She didn’t know why Jim had decided to do the same prank twice, but bedamned if she wasn’t going to play along like last time.

“I don’t know, Dwight.” Both Dwight and Jim turned at her voice. “Are you sure you have one?” Dwight drew in a shaky breath, preparing to turn his rage on her as she fed a dollar into the slot and pressed the K and 7 buttons. Thunk. “Because I think I do.” She picked up the radio from the bottom slot of the vending machine. “But you can borrow it if you like, if you want to come out to my desk.” She turned and made her way serenely out of the break room while Dwight sputtered behind her. As she got to her desk and settled the radio next to her mousepad, she could see Dwight grab the bag of nickels from Jim and start angrily pumping them into the machine to recover his remaining items while the rest of the office dispersed to their various desks. “Mischief managed,” she thought.

After a little while Jim strolled up to her desk and grabbed a jellybean, as was his wont. She glanced up and shook her head playfully at him. “Really, Jim? Double-dipping?”

He looked up surprised. “I’ve only had one!”

She shook her head again. “Not the candy, the prank. Didn’t you get your fill of that yesterday?” She frowned. “Actually, I thought Steve only came once a week. How did you get him to make a special trip?”

He looked at her strangely and spun the jellybean in his long, agile fingers. “What are you talking about?”

She made a face. “Come on, Jim. We did this yesterday. I bought Dwight’s pencil cup. Why again today? It’s not like you to be so unoriginal.”

He popped the jellybean into his mouth and chewed it deliberately, then shocked her by reaching across the desk to feel her forehead. She felt a bolt of electricity shoot down into her spine from her forehead. Where was this coming from? She pulled away from his hand. “What are you doing?”

He shook his head absently. “No fever.” He moved his hand over towards her mousepad, leaning across her desk. She barely noticed how he was invading her personal space, because she was distracted by looking at him. She liked the way his shoulders moved in the fabric of his shirt, which pulled taught across his back as he leaned. He tapped the radio. “You bought a radio, not a pencil cup.” He leaned back and she felt oddly bereft of his presence—which was strange, because he never leaned that far across her desk, so she shouldn’t have felt his absence. “And I didn’t do this yesterday. Just today.” He grabbed another jellybean and fiddled with it, thinking. She stared up at him. What was going on? He tapped the bean on the desk. “You feeling OK?”

“I could ask you the same question.” She put her face between her hands and leaned forward to him while whispering. “Are you running a double prank? Trying to convince Dwight he’s caught in some kind of loop? That today is just a rerun of yesterday?”

He ate the jellybean and she found herself distracted by the movement of his throat as he swallowed. “No, but thanks for the idea, Beesly.” He grinned down at her. “I just did this the once. Admit it, you were just so stoked for this prank that you dreamed about it last night.” He winked. “It’s OK, I dream about pranking Dwight too.”

“I...” She stopped. Had she just dreamed about the prank last night? Had it all been a dream? That would explain why she was wearing the clothes she’d planned to wear yesterday—and why Kelly hadn’t stopped by to ask her why she was an outfit repeater. It would also explain the bags by the door. But...it had felt so real. Oh god, was there no date? Had she dreamt that as well? She pushed back from the desk. “I have to go. Sorry.” She fled for the ladies’ room, leaving a confused-looking Jim behind her.

In the bathroom, she sat in a stall, wondering what had happened to her. Had she really hallucinated last night? Was it all wishful thinking? Did Roy not actually want to marry her at all? She took calming breaths and reminded herself that if she stayed in here too long Kelly would come in and look for her. Or worse, Angela, probably because Dwight would be sending her mental messages that Pam had overstayed her allotted bathroom break time. Or oh God Dwight himself. Anything but that.

So, she had to pull herself together, quickly, and tell if she was hallucinating or if everyone else was. She trusted Jim. He might still be putting her up to some kind of galactic megaprank on Dwight, but barring that she didn’t think he’d actually prank her herself, and that meant there was something off between her and the rest of the world. If she and Jim didn’t see eye to eye, something was wrong. So, was it wrong with her, or them?

She outlined in her head the major things that she remembered happening yesterday, besides the prank (which, to be fair, she’d known about in advance), and that. Michael’s stupid announcement of the booze cruise with Brenda from corporate, whom she’d never met before and so had no reason to make up. The actual cruise itself, with the weirdness that was Captain Jack. And Katy being on the booze cruise with them, along with the incredible awkwardness of discovering she had been a cheerleader that Roy had noticed at his football games.

If those things happened like she remembered them happening, it wasn’t her. It was the world. And if they didn’t, it was her.

Based on her recollection she had about fifteen, maybe ten more minutes before Michael’s arrival and then a little more before the big reveal. She’d just have to spend that time verifying whatever else she could before then, because there was no way she was waiting until tonight to know if she was crazy or engaged. Well, date-set-engaged. She was already engaged.

She slipped out of the bathroom and walked straight to her desk, ignoring the concerned look on Jim’s face as he turned to look at her. She pulled up the Lake Wallenpaupack cruise line website, and there was Captain Jack’s smug face staring at her on a little “Our People!” page that looked like it dated from 1997. There were even flashing lights, and she’d had to turn the volume on her computer way down when it started to autoplay some sort of stupid music (she’d had it up, of course, to hear the fwp-fwp-fwp of a victorious game of solitaire). Check one for “not crazy.”

She sat calmly through Michael’s pseudo-mysterious entrance and the hour wait after that, and was unsurprised but cooperative when Jim (once again?) suggested sending Stanley in for information. She took the opportunity to ask Jim if he was planning to bring Katy to…whatever this event was. He drew back in surprise and popped a jellybean into his mouth.

“I mean…” he said as he chewed (how was it that talking while chewing didn’t look completely disgusting in him? It was awful when Roy did it, but she didn’t mind so much with Jim. Though maybe it was just because a jellybean was so small—Roy did it even when she’d made prime rib, and he never took small bites). “I guess I might have mentioned it to her?” She wasn’t sure if that was really a question. He rubbed the back of his neck and popped another jellybean, and she decided it was time for more direct action.

“Hey, Jim, I was wondering…”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing…” she chewed her bottom lip. “It’s just…” she decided it was time to press the issue a little. “Roy was mentioning that he thought he recognized her from somewhere.” OK, this was only a lie if she’d hallucinated last night, because he had mentioned it then, even if he hadn’t before. “Like, was she a cheerleader or something in high school? Because he was on the football team, you know, and he thought maybe he recognized her from that.”

“Nah.” The instinctive reaction he’d had last night too. Interesting. She was becoming more certain by the moment that she hadn’t made it up, but at the same time there was no way he could have said no if she wasn’t—because he’d been there too. They’d even…well, not joked about it, because trying to joke about it had led to that incredibly awkward 27 seconds of silence (and how did she know it was 27 seconds?). But they’d mentioned it to each other after it happened. He’d noticed. So how could he not know about it now if, as she was beginning to suspect, it had really happened? Something made her push harder.

“You sure? Because he seemed awfully certain, and you know Roy, he doesn’t remember much, but a pretty face…” She grimaced internally. Had she really just said that?

Jim was blinking at her with a face that suggested he was thinking the same thing she was, and she ducked her head a little to avoid blushing. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess it’s possible.” He turned away, and then turned back before taking a step. “But just so you know, I’m not so sure Roy’s that good at noticing a really pretty face.”

What had he meant by that? Of course Roy could notice a pretty face. He’d practically fawned and drooled over Katy when she’d been here as the purse girl, though he hadn’t recognized her then. Maybe that’s what Jim meant. Maybe Katy had recognized him and told Jim and they’d laughed at how Roy didn’t notice and now Jim was telling her…but that made no sense, because then he’d know she was a cheerleader. Unless somehow she had just had a really accurate prophetic hallucination of a dream last night.

This was all so confusing.

She was distracted from wondering about Katy and Roy and Jim by Stanley’s gruff return with the news that it was going to be a booze cruise. Or more accurately she was distracted by the sudden surge of panic. There was no way this was just an overactive subconscious; the booze cruise (“in January?” as Stanley so aptly put it—both times) was too strange. But everyone else seemed surprised. No one else seemed to remember doing this. Which left her with three options: an odd case of divine intervention and prophecy centered on her, Pamela Morgan Beesly, for no discernible reason; she was having an extremely waking dream that simply happened to go over all of yesterday while she was actually sleeping next to Roy after the booze cruise (which seemed unlikely as she didn’t usually dream, at least not so lucidly), or an equally unlikely case of the groundhogs. Or, she supposed, secret option four, which was the most elaborate prank Jim had ever devised. She didn’t want to believe it—why would Jim prank her? Why would her best friend prank her on the day she was supposed to be celebrating having set a date for their wedding? Hers and Roys, that is—but she was rapidly running out of logical explanations.

She got through the rest of the day in a daze. Brenda was introduced to them—again—Michael went off the deep end (heh. Titanic)—again. She didn’t remember what she said, what she typed, what she did. Eventually her mind focused down on one point. Whatever else was going on, she needed to know: had Roy actually set a date? Because, she finally admitted to herself, that was the most unbelievable, the most wish-fulfilling, the most fantastic part of the entire day before that no one else seemed to know about. If that was true, she could forgive herself, if this was a hallucination; could forgive Jim, if this was a prank. If it wasn’t…she didn’t know what to do.

She was terrified of bringing it up, and even more so when she realized she’d have to ask Roy. She couldn’t ask Jim—if this was a prank, he wouldn’t let on. She wasn’t going to ask any of the other office folks—if it wasn’t a prank, she wasn’t going to give them either the satisfaction of crowing over her that she’d doubted it if it was true or pitying her for her desperate imagination if it was false. No, she’d have to ask Roy. And since she wasn’t going to draw attention to it by interrupting his workday, that meant she had the fifteen minute drive to the lake to work up the nerve to say anything to him.

In the end, it took her fourteen minutes.

“Uh, Roy?”

“Yeah, Pammy?”

She froze. How was she supposed to phrase it? She couldn’t ask if they were engaged, they’d been engaged for three years. She could ask if he had set a date…but the one thing that had bugged her about last night (if it was last night, which she was increasingly beginning to doubt) was that he hadn’t asked her privately first; that he had set a date, but they had not. She could ask if they’d set a date, of course, but then why was she asking him if she was involved? In the end she blurted out the best thing she could think of.

“Are we getting married on June 10?”

The truck swerved towards the median and he got it under control, swearing under his breath. “Uh, why do you ask?”

She knew the answer in her heart, because she could hear it in his voice, but she needed to hear the words. “Just answer me: are we getting married this June 10?”

He sputtered. There was no other word for it; actual spittle was coming out of his mouth, with the words only a secondary effect. “Uh…I guess…would that really give you enough time to plan a wedding, Pammy?”

“So we’re not getting married on June 10.”

“No.” His shoulders relaxed a bit. “What gave you that idea anyway?”

“Oh…just this random thought I had. I guess it was nothing.”

She could feel him relax further next to her, and he wrapped an arm around her. “I promise we’ll get married soon. I love you. You know that, right?” He kissed the top of her head.

“Yeah. I know, Roy.” Just not enough to actually set a date. She knew it had been too good to be true.

But for all she was now certain that it had been some kind of crazy hallucination, she couldn’t help but notice how eerily it was tracking her lived reality. By the time she and Roy were sitting across from Jim and Katy in a booth again, she was beginning to feel like she would vomit. And when Roy leaned over and asked Katy about cheerleading, and Jim flashed her an alarmed look when it turned out that, yes, Katy had been a cheerleader, she was D-O-N-E done.

“I’m gonna go get something to drink.”

Only this time it wasn’t just going to be beer. She fitted the snorkel to her mouth, Darryl poured in the liquor, and…she didn’t remember anything else.  

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Well, that clinched it. If she wasn’t hung over this morning, last night never happened. But if last night never happened and the other last night never happened…was this the same day again?

And assuming so, what was she supposed to do about it?

She hit the alarm and thought things through a little more in the shower. The trick to this sort of thing, she knew from her obsessive watching of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day (her all-time favorite movie; too bad Jim hadn’t let her finish listing her desert island movies that day Ryan started the fire, because she thought they could have had a fun discussion about it) was to figure out what had gone wrong in the initial cycle—or more accurately, what needed to go right in the final cycle. Unfortunately, she had no idea. But she did have something she wanted to find out, and she figured she might as well start the cycle by working on that.

She got out of the shower and confirmed her expectations. There they were sitting on the dresser: gray sweater, purple shirt, black pants. This was definitely the same day.

She tried her best to remember the sequence of events from what was, to her, two days ago but, of course, apparently hadn’t happened at all in everyone else’s reality. She’d made breakfast—so she did. She’d waited for Roy (no surprise)—so she did. This time she made the office at the same time she had that first go-round, and she bought the pencil cup again. She feigned the same surprise she remembered feeling about the booze cruise, played along with Jim’s jokes about water disaster movies, and generally tried her best to make the day go the same way it had the first time around.

Up until the booze cruise itself, that is. And even then, she let things start the same, the same bad jokes from Michael, the same discovery that Katy was a cheerleader, the same giggle in Jim’s direction when she found it out officially. Because the thought that was itching in her mind was that somewhere on this cruise lay the secret to why Roy had set a date. She knew from the last try at this that Roy hadn’t had any such plan in mind going onto the boat, or at least not a specific date (and from his body language she’d have bet serious money if she were a betting woman that the very idea had not occurred to him). So she was determined to find out what had happened, what had changed, to make him suddenly, drunkenly spew out a date so publicly. That meant keeping as much the same as possible, while finding a way to keep an eye on him as the night progressed in a much more active way than she had two nights ago.

She was really going to have to develop a new vocabulary for this. What did you call it when time passed for you but not for anyone else? Two nights ago was Tuesday; two cycles? Times? Iterations? She’d work on it. Just as she’d work on making sure she knew what it was that had made Roy change his mind.

At the same time, she found herself sitting back as an observer more than she usually did. Oh, she was definitely a wallflower most of the time, but she was so consumed by anxiety and self-consciousness in her everyday life that even though she was sitting by the wall sprouting a pistil and a stamen, she didn’t really notice any more than anyone else did. In fact, when Jim would lean over and whisper things to her she often realized that she was noticing less than him. But now that she didn’t have to worry how she came across, because of the combined power of knowing that things would probably reset overnight anyway and of having experienced the night twice before anyway, she could turn her attention outwards to the rest of the room.

Was Michael always that awkward? She knew he was annoying, and often thoughtless, and cringeworthy, but she hadn’t fully recognized before the symptoms of sheer awkwardness blaring forth from him. She began to think about how his awful personality might be a mask for a deep, dark loneliness and fear of being left out. Maybe one of these times through she’d have a talk with him. Not now though. Now she needed to focus. On Roy.

Of course, right now Roy was going on and on about cheerleading and football with Katy while Jim looked on with a dull smile on his face. How did she know it was a dull smile? Because it didn’t quite reach his eyes, and his teeth weren’t showing. When Jim got really interested or excited or happy, his eyes became the size of a Magic 8 Ball and his grin could swallow galaxies. Or at least that’s how it felt like to her. Right now everything about his face was normal-size, with a smile pasted on. He must be dying inside, she realized. Maybe it was really important to him that Katy wasn’t a cheerleader. Maybe when I teased him that time two…tries ago, he was hurting inside and I just made it worse. Maybe that’s why there were those 27 seconds of silence.

Of course, he wasn’t dying inside any more than she had been that first time, when Roy had made that gratuitous jab about her art and her turtlenecks. She looked damn good in a turtleneck, she thought. And besides, in Scranton in the winter it was cold.

Oh god, they were in Scranton. She remembered that Bill Murray had fixed everyone’s problems in the whole town in Groundhog Day, but that was in freaking Punxsutawney, population diddley-squat, not in Scranton. She took a deep breath. Focus. Maybe look at the office, not at the city. And anyway, right now, look at Roy.

Look at Roy doing a snorkel shot. This was when she’d left with Jim the first time, she realized. Was that important to whatever choice Roy had made? Would not leaving mean he didn’t make that decision? But how was she to keep track of how he made the decision if she left?

She decided to go. After all, she’d messed with the shots last time, by taking one herself, and that hadn’t led to a date. Or maybe it had—she couldn’t actually remember. But she was willing to bet it hadn’t, since even Roy was probably coherent enough not to re-propose to someone passed out. Assuming he’d even noticed…but that was unfair. Roy wasn’t the most attentive human being on the planet, or even in the office, or even in this particular booth, but he was actually really good at dealing with her when she was drunk. He could be surprisingly respectful and considerate when she wasn’t sober, probably because he had so much experience dealing with drunk people and being drunk himself. That wasn’t fair either, but it was accurate, and she wasn’t going to sit here all day deciding if she was being fair to everyone. She’d have to be eventually, if she was going by the Bill Murray method, but there was time for that later. She shoved up from the booth and headed outside. As before, Jim followed her.

“Hey, Jim.” She knew this wasn’t what she’d said the last time they’d been out here, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t want to run it all back, even if it ended with a date. She wanted to do better. And one way she could do better was giving her friend the support she thought he needed.

“Hi.” He looked down at her. His eyes were so piercing, she remembered folding in front of them the last time. She wasn’t going to do that now, even though she knew she had a precious opportunity now to sneak back in and watch what Roy was doing.

“You ever feel like an observer in your own life?” Where had that come from? This wasn’t soul-baring time, Pam, this was helping-Jim-and-then-going-back-in time.

He exhaled. “Yeah. Pam?”

“Yes?”

He looked down at her again and shook his head. “Nevermind.”

She reached a hand out and touched his arm. “It’s going to be OK, Jim.”

“Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. Scratch that, he was looking at her, but not at her eyes…and not at her breasts either, as she usually caught Roy and his friends doing. He was looking at her hand on his arm. She let it fall, tracing a path down his forearm as he watched.

“It is.” She forced a smile. “You want to go spy on people?”

He grinned, suddenly. There was the smile she was used to, the one that made him seem twice as large and ten times as alive as usual. “Absolutely.”

She thought quickly. If Jim was bothered by Katy being a cheerleader, he probably shouldn’t be in the cabin with the snorkel shots. Actually, that was probably why he was out here in the first place. That was perfect, because she needed to sneak back into the cabin to keep an eye on Roy. Where could she send him…

“OK. This is serious spy business, Jim, so we’re going to need to split up and compare notes later.” She could totally use him to jumpstart Operation Help Michael, as she’d just dubbed her plan to eventually improve things for their boss. “You go check out Michael, Dwight, and Captain Jack, I’ll keep an eye on the others.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” He saluted her. She shook her head. “There’s already two captains on board, Jim, keep up. We don’t need a third.” He grinned back magnetically and she had to make a physical effort to turn back towards the door to the main cabin. “Report back here in a couple hours, OK?”

“Aye, aye, Beesly.” She could feel the laughter in his voice as they went their separate ways.

She snuck back into the cabin feeling more hopeful. It was funny how a little laughter with Jim could go a long way to making her feel better. She would figure this out. It couldn’t be too hard, right?

One hypothesis that she was not really enjoying but had to entertain was that it was just alcohol that made Roy set a date. After all, he was going pretty hard on the snorkel shots (“Roy! Roy! Roy!” had replaced “Darryl! Darryl! Darryl!” again). For a moment this made her feel warm inside, because after all alcohol removed inhibitions—so maybe that meant that setting a date was what Roy had always really wanted to do deep down. But then she remembered that he had evidently had absolutely no interest in doing so before they got on the boat—and that he’d been riproaringly drunk more times than she cared to count in the past three years and never set a date. So that hypothesis was out.

Instead of warming herself with that ridiculous idea, then, she was going to have to do some subtle sleuthing. Or maybe not so subtle; one advantage to having a drunk fiancé (not that it felt like that much of an advantage) was that he probably wouldn’t really notice her paying close attention to him, and so he wouldn’t change his behavior from the first cycle. She sat down next to Katy, as she’d done then, and kept up a desultory conversation (interrupted, of course, by snorkel shots: “Katy! Katy! Katy! Woooo!”). She was in the middle of the same awkward conversational interlude that she knew was going to lead towards “how did you get engaged” when  she saw movement. Roy was headed in aft? Afore? Whatever, towards the front of the boat. Where Jim was probably still on watch. But she wanted to see for herself; Jim might not tell her exactly what she needed to know (she didn’t know what she needed to know, which would make it hard for him to tell it to her anyway) so she needed her own eyes on the situation. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, simultaneously cutting off that awful conversation with Katy (don’t think about whether she’s going to be engaged to Jim, don’t think about it at all) and keeping her attention on Roy.

He was talking to Captain Jack. Or more accurately, he was listening to Captain Jack, with a surprisingly rapturous look on his face. She didn’t know Roy could listen that well. She pushed aside her surprising frustration at the thought and listened to what the captain was saying. Something about his “first wife” and how, when he’d survived a near death experience, he’d married her.

It should have been a sweet story. No, it was a sweet story. But she couldn’t help but focus in on that “first” of “first wife.” It wasn’t a forever marriage. It wasn’t a forever kind of love. Whatever had inspired Captain Jack to propose to that woman wasn’t enough to keep them together over the long haul. He’d reached out to her in a time of intense emotion, but they hadn’t built anything lasting.

Perhaps she was being unfair. Perhaps his first wife had died tragically and he had taken years to recover. Perhaps she’d left him, and his love had still prevailed, so that it was her that shouldn’t have accepted him. But she didn’t think so—listening to Roy and the captain and Michael whooping it up about how big that first wife’s breasts had been didn’t really give that impression.

And now Roy was saying something to Michael and Jack, tears in his eyes. It was a little garbled, which wasn’t surprising given how many snorkel shots he’d done, but the sense of it was clear. “I’m gonna propose to Pammy.”

We’re already engaged, she thought, just as Michael (of all people!) said the same thing to Roy. Or at least, the same thought, in Michaelese: “she’s already your woman. You proposed to her three years ago.”

“Ah, that one didn’t count. We’re not really engaged, you know. But hell, maybe we should be. What do you think?”

Captain Jack leaned over, eyes serious in the way that only crazy people, drunks, and those drunk on power can make them. “I think you should do it.”

“Well, what the hell. Not like I’m going to do any better, right?”

She’d frozen stock still at Roy’s first words about their engagement, and in doing so failed to remember she was right outside the door to the bathroom. Now she was banged into by someone actually coming out, and saw three heads swivel in her direction. Roy spoke first.

“Aw geez, Pammy, I didn’t mean it like that!”

She couldn’t deal with this right now. She couldn’t deal with him, she couldn’t deal with the world, she couldn’t breathe. Now she knew why what had seemed like the perfect resolution to a Groundhog Day-style loop, Roy’s setting a date, was instead the start. She didn’t know what power up there had given her this series of redos, but she was simultaneously thanking and cursing it. The last three years of her life didn’t count? It took a drunken story about a serial monogamist’s first wife to convince him to set a date? He cared more about what some stupid sea, no, lake captain had to say about marriage than what she had repeatedly said in asking him to set a date over the last three years? No. She wasn’t doing this now.

She scrambled into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Roy banged on the door and begged her to come out, but she just scrambled against the far wall and cried. How could he do this to her? More to the point, how could she do this to herself?

And what was she going to do with this in the next go-round? She hoped there was one. She hoped this horrible, gut-wrenching news that confirmed the worst she’d ever expected or thought about her engagement to Roy wasn’t the revelation she was supposed to come to. She prayed to whatever God, or genie, or angry imp had imparted this fate to her that she wouldn’t have to wake up tomorrow on Friday and deal with this. Not that she was ever going to forget it. But at least let her have some more iterations to figure out what she was going to do with herself now. Don’t make her life go on from here without a little time to process it.

She stayed in the bathroom the rest of the voyage, and icily took Roy’s keys when they docked. “I’m driving, you’ll kill us both” was all she said to him as he continued to beg and plead on the way home. She wasn’t in the mood to listen to him, and he was still too drunk to have anything more coherent to say than sorry—which strongly suggested to her that he hadn’t cut himself off when she’d locked herself in the bathroom. When they got home he rushed up the stairs and collapsed into the bed. At first she was annoyed: how dare he make her sleep on the couch when it was him who had fucked up so royally? Then she realized that this was probably his strategy to get her to sleep in the same bed with him, and she just felt sorry for him. Did he really think that would work? Did he really know her so little after ten years that he’d think she’d just let this go?

But then again, she’d become an expert at letting things go, hadn’t she? She let go every booze-filled night, every refusal to set a date, every embarrassment, every disappointment. She let go “jokes” that weren’t funny and anger that wasn’t provoked and thoughtlessness that wasn’t apologized for. Of course he thought she’d just let this go too.

But she wasn’t going to.

Not after discovering that what had seemed two times ago to be the happiest moment of her life had been a booze-fueled whim. Not after finding out that apparently, in her fiancé’s mind, the last three years of their engagement didn’t count. No. She was stronger than that. And if she hadn’t been before, well, she had theoretically infinite attempts to get herself there. And she was not going to start those by sleeping with him.

She made up the couch, and brooded, and made plans for the next time around. Hoping, desperately, that she was right and there would be one.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. This time, though, she didn’t turn the alarm off when it blared. What was the point? She needed to figure out what she was going to do with herself now. If getting married to Roy wasn’t the goal—and while she wasn’t entirely willing to admit that it was off the table, she certainly wasn’t excited about it after that last cycle—what was the point?

Not that Roy was her whole life, but she realized in between the snoozes of the alarm that that was much truer than it ought to be. Her friends (Jim and Izzy excepted—and she hadn’t talked to Izzy in months) were Roy’s friends and their girlfriends (not, she realized now with some clarity, wives). Her social life was his social life. When had she let that happen?

A grumbling Roy reached over her to slam the alarm clock. “Geez, Pammy, how are you not up yet?” He rolled away and stomped towards the bathroom. She took the momentary peace of not, for once, being the first one up and into the shower to think about what she could do with her day.

Point one: this cycle, she was not going on the booze cruise. It would still be there later, but for now, it was too fresh.

Point two: she would, however, go to work. She wanted to see what happened if she bought Dwight’s wallet.

Point three: that meant she had to come up with a reason, or at least a way, to get out of work after the prank and before the booze cruise. She got up and made sure that her keys to the truck were in her purse. Roy could get a ride with someone to the cruise; she’d leave before lunch, claiming feminine upsets that Michael couldn’t comprehend.

What would she do after that? She’d figure that out on the way.

She hurried through her morning routine while Roy complained about not having breakfast ready, and they actually got on the road before they usually did because she didn’t bother to make him any. She wasn’t late; she actually had a moment to sit at her desk in order to time her entrance into the break room correctly. She and Jim had a system when it came to Dwight pranks: one of them, usually Jim, would initiate, and the other would count off twenty before wading in to assist.

Twenty seconds on the dot after Jim first set foot in the break room, she slipped past him and mock-pondered the selections on the machine. “Hmmm…I’m feeling lucky.” She punched in J-1.

Dwight tried to get it back, of course, but Jim smoothly slid into place and started eyeing his own purchase, which distracted Dwight just enough to let her slide the wallet open.

It was empty. Well, not actually empty. There was actually some cash, and a number of vouchers for things like free paintball games and buy-one-get-one at Bobble Warehouse and whatever a hogslaughter was (she was depressingly sure that it was exactly what it said, but you could never be sure with Dwight). But no ID. No insurance card. Nothing.

“Dwight?”

“Yes?” He stopped mid-harangue (something about how Jim could never care for his beloved bobbleheads correctly and so should not dare to buy them from the vending machine) and turned to her.

“Why don’t you have a driver’s license?”

Dwight grinned. “What makes you think I don’t have a driver’s license?”

She held up the empty insides of the wallet. “Um, that you don’t?”

Jim took one look at the wallet and smirked, turning towards Dwight. “Dwight, do you see a driver’s license in there? Are you hallucinating things again? Quick, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Dwight swatted Jim’s hand away. “I can see just fine. I just don’t keep my driver’s license in my wallet, in case of precisely this event.”

Head cocked, Jim surveyed Dwight as one might a cubist painting, trying to find a human shape among the disorder. “You don’t keep your license in your wallet in case someone buys your wallet out of a vending machine?”

“No, idiot, I keep my driver’s license out of my wallet in case of enemy action. You can never be too careful.”

Jim smirked again. “I don’t believe you.”

“I’m telling the truth!”

“Nope. It’s a lie. Hey, everybody, Dwight doesn’t have a…”

Dwight clapped a hand over Jim’s mouth. “Silence, fool. I have my driver’s license right here.” Dwight started unbuttoning his shirt, and Pam felt it was time for her to reintervene.

“Really, Dwight?”

Jim glanced up at her and grinned. “Yeah, Dwight, there’s a lady present.”

“Where?” Dwight looked up inquiringly, still unbuttoning his shirt.

“Really?” Jim gestured at Pam, who put her hands on her hips.

“I was under the impression,” Dwight grunted as he pulled down his undershirt, “that ladies did not buy other people’s personal items and then rummage through them.”

“I don’t have any proof that this is yours, Dwight,” Pam answered sweetly. “After all, there’s no ID.”

Dwight looked briefly puzzled, then reached under his armpit and pulled out a holster. Inside there was no gun, just what was, upon the brief glance Pam threw at it, the smelliest Pennsylvania driver’s license she’d ever seen, issued to one Dwight Kurt Schrute.

She pretended to gag on the smell from under his arms. “Dwight, we believe you, now put that thing away.”

He obliged, and she shoved the wallet into his hand. “I’ll pay you everything in here just to never show me that again.”

“Deal.” He grabbed the wallet and shoved it in his pocket. “Perhaps you are a lady after all.” She started to thank him, but he wasn’t done. “Women are, after all, known for their poor tactical and business sense.”

“Aaaaaand on that note, we’re outta here.” Jim grabbed the bobblehead he’d bought while Dwight was stripping and marched out. “Pam, we need to figure out what Lieutenant Picard is going to do for the rest of the day.”

“It’s Captain Picard!” Dwight yelled after them. “And besides, that’s Darth Vader, you idiot!”

Pam and Jim giggled their way out the door and collapsed onto her desk side by side. It was a great way to start the day.

The rest of Pam’s extremely foreshortened day at work went smoothly. She joked with Jim, restocked the jellybeans, and looked up things to do in Scranton while she pretended to work. What had Bill Murray done? Ice sculpture, the piano, lots and lots of sex…she was blushing at her desk. And wouldn’t you know it, someone was there to notice. Of course he was—Jim must have eaten fifteen jellybeans already today, he was up at her desk so often.

“Hey.” Oh god, she could feel the warmth down to her toes. How was she supposed to respond to that? “You know, you don’t need to be embarrassed.”

How could he possibly know? What did he know? She hadn’t searched any of the…sex stuff on the computer. It was all in her head. How did he know?

“I don’t?”

“No. I have it on good authority that lots of women find…hogslaughtering erotic.” Oh. Thank God. He was looking at the contents of Dwight’s wallet that she’d spread out on the counter.

“Yeah, I’m just struggling to restrain myself from throwing my panties at him.” Did I really just say that? If she had been pink before, she knew she was something on the far side of burnt umber now. She realized she must have said it out loud, too, because Jim was coughing like he’d choked on a jellybean.

“You OK there?”

“Yeah. Just…quite the image there, Beesly.” He reached for another jellybean.

She fluttered her lashes up at him (and where had that come from?). “Are you telling me you’ve never imagined them before?” Before Jim could turn entirely purple, she burst out in a guffaw. “Jesus, Jim, I’m kidding.”

“Uh…yes, I got that.” He bent down towards her. “Unless you’ve been hiding a Dwight fetish from us this whole time.” She shook her head. “Good. Because I’d hate to think I’d misjudged you, Beesly.” And the conversation veered away from the dangerous territory it had entered and onto more mundane topics. Pam wasn’t sure if she was glad of that or sad—she’d really enjoyed tweaking Jim, and his reactions had been absolutely priceless. Maybe in some future cycle she’d have to explore that…see if she could make his head actually explode.

As she was pondering this idea, Jim finally came around to the reason he’d wandered up to her desk in the first place, which was (of course) to suggest that they send in Stanley to figure out what Michael had planned for the afternoon. An idea occurred to her—it wasn’t an entirely fair idea, but then again, what did it really matter? She’d be back here “tomorrow” anyway.

“Hey Jim, wanna bet on what it is?”

“Absolutely. What stakes?”

“Loser has to cover for the winner when they skip out on whatever the event is.”

“Sounds like a deal. I get to pick first though.”

“Go ahead.” There was no way he’d get it.

“Hmm…I’d still say bank robbery, but I don’t think even Michael would manage to keep that kind of secret for so long. So since you so foolishly let me go first, I’m going to steal your idea—overnight in the Poconos.”

“Cheat! In that case, I’m gonna go with…lake cruise.”

“Bold move, Beesly, given that it’s January. The lake’s frozen.”

“No, no, remember how unseasonably warm Christmas was this year? It all melted, and they’re starting up some early cruises to try to drum up publicity for the new dockside attractions that finished construction in November.”

“Hmmm…well, we’ll see. May the best man win.” They shook hands formally and he grinned. “Now to get Stanley to go confirm my victory.”

“Dream on, Halpert. Enjoy coming up with excuses for my inevitable absence from this stupid event.”

Jim just waggled his eyebrows and headed over in Stanley’s direction. Pam tried to pretend shock when she won, and ducked out of the office at the next opportunity, sticking her tongue out at Jim as she slipped through the door to the outside.

Freedom!

But what to do with it? She found herself wandering aimlessly, until she washed up at the library. It seemed like as good a place as any to stop, so she pulled in and hopped out of the truck. She had fond memories of spending hours at the library as a child, but she hadn’t been in a lot since…since then, really, but especially since she had moved out of her parents’ house. Her mom had always wanted to be a librarian, and so she’d inculcated in Pam a deep respect for the library, but there had just always been a reason not to go. Work, of course, or Roy being home, or Roy being gone and her waiting up for him, or a game on TV, or…just something that meant she had no time. So now she might as well look in, because if there was something she had now, it was time.

The first thing she spotted as she entered the main doors was one of those racks of local brochures that you usually see in a hotel in a strange city and completely ignore because you’re in town for a reason and you don’t need attractions. Today, though, she decided she wasn’t going to ignore it; she was going to raid it. Because she had a few days to kill…or a few millennia, perhaps. She swept all the brochures she could into her purse, deliberately ignoring the one that screamed NEW JANUARY CRUISES ON LAKE WALLENPAUPACK! with a jaunty photo of Captain Jack on the front. She went in and sat down in the little café by the door and sorted through the leaflets: one “maybe” pile for those things that might take more than a day to do properly (like overnight trips), one “no” pile for those things that either didn’t interest her, weren’t available on Thursdays, or were just ridiculous (why was there a brochure for a shiatsu massage place in Stamford, Connecticut in the Scranton public library?), and then a final, much smaller “yes” pile for those things she wanted to try.

The first of those was a painting class—Thursday night at 9pm—at the YMCA in room 110. She had already decided she wasn’t going on the booze cruise tonight; why not do something she actually wanted instead?

She spent the next few hours exploring the stacks of the library, signing up for a card (apparently they expired every five years, so the one she’d had as a kid was no good), and resisting the temptation to pile the books up high and bring them home with her. After all, she reasoned sadly, they’d just be back on the shelves if she didn’t read them by the end of the day anyway. She ended up grabbing one romance novel that looked particularly interesting and curling up with it in a comfy chair by the young readers section. Before she knew it, the half hour announcement went that the library was closing, and she realized with a start that it was 8:30. She checked out the book, hopped in the truck (ignoring the missed calls from Roy on her phone) and grabbed drive-through food on the way to the Y.

Scarfing down a taco, she jumped down from the truck and made her way haltingly into the front doors of the YMCA. She’d been in here, of course, because Roy had liked her to come watch him when he’d played in rec league games, and there’d been the occasional yoga session or community meeting across the years. She found room 110 after a little wandering, and hesitated for a moment before turning the knob. The room was full of middle-aged men and women, sprinkled with a couple of bored-looking teens.

“Hello!” A tall, spindly woman greeted her at the door. “Are you here for the painting?”

“Yes?” Pam hated herself for making it a question, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.

“Great! Are you registered?”

“Um…”

“I’ll take that as a no.” The woman laughed merrily. “That’s OK! It’s $15 for the session, but we’ve got plenty of space. That includes materials…since I’m guessing you don’t have a canvas in that little bag.”

Pam smiled back and dug through her purse for the money. “No, I’m afraid I just brought me.”

“That’s all we ask you to bring! I’m Kerry; you are?”

“Pam.”

“Welcome, Pam. Why don’t you go sit over by Melanie?” Kerry pointed at one of the bored-looking teens in the corner. She leaned over conspiratorially. “Don’t let her face fool you—she’s here every week.” Kerry giggled, and Pam found herself unwinding a little. “She’ll help you get set up, if you ask nicely.”

Pam slipped between her chattering fellow students until she was next to Melanie, who managed to look marginally less bored when Pam asked her for help setting the canvas up. They got to chatting, and it turned out that Melanie was a couple years older than she looked—old enough to be classmates with Jim’s sister Larissa, actually, which gave Pam enough conversational ammunition to cover the time until Kerry strode firmly to the front of the classroom and cleared her throat. She spoke very briefly about the purpose of art, and while Melanie rolled her eyes a little and whispered something about how “she always said the same thing” Pam found it surprisingly inspirational. Apparently this was an abstract painting class, and they were supposed to paint “whatever they saw when they closed their eyes.” Pam felt very daring as she leaned towards Melanie and whispered “do we have enough black paint?” When the twenty-year-old tittered she felt a thousand feet tall.

The next hour was a blur, but not in the way that the night had become a blur when she’d done the snorkel shots. Instead, she was thoroughly enjoying herself. By the end of the night she had a fairy literalist interpretation of “what you see when you close your eyes,” but she was proud of the purple strokes and yellow highlights strobing across her canvas. Kerry told them all to take their canvases home and think about how they might change them if they had them to do again and to “make sure and come back next week!” Pam doubted she’d be back next week—but she knew she’d be back again on the same day.

She waved goodbye to Melanie, carefully buckled the canvas into the passenger’s seat of the pickup, and drove home. She didn’t know where else to go—her mom’s was still too far, and it wasn’t like Roy was going to be home yet anyway. She put the canvas up on a nail in the living room, took a shower, and went to bed.

Then she realized that of course Roy was going to come home drunk and probably angry at her for taking the truck, and she didn’t actually want to be in the bed when he got there. So she moved herself into the guest bedroom, thankful for once that Roy’s brother Kenny crashed with them sufficiently frequently that there were already pillows and blankets on the bed, and more thankful that she had put clean sheets on since he’d last stayed. She locked the door—and when had it become an instinct to lock the door against her fiancé?—and bedded down for the night. She did not awake when Roy came home—assuming he ever did.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Today she had a decision to make, she thought as she lunged to turn off the alarm before it could go off at all. Did she continue indulging herself, going down the path of yesterday’s art class? Did she go through the other flyers she’d found systematically? Or did she go back to the Booze Cruise and try to figure out what had gone wrong, what it was that she was supposed to fix? Because for all that she’d enjoyed yesterday, for all that she felt strongly that she wanted to go back to that YMCA art class and hang out with Melanie forever, she doubted that the trick to whatever was going on was to be found in the abstract art class. She never would have considered going to that class before she knew she had unlimited time, so whatever it was she needed to work on couldn’t be there. It had to be something she could have done differently that first time; something in her workaday world, so to speak, or on the cruise.

But she wasn’t sure she wanted to face that right now.

After all, she thought, feeling a guilty blush steal warmly across her cheeks, she didn’t have to, did she? She could keep coming up with excuses—hell, she could just ditch work entirely without excuses, since no one would remember tomorrow—and she could keep working on her art. But that wasn’t really her, was it? Pam Beesly didn’t blow off obligations. But then again, on the other hand, Pam Beesly also wasn’t all that special. Certainly not special enough to be the center of some kind of infinite repeating loop, the one person who remembered everything. So which was she? The person who kept on plodding through a boring life (and when had she admitted to herself that yes, it was a boring life?) and met every obligation others imposed on her, keeping her head down, or the person with the power to change the whole world by her choices?

She knew she was the first one. But apparently she had to be the second one too. It was a puzzle, and no mistake.

She thought about how she usually dealt with temptation. She didn’t indulge, no, but she didn’t entirely deny herself either. She’d have one piece of chocolate after dinner, or go to one barbecue without Roy (her cheeks flamed again at the thought of Jim’s room), or spend one night painting instead of cleaning. So how did that translate now? She could maybe alternate? One day of exploring, of total freedom, for one day of trying to figure out what she should have done differently?

That seemed…fair. Not that anyone else could judge her, of course, since none of them would know about it, but she would know and that was enough. It seemed fair.

But if she was being fair, she had to admit that she’d had her day of fun yesterday. So today it was back to the grind. And if she was going to go back on that cruise, she’d need a plan. She’d need to change something. What could she change?

Maybe she could start by getting rid of a cheerleader.

The rest of the morning went as she knew it would, once she poked Roy awake and pointed him in the general direction of the shower. They made it in in time for her to buy Dwight’s pencil cup (she vaguely recalled something in high school science about reducing independent variables, which she remembered meaning something like changing as few things as possible so that you could tell what change actually mattered). She pretended surprise at Michael’s revelation (to be fair, she’d been pretending the first time because of Stanley’s good work) and felt sorrow for Brenda being mixed up in all this all over again. But as the meeting was breaking up she kissed Roy on the cheek (thinking “it’s not his fault he doesn’t love me the way he should,” which was a less bitter and more sweet version of bittersweet than she’d expected of herself) and grabbed Jim by the sleeve as he tried to slip out of the conference room.

“Hey.”

“Uh, hi.” He looked about him comically. “Where’d you come from?”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “I was sitting right behind you, dork.”

He grinned. “To be fair, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.”

“Probably for the best. It would totally suck to have that much hair in your eyes all the time.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “It is getting a bit long, isn’t it?”

“Getting? Jim, how long have we known each other?”

“Couple of years now.”

“Has your hair ever been short?”

He rolled his eyes up in thought. “There was that one time we tried to convince Dwight I had given him lice.”

“Right.” She giggled. Why was she giggling? She didn’t giggle. Except apparently she did. “Any other time?”

“No.” He stopped rubbing his neck. “Was there a point to this, or did you just want to mock my hairstyle?”

“Oh!” She blushed. Why was she blushing? Right, she was about to try to convince her best friend not to invite his…his girlfriend to a work event. “Yeah, um, I just wanted to…” Dammit, the plan had seemed so straightforward in the pale dark of morning. Where was her courage now? “IjustwantedtoaskifyouwerebringingLarissaonthecruise,” she finally spat out in a rush.

“Woah, slow down there Beesly.” He extended both arms as if to ward her off, but he was laughing as he did it. “Care to say that a little slower, so the rest of the class can hear?”

She could feel the blood in her face pounding. “I just wanted to ask if you were bringing Larissa on the cruise.” She took a deep breath. “I remembered how she came bowling with us and it was really cool.”

He grinned. “You mean you liked that she kicked my ass at bowling.”

“Maaaaaaybe.” She grinned back. “I was just hoping to hang out with her, since she obviously got all coolness in the family. And all the bowling skillz.” She made sure to pronounce the Z.

“All the coolness? You wound me. I am wounded.” He clutched his heart.

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, maybe not all the coolness. After all, if you invited her, some of the coolness she brought with her would count as yours, I suppose. If she came.”

“So to increase my cool quotient, I need to bring my kid sister? Wow, Pam, you really know how to make a guy feel special.” But his eyes were smiling even as his mouth pouted.  She patted his arm.

“I’m sure if you explain to her very nicely that the mean lady told you you had to bring her she’ll take pity on you and make you feel cool and special, James.” She dug deep to memories of her fourth-grade teacher, who’d always called her and the other kids by their full names (Pamela. Rebecca. Isadora.) when she’d been trying to connect with them on an individual level. Not their full-full names, like when her mom was mad at her (Pamela Morgan Beesly you come here this instant!) but just a little sign of respect beyond a nickname. It had worked on her, and apparently it worked on Jim, because he gave her a little bow and headed to his desk, and when she passed by him after getting a candy bar from the vending machine (now that Dwight had rebought all his possessions) he was whispering something into his phone about “help a brother out…yes, specifically your brother, L” and winked at her as she passed by.

The rest of the workday passed without incident, and honestly Pam didn’t notice much of it because it was all the same. The next thing she really paid attention to was the dynamic on the boat after she’d maneuvered herself and Roy into the same booth with Jim and Larissa. Funny…she didn’t remember having to do as much maneuvering when Jim had brought Katy.

“Heya Pam!” Larissa grinned with infectious enthusiasm across the booth.

“Hey yourself!” Pam smiled at the younger woman. “Roy, you remember Larissa, Jim’s sister?”

“I guess.” Roy gave Larissa the kind of smile that Pam knew from experience meant he had no idea who she was.

“You remember her, she beat Darryl at bowling last year?”

“Oh right, the ringer. How ya doing?” A big hand swung over the table, and Larissa fist-bumped it. Roy turned to Jim. “What’s the matter, Halpert, no date tonight?”

“Nah.” Jim stretched an arm out over the top of the booth around his sister. “It said friends and family on the invitation, ya know? So, family.” He gestured at her.

Larissa looked up at her brother and then winked at Pam. “Yeah, he calls me at like 3:30 and is all ‘L, ya gotta be there for me.’” Her voice imitating Jim was impossibly deep. “‘Help a brother out.’” She switched back to her own voice. “So, you know, I felt sorry for the guy.”

Roy was chortling. “’Smatter, Halpert, couldn’t find anyone else so you begged your kid sister?”

Pam rolled her eyes, and she could see that Jim was getting uncomfortable—and that Larissa was looking at Roy speculatively in a way that suggested that she’d assumed he was a nicer man than he was proving to be. “Roy, you know if Penny weren’t away at college I’d love to have her here.”

Roy slung an arm around her and squashed her to his side. “But you have me, Pammy.”

She rolled her eyes again. “Yes, but we each could have brought a plus one if we’d wanted, since we’re both employees. And I’m really glad Jim brought Larissa.” She smiled at Larissa, who grinned back, her attitude apparently unimpaired.

“Shit, I could’ve brought Kenny?” Roy shook his head. “Man, he’ll be pissed to realize he missed free booze. I’ll have to tell him that.” He shook his head again. “He’ll freak.”

Speaking of free booze, the conversation kind of petered out until Roy noticed the snorkel shots, which again pulled him away from the table. Only this time Pam didn’t feel the need to get up herself, and she and Jim and Larissa ended up talking about…well, actually, pretty much nothing, but a really fun nothing for most of the rest of the cruise. She almost lost track of time, until something about the lighting…or the maybe the feeling of the room…or something told her that it was right before Roy was about to get on the mic again and propose—or rather, set a date—(assuming this cycle went like the others) and she signaled to Larissa with her head to go to the bathroom with her. Jim managed to avoid making a joke about women going to the bathroom together, which raised him substantially in her esteem.

Before they got to the bathroom, though, she pulled Larissa outside.

“Sometimes I just don’t get Roy.” She remembered saying that to another Halpert, but Larissa’s face was a lot easier to read than Jim’s.

“What’s to get?” Larissa leaned against the railing and flushed. “I mean, I’m sorry, he’s your fiancé, I shouldn’t…”

Pam waved it off. “No, no…” she stared out into the lake. Why was this easier to talk about with Larissa, whom she liked but hardly knew, than to Jim? “Out with it. I’m out here hiding from him, the least I can do is listen to you.”

Larissa half-smiled. “It’s not like I have any great insight.” She shrugged. “I just wonder why you’re struggling to explain what seems pretty straightforward.”

“Yeah.” Pam stared out across the lake next to her. “…care to explain it to me?”

Unfortunately, Kelly chose that moment to burst out of the cabin. “PAAAAAM! Ohmigod! I can’t believe you’re out here, you totally need to come in and hear what Roy’s saying!”

Pam shoved herself wearily off the railing. “Did he just suggest we get married on June 10th?”

Kelly and Larissa stared at her. “How did you know? Did he already talk to you in advance? Ohmigod, Pam, can I be a bridesmaid?”

“Sure.” Pam shrugged. “Why not? Larissa, you want in?”

Larissa looked at her oddly, but nodded, while Kelly squealed, started listing potential colors for dresses, and sprinted back in “to give Roy the good news.” Whether that good news was that Pam had (by sheer inertia) agreed to the date or that Kelly herself was a going to be a bridesmaid was left unclear.

“So…June 10th?” Larissa’s voice was quiet.

“I guess.” Pam shrugged. “This time at least.” Larissa looked at her even more oddly, but Pam was just feeling tired. She’d come back to this some other cycle—and find some way to get to the rest of that conversation with Larissa before Roy tried to set a date. Right now she was just so tired of it all. Tired of Roy. Not tired of Larissa, precisely, or of Jim of course, but of the whole situation. “Let’s just get it over with.” And she headed back into the cabin.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She got up and turned off the alarm with a bit of pep in her step. Today was a day she wouldn’t need to worry at all about the stupid booze cruise. She could go do…well, pretty much anything else. As she went through her morning routine, she thought for a moment about the advantages of living your life on repeat. No laundry. No cleaning. She could wash her hair every morning without worrying about the long-term effects of washing it too often—or she could skip a day (as she did now) without worrying that skipping an extra day would make tomorrow worse. There was even no need to pick out the next day’s clothes: she knew that today’s clothes, fresh as they had been at the start of the cycle, would be laid out on the dresser every morning. In a weird way it was like having a very predictable, set-in-their-ways personal servant looking over her.

As she puttered about making breakfast and listening to the incipient sounds of Roy awakening upstairs, she wondered where her life had gone wrong so that a day on repeat seemed like a good thing. Especially a day like this one: a day that had somehow gone from one of the happiest of her life to one of the most gut-wrenching even as the same things had happened over and over. Was there something wrong with her? Or with the world? Or with her expectations?

No. It wasn’t her expectations. There was nothing wrong with wanting her fiancé to care about her—wanting the last three years to matter to him as much as they did to her—wanting his proposal to represent an actual desire to marry her for her.

But maybe there had been something wrong with her expectations from the start, or maybe with her expectations of Roy. Because no, it wasn’t ridiculous to want more than she had in her day-to-day life, but it might be wrong to think she could or ever would have them with Roy. After all, while now she might be literally reliving the same day every twenty-four hours, hadn’t she been doing that figuratively for some time now? There was a reason her routines were like clockwork, and it wasn’t her desire for order. It was because their lives hadn’t changed much, if at all, since she had dropped out of college and started at Dunder Mifflin. Bill Murray had at least been in a new town, one he visited only one night a year, with a new producer and a new (and surprising to him) snowstorm on the way. When he’d lived through the same day so many times, he’d had to first acclimate himself to the place and the people. She saw the same people every day anyway, and while the cruise itself might be new to her the ideas of a stupid Michael plan gone wrong, or a distressingly alcoholic party with the office, or of Roy doing something impulsive without real thought about its consequences weren’t new at all.

Roy doing something stupid and impulsive. Like asking her out in the first place? If she had been so “artsy-fartsy,” as he put it, why hadn’t he asked out a stupid cheerleader like stupid Katy? Well, not Katy specifically, she wasn’t actually stupid (some of those purses were actually really well-designed) and anyway she’d apparently gone to one of the other regional schools, but someone like Amy Birdhauser or Lesley Williams, both of whom had quite clearly been interested in him.

A sick feeling gathered in her stomach. Casting her mind back, she remembered a particularly nasty rumor she’d heard floating around high school when she and Roy had first started dating: something about how he’d only asked her out on a bet. Now, she reminded herself, he obviously hadn’t stayed with her for a decade on the strength of one bet. But she knew Roy, probably better than he knew himself if she was honest. And she knew the way his inertia functioned. She could see a world in which Roy had asked her out on a bet, found out he liked her (she wasn’t going to give up the point of self-esteem which reminded her that he had, after all, taken her to prom and asked her to marry him), and just…let it ride.

She took a shuddering breath. Now was not the time to get all worked up about that. Now she needed to scrape the scrambled eggs that had somehow found the time to harden in the bottom of the pan out into the trash and put on an acceptable face for Roy as he hurried out and they hustled themselves into Dunder Mifflin once again.

And how was that different from every other morning even before this all started?

She went through the workday almost by rote, although she did decide to mix things up a little by buying Dwight’s family photo. She almost instantly regretted it, because having to look at what she assumed was Cousin Mose’s face even for half a work day was nauseating, but it was worth it because it caused Dwight to lapse into a series of Germanic mutterings that she was pretty sure were either curses against her soul or prayers for forgiveness to his ancestors. German being an angry-sounding language, she was never certain. Jim gave her a wink and a surreptitious thumbs-up as she swept out of the break room, and she let that carry her through the discomfort Mose’s visage inspired.

Around 1pm she found an excuse (claiming they were out of paper for the copier—she wasn’t quite sure why Michael bought it, but something with Brenda had apparently distracted him from even the most basic of mental processes) and slipped out of the office, keys to the truck in hand. She pulled out of the parking lot and headed to refill the vehicle (Roy never remembered to) while she decided where she ought to go. She rehearsed her mental list of brochures from the library (the brochures themselves had gone wherever it was that the alcohol in her system went every night, which was to say mysteriously away, but she could still remember the ones she’d selected as interesting to her). What was the right one to go to today? Thinking of her doubts about Roy, she remembered one brochure for a low-level minor-league hockey game: not the Penguins, but still reminiscent enough of their first date. And, because it was such a minor league, it played on Thursday afternoons while the ice rink was free.  She wasn’t sure if the players were even paid.  But it would fill an afternoon.

She slipped into the bleachers after handing the man at the door a $5 bill, to his obvious surprise, and noticed that she appeared to be the only person in the stands not actively related to a player. She started to head for the top of the stands, where she usually sat if she had her own choice in her seats, and then thought better of it. Where had she and Roy sat on that first date? He certainly hadn’t let her choose: no, Kenny had already been there, and he’d waved at Roy, who had grinned and led her over to his brother. So where had Kenny been camped out? It wasn’t iceside, of course, no way Kenny had been such an eager beaver as to actually show direct interest in the hockey. No, it had been…about there. Right by the aisle, for easy beer runs (even though neither he nor Roy had actually been 18, let alone 21, both had had fake IDs and the kind of burly masculinity that led no one to question them) and about three aisles up so that they could see out over the players on the ice. She sat down in the same area, conspicuous in her businessy attire at what was clearly a sporting event for the young and underemployed or their retired parents.

The game itself was actually better than she expected. Apparently ten years of hanging out with Roy and watching hockey (mostly on the TV but occasionally in person, though she always drove after that first time) had had an almost osmotic effect on her and she discovered she not only knew the rules, she actually enjoyed the game when it wasn’t accompanied by Roy’s sarcastic running commentary. Rather than hearing his hissed “geez, can’t you see Primeau in the corner?” or a bellowed “Fire Hitchcock!” she could actually pay attention to what she could see for herself, and found she enjoyed the rhythms of the game. In a way, it appealed to the artist in her: the flow of colored uniforms both near to and (surprisingly, she realized) away from the puck; the almost imperceptible but definitively present changes in mood in the building as a given team started a breakaway, or as everyone held their breath during a powerplay, wondering if the home team could kill it; the intricate dance of a breakaway followed by the tense energy of a face-off after the goalie iced the puck down to the far side. Unthinkingly she pulled her sketchbook out of her bag (and when had she last actually used it for something other than calculating a tip at a restaurant when there was no nearby scratch paper?) and started to play around with forms and motion. By the end of the third period the sketch was complete, and she was on her feet cheering with the smattering of moms, dads, and little siblings as the Scranton team made a last-minute charge to first tie the game and then (during a powerplay triggered by the other team’s over-aggressive high-sticking response to the tying breakaway) miraculously pull out a victory. She hugged a woman she’d never seen before in a red pullover, high-fived a man in a Flyers jersey from the ‘80s, and exchanged a grin with a little five-year-old sitting across the aisle.

Suddenly, she could understand why Roy enjoyed sports.

But with that understanding came sorrow, because while this might be why Roy liked sports, it wasn’t why he liked sporting events. His joy came straight from the bottom of a bottle, and he rushed through to find as much of it as he could in the three periods of a hockey game. Looking back on it, she could see that he’d actually restrained himself on that first date: only two beers per period. But he’d still left her when she’d been in the bathroom, and he and Kenny had made their way almost all the way home before rushing back for her. Now she could see families and young couples searching each other out and streaming (or maybe trickling, given the attendance) out the exit, and it made her…what? She had expected to feel angry, had braced herself for the wash of emotion over her causing her spine to straighten and her eyes to flash, but all she felt was sadness. Sadness for Roy, who didn’t seem to access the higher, better emotions of his own fandom. Sadness for herself, who had been tied to him for a decade. Sadness for their relationship, which she could see with clearer, sadder eyes now that she had a chance to look back, not in anger (thanks Oasis) but with resignation. It hadn’t been working; it had never really worked the way she’d always desperately hoped it would. Whether or not Roy had asked her out on a bet—and honestly, after a decade together, did it matter?—they’d stayed together more out of a fear of change than out of the depth of their love. And it was truly a matter of they: she couldn’t blame Roy for this. Or at least not just Roy.

Maybe that was what she was supposed to realize from this whole stupid scenario. That she needed to figure out what she wanted, not what she was used to. That she needed to live her life, not just repeat it day after day.

She drove to her parents’ house—all three hours of it—knocked on the door, and went in with her key before waiting for a response.

“Hey honey!” Her mom’s face reflected surprise, but also joy to see her. She felt guilty. It had been far too long since they’d seen each other—or even talked. Not that she didn’t like talking to her mom, but she’d just let it slip, so it had been a couple weeks, since Christmas really.  “What are you doing here? Not that I’m not happy to see you, dear.” She gestured with the mug she was holding. “Your father’s just in the other room watching TV.”

As if on cue, she heard a bellow. “That Penny?”

“No, Pam!”

“Pam?” She heard the couch squeak in the living room. “What’s Pam doing here?”

“Hi Mom. Hi Dad.” She stood awkwardly in the doorway and then rushed over and gave her mom a hug. “I just really felt like I needed to be home.”

“Well, you’re always welcome, dear.” Helene gave her daughter a firm squeeze and then left her to her father, who rubbed her hair like he’d always done when she was little and then hugged her himself.

“Thanks, Mom.” Pam didn’t really know why she’d driven herself all this way. Maybe it was the memories of the other hockey game that had made her feel like she needed to go home—needed to take responsibility for her own mobility instead of waiting for Roy to bring her back. Or maybe (she thought this more likely, now that it occurred to her belatedly) she had just not wanted to bed back down next to Roy again. She knew (or thought she knew—maybe coming here would break the cycle?) that she’d wake up next to him “tomorrow,” but the thought of just one night sleeping in a bed without him beside her was a suddenly appealing prospect.

She briefly toyed with the idea of confiding in them, in unburdening herself to her parents about Roy, about the weirdness of what was going on, about her sudden doubts (and the much worse, long-lingering ones that thronged behind them) that she was feeling about her life. But she looked at her dad, already itching to go back to the living room, and at her mom, sitting alone in the kitchen with a mug that smelled strongly of something other than tea or coffee, and she decided it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth explaining why their life wasn’t the life she wanted anymore, and why Roy, who had always promised to give her that life, not only wasn’t doing it, but wasn’t the man she wanted to be with.

And he wasn’t, was he? The thought occurred to her in a rush that while she’d been so focused on not wanting to be with Roy because of how things had been going and because of the circumstances under which he’d apparently proposed a date she hadn’t actually thought about whether Roy, himself, was the man she wanted to spend her life with. And that was a problem, she saw with sudden insight, because how could she blame Roy for not actively wanting a life with her if she didn’t want a life with him? She needed to forgive him for seeing (through a glass darkly) the truth she hadn’t seen herself: they didn’t really belong together. Now, that didn’t mean she’d forgive him for his neglect of her as a person, or worse for being willing to offer a date for a marriage neither of them really wanted, but (she thought as she mechanically accepted her mother’s offer of tea before bed) it did mean she ought to be specific about what was wrong with her life. It wasn’t that Roy didn’t feel the right way, or that he didn’t act the right way, or really anything to do with Roy at all.

It was her. She wanted different things. She had changed. She had evolved. It was time for her to think about what Pam Beesly wanted, and who she wanted to do it with. Because Roy wasn’t the answer.

She looked at the picture of Roy she’d painted in eleventh grade art class that still hung on the wall above her childhood bed as she put the sheets her mother had given her down, and slipped it off the hook. She knew it was a futile gesture—everything seemed to reset every night—but maybe this would help to break the cycle. She didn’t destroy it, or rip it down, because it was still a part of her past, just like Roy was, and because she’d put a damn lot of work into it way back when. But she slid it into the closet and closed the door on it. It was time to put away childish things—like the belief that Roy was it for her.

It was also time to sleep. She’d figure out what to do with that stupid booze cruise tomorrow, assuming she didn’t wake up here, back in her childhood bedroom. Assuming she woke up again next to Roy. She’d deal with that if it came up—but she kind of assumed it would.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She let it ring. She wasn’t looking forward to going on the booze cruise again, but she’d promised herself—after all, if there was a solution to this thing it probably lay there, in redoing whatever it was that she’d left screwed up before. Though how she was supposed to figure that out with the giant disillusionment of Roy’s proposed date staring her in the face, she couldn’t quite make out.

Maybe that was it. Maybe what she needed to do was figure out how to get Roy not to propose June 10th as a wedding date. Or any wedding date for that matter. Oh, obviously, that wasn’t the only thing she needed to do: she was pretty sure he hadn’t picked a date on the cruise when she’d drunk until she passed out either, though she had to admit that she couldn’t be entirely sure. And probably he hadn’t on the days she wasn’t there, though the fact that he’d done it when Pam wasn’t in the room that one time she’d been with Larissa outside gave her a little pause.

In any case, it wasn’t sufficient but she suspected it might be necessary. So she went about her day with that in mind. She bought Dwight’s wallet again, just to have something to fiddle with when she was waiting to get through the day. She could tell she was settling into the routine. There was Angela, buying two Baby Ruths from the vending machine and dropping one off for Dwight as she always did. There was Kevin misplacing a 7 as a 1 and running around like a chicken with his head cut off looking for $6,000 of lost revenue until Oscar quietly got up, typed a decisive single number on Kevin’s spreadsheet, and calmed the big man down. There was Kelly, running crying into the bathroom after Ryan said something stupid, and there she was fifteen minutes later ignoring him as if he didn’t exist. It wasn’t all that different from any other day, really, but she was all the more familiar with it, and it almost lulled her to sleep.

The one thing that kept her awake, though, was Jim. She wasn’t sure what it was about him—after all, if she could recognize the same things in everyone else’s day to day routine, why wasn’t his repeating itself in the same way?—but he always had something slightly new to say. He’d make a slightly different joke about jelly beans, or nod at Michael’s retreating back and make a different face, or wink at her when before he’d knocked on the desk.

Maybe, she reflected during Kelly’s fifteen minute sob, it was because what Jim did involved her in a way that no one else’s day did. Jim made his jokes to her, got his jellybeans from her, knocked on her desk. It was inevitable that if she made a slightly different response, because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard a joke or made a comment, he’d make a slightly different response back until their dynamic was…well, not entirely different, but just unusual enough to keep her awake. She couldn’t be sure that this time when he approached her desk he’d say or want or do the same thing as the last time—or rather, the last cycle—unlike Dwight’s repetitive request for twenty-three copies of a single purchase order, or Michael’s exactly repetitive infantile jokes. It was actually pretty impressive that each of them was so similar time after time—but also soul-sucking in a deep and painful way.  She’d thought before these cycles even began that she’d heard Michael’s same jokes too often, but now she knew that she had had no idea whatsoever of what she was talking about.

She spent most of the day trying valiantly to overcome her instinct to rush ahead: to act like people had already said what they had to say, or done what they had to do, because of course she already knew it all. The last few hours, however, she realized that while she was still pretty sure that the booze cruise held the key to whatever was making her repeat the day, Bill Murray hadn’t just fixed his lazy reporting, or his relationship with his producer, he’d fixed the whole town’s day. And that meant she might need to make her work life as good as possible as well as improving the cruise.

So she conscientiously closed the Freecell window (apparently random numbers generated the same across cycles: she’d had to press the button for a new random seed every day to make sure she didn’t just play the same game each ever iteration, alternating between traditional Windows Klondike solitaire and Freecell). Instead of solitaire, she dove into territory she usually avoided: the branch client directory. OK, she didn’t actually avoid it as such, because she had to use it whenever one of the sales or customer service reps had something to send out or needed her to do their calling for them (not actual sales calls, of course, but things like scheduling with the secretaries of busy offices to make sure that the sales calls would find someone at work who could make a purchase order). But she avoided it as much as she could, and she had pulled out a large number of frequent clients’ information onto the gigantic mass of Post-It notes that continually threatened to overwhelm her desk. This was because the directory was poorly organized, for one, but even more it was because no one had actually ever taught her how to use it. Before Roy had gotten her this job, Michael had contrived to drive away six secretaries in five months (which she desperately hoped was a record that would stand for a while), and only secretarial staff actually had to use this particular directory: it included different information than the sales, customer service, quality assurance, and managerial databases, each of which was separately hosted and managed.

God, someone needed to overhaul the technology at this company. She giggled to herself as she remembered the Dunder Mifflin “website,” long-promised but never realized. Jim had tried to convince her once that it was the Platonic ideal of a website. He’d stolen Dwight’s glasses and droned on in a mock-lecture like a particularly bad English professor she’d had before she dropped out of college: “a website with no actual content, always striving, always improving, always about to be and never bogged down in the prosaic reality of ‘is’: it’s the future, Pam, because it’s never stuck in the present.” They’d laughed long and hard that day.

But the result of all this technological mayhem was that there was no one around who knew the least thing about how to actually use the secretarial client directory back when she was hired, and so no one to train her. The extent of her training had been Michael showing her the computer, waving his hand, and saying “there’s some kind of directory or something in there. Or as I call it, an indirectory,” while looking at her expecting some kind of response. So she had taught it to herself, but the sheer unpleasantness of the experience meant she only knew the most surface-level functionality of the database, and she used it as little as possible.

That changed today.

She dug through the bottom drawer of far side of her desk, where she’d stuck everything she didn’t feel comfortable disposing of but didn’t really use or need. Aha! There it was, printed on old dot-matrix paper with the edges still on: “A Brief Guide to the Dunder Mifflin Client Directory.” The copyright date was in Roman numerals. She flopped the printouts onto the desk in front of her and began to go through it line by line. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

Well, something better to do of course came along, in the form of one Jim Halpert. She was halfway through Section IV Paragraph iii: Advanced Searches when his friendly face hove into view above the desk.

“So what do we have here? Doing some office archaeology?” He fingered the paper. “Do we even still sell this stuff?”

She shook her head. “I think we stopped before I got hired, actually.”

“So as far as we know, we’ve never sold this.”

“Right.” They were leaning together, whispering conspiratorially, and she felt genuinely happy for the first time all day.

“So as I see it, we have two options.” He glanced at her, his eyebrow raised in challenge, clearly expecting her to guess what the options he saw were. Fortunately, she knew him.

“Option one is asking Dwight to reorder it, isn’t it?” He grinned at her in approval and gestured for her to go on. “And option two…tell him we have an unauthorized paper breach and need to seal the exits and look for the culprit?”

“Very nice, Beesly.” He tapped the desk. “I was going to go for ‘hide it in his desk overnight and ask him tomorrow if he got the new paper order,’ but I think yours are better.” She grinned up at him. This was just who Jim was: generous to a fault, always willing to admit when her ideas matched up to or even bested his. Their eyes met for a moment before he turned aside to grab a jellybean. “So, you excited for tonight’s main event?”

She sighed. “Can’t you see how excited I am?” She gestured at the printouts. “I only bring this out on special occasions.”

He fingered the edge of the pages she’d set aside, where the dot edge was starting to fray off the main paper. “You did bring confetti.” He popped another jellybean. “And candy, of course.”

“Of course.” They grinned at each other until Dwight chose that moment to walk out of the men’s room and bark something at Jim about “lollygagging.” Jim mouthed “how old is he?” to Pam as he made his way back to his desk.

The rest of the training went remarkably quickly after  that.

The cruise, on the other hand, felt interminable. Pam went through the motions, listening to Katy, teasing Jim mildly about her cheerleading tendencies, cringing at Michael’s inanity, but her mind was focused on making sure Roy didn’t pick a date in public, and that meant she was on edge all evening. She managed to get him to stop taking snorkel shots by the simple expedient of not going outside (she felt the loss of that little bit of time with Jim keenly, but ignored it: one had to make sacrifices for the greater good sometimes. In this case, the greater good was not having her drunken boor of a fiancé make a fool of them both in public). Instead, she grabbed the snorkel and poured orange juice into it, convincing Katy that alternating that with a bottle of champagne she found in the…what did you call a kitchen on a boat? The larder? The galley?...made a passable mimosa and then relying on the cheerleader’s good will to get the boys to play nice and stop pouring pure grain alcohol down the damn thing. When Roy belched (a side-effect of chugging champagne she hadn’t anticipated) and went wandering towards Captain Jack, she tried to follow, but Katy grabbed her instead and she lost sight of him. Apparently the mimosas had put Katy in mind of brunch, and from brunch she’d moved on to wedding breakfasts and then to engagements, which meant they were right back on track with that awful conversation about how one got engaged. Was Jim really getting engaged to Katy? She felt that awful sensation in her stomach you get when you try to run after eating Mexican food, and had to run to the bathroom. There she found Roy once again listening to Captain Jack in a weird drunken rapture. She listened to the same patter about saving people (really, Jim, the customer? Really Captain Jack, your “first” wife?) but she didn’t have the time to stop what she was worried was happening: her stomach needed her more than her heart right then.

When she slunk out of the…head?...she caught sight of Jim pacing around the cabin, but didn’t see Roy anywhere. She headed towards Jim and heard him muttering something about “saving the receptionist.” Wait, what?

Before she could entirely process what she’d just heard, there was the telltale screech of the microphone and Roy’s voice. “Hello, everybody…”

She couldn’t stand it. She ran into the room just as Roy got to “could I have your attention” and grabbed the microphone. “Pammy!” he cried as she wrestled him for it, and (thankfully) managed to get it entirely in her hands.

“Sorry, folks, I think it’s time we cut this guy off, don’t you?” Appreciative chuckles greeted her, but she could feel Roy behind her starting to get angry. She looked around, made eye contact with Michael, and felt fate touch her. “Meanwhile, ladies and gentleman, the comedy stylings of Michael! Gary! Scott!” She tossed Michael the microphone (which, in a miracle, she didn’t throw into the ceiling or someone’s face and, miracle squared, he actually caught) and dragged Roy out onto the deck with sheer willpower.

“But Pammy!” His anger had apparently passed into the sad-drunk stage. “I was gonna propose to you!”

Sad-drunk Roy wasn’t worth her anger, so she let it go with a sigh. “Roy, we’re already engaged.”

He swung a hand in front of his face like he was swatting a fly and began to slur his words. “Tha didn’t count.” Apparently mimosas made him sleepy—or maybe it was the release of all the tension he’d worked himself up to in proposing. “Gotta pick a date for itta count.” He slumped and she was lucky to be able to slide him onto one of the benches by the outside rail before he collapsed entirely. “Doan count.” He was out.

She slumped down herself. That had been close. No, not close: she had to admit, even after the last few cycles, it was still a direct hit to her feelings, if not a public humiliation in the way that being proposed to again was. She sat next to her erstwhile fiancé, tears pricking her eyes, and then shook her head. This wouldn’t do. She’d have to do better next time.

But for now…at least she’d avoided doing it in public.

Maybe next time she could figure out what Jim meant by that receptionist line. For now, though, she was too emotionally drained to deal with anything more. And anyway, it wasn’t like she didn’t have time. 

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Today, she decided as she flipped the alarm off and headed for the shower, she was going to forget all about that stupid booze cruise and the engagement that “didn’t count” and all of it. She was going to disappear: it was time to find out what the hell was so exciting about a shiatsu massage in Stamford, CT that justified its presence in the brochure rack in the Scranton library.

But first, of course, she had to get through the routine of the start of the day. Well, she didn’t, actually, but she was a creature of habit (ironically, she thought, given that she was replaying the day over and over again with variations—maybe next time she’d try letting it all play out the same way it did the first day, just for diversity’s sake). So being formed of the habits she had accumulated over the years, she would go through the morning as she found it, and then make her by-now-also-habitual escape from Dunder Mifflin closer to noon.

The knowledge that she was going to make a run for it later emboldened her in the morning as well. She made pancakes instead of bacon and eggs for breakfast, even though Roy hated pancakes (or at least her pancakes) unless they had chocolate chips in them, which she refused to include. So maybe it was petty. She didn’t care. She made tea instead of coffee too, even though Roy swore he couldn’t wake up from “sissy teas” and needed coffee.

After all, she thought, he wasn’t going to be awake enough to appreciate it.

And indeed, he ran through the house at full speed as usual, gathering their things and barely casting a glance at the kitchen table where the leftover pancakes lay. He didn’t even grab the thermos of tea she’d put out for him. Why did she even bother? Or, more to the point, why hadn’t she thought of this before? Sure, Roy had his preferences, but he was so rarely around to actually take advantage of those preferences, so why should she cater to them? She was the one eating breakfast. She could make her own damn food and drink to suit her. Or…maybe someday someone could make them for her? God knew that wasn’t Roy, but since the whole Roy thing seemed destined to a quick end if she ever got out of this loop, maybe someone else?

She didn’t have time to reflect on that thought; it had actually been a miracle that Roy and the radio were both quiet enough for her to reflect that much in the car. Now she was at work, and it was time to pick something out of the vending machine to annoy Dwight and please Jim.

Now, what would…

Oh.

Oh.

“I feel like a change today,” she said, slotting her coins into the machine as Dwight tried to remonstrate with Jim. Tried being the operative word, since her presence seemed to defang his physicality somehow, almost as if he needed more space to become truly angry and her slipping in beside him deprived him of the option. That was the germ of an idea for a prank actually. She’d have to tell Jim later.

Ca-thunk said the machine, and she was the proud possessor of one Dwight K. Schrute nameplate.

“Pamela! You are not authorized to use the name Dwight K. Schrute for business or personal purposes!”

She was saved from the necessity of replying by Jim. “Ew, Dwight, gross image. Pam doesn’t need your personal purposes.” She giggled, although the image was indeed disgusting. Angela could have all of Dwight’s personal…purposes, thank you very much. Dwight, however, appeared ignorant of what Jim was implying.

“What? I was merely informing Ms. Beesly here that any attempt to pass herself off as Dwight K. Schrute, or indeed any other Schrute, will result in legal action for fraud.”

“Sure you were.”

“I’ll have you know the Schrute name is famous in certain circles, and I will not have a mere Beesly besmirching it.”

“Certain circles?”

“Yes, I…”

“Would those be beet-growing circles, or Nazi circles, Dwight?”

Dwight didn’t seem to notice the dig. “Beet-growing circles, of course: we Schrutes have been well-known as Rübenbauers for years, both in the Old Country and here in Pennsylvania.” He sniffed. “My grandfather the war hero” another sniff “was not a Schrute, since he was my mother’s father.”

“Not a Schrute?” Pam clutched her newly bought prize to her chest. “But you said he was the bravest man you’ve ever known.”

“He was, Pamela.” Dwight drew himself up to his full height: this was less than impressive given that Jim still towered over him and Pam herself was sufficiently short as to make the gesture ridiculous. “Many a time I heard his stories of the Blitzkrieg and…”

Pam decided to interrupt. “But Dwight, doesn’t that mean that being a Schrute makes you less brave?”

Jim leapt on her suggestion, as she’d known he would. “Yes, Dwight,” he nodded sagely. “Pam’s right, you know. Every drop of Schrute blood makes you less like your grandfather.”

Dwight looked like he was going to cry. “Großvater mütterlicherseits,” he whispered to himself and shook his head for a moment. Then he visibly rallied himself before attempting to straighten even further. Unfortunately for him, since he’d already drawn himself up to his full height this had the effect of causing him to bend over the other way, extending himself as if he were going under a limbo bar. “No! He chose my father for my mother himself as the most worthy murmeltierführer in the land. My bloodline is strong!” He snapped at Jim. “Do not insult a Schrute!”

Pam, who had slipped behind Dwight towards the door while he dealt with his personal demons, winked at Jim around Dwight’s bent back. “That’s right, Jim, don’t insult a Schrute.” She opened the door and delivered her parting shot as she ran back to her desk. “After all, I’m Dwight K. Schrute.”

“You are not!” Dwight stuck his head out of the door after here.

“Sure I am! I have the desk plaque to prove it.” All in all, a satisfying prank.

Even more satisfying, because it was more hers, was the prank she outlined for Jim while they waited for Stanley to discern that this was a booze cruise.

“So I just keep moving everything else in the office towards his desk?”

“One at a time, an inch or two at a time, over a few weeks, yes.” As she’d explained, once Dwight found himself hemmed in on all sides he’d want to explode but not have the physical space to do so.

“What about the walls?”

“What about them, Halpert?” She raised a challenging eyebrow and Jim popped a jellybean into his mouth.

“I suppose I could get some sheets of luan from my friend Hank—he works for a theater supply company…” She laughed. “What?”

“Jim, there are no walls around Dwight.” She collapsed into giggles at her desk and Jim looked around before realizing that she was right. He smiled wryly down at her.

“Except the walls around his heart, Pam, except the walls around his heart.”

“Oh, no, I’m pretty sure…” Angela walked in from the annex and Pam changed the topic. “Anyway, we’ll have to move Phyllis’s desk a little, but I don’t think she’d mind, do you?”

He snorted. “I don’t think she’d notice. But no, she wouldn’t mind even if she did.”

“And obviously we’ll have to move the cabinet next to Meredith’s desk, but if we just put in something with a space for her to keep booze in, I don’t think she’ll care.”

“Are you kidding? She’ll probably insist we keep it that way afterwards.”

“Exactly.” They smiled at each other. This feels right, Pam thought. Nothing else in this stupid day goes right, but playing pranks with Jim always feels right. Before she had time to explore the thought further Stanley returned, and Jim went to find out from him about the booze cruise, and it was time for her to sneak out again.

Twenty minutes later she was blowing down the interstate towards Connecticut, listening to the classical station Roy never let her tune to and sipping the large tea she’d gotten from the gas station where she’d filled the truck.

Three hours after that she was stuck in traffic in Stamford, Connecticut, wondering what had made her forget that the drive from Scranton to Stamford would land her in the start of rush hour traffic when she arrived. The shiatsu place was, ironically, across the street from Dunder Mifflin Stamford, and she was waiting for space to open up on the other side of the intersection for her to cross. She knew it was overly defensive driving not to be in the intersection already—Roy would have called her a “pussy”—but she’d been taught that if there wasn’t space, you didn’t go.

Just as the space opened up and she started forward, the giant Mack truck waiting to take a left decided she wasn’t going at all and started its turn. She slammed on the pickup’s brakes, the Mack truck gunned its engine to get past her, and she heard a thump from somewhere to her right. A woman had run out of the doors of Dunder Mifflin Stamford and begun to cross the street just as the truck moved, and in his hurry to avoid Pam the driver hadn’t noticed her at all.

Pam pulled into a parking space on the far side of the intersection, her hand shaking. Someone must have called 9-1-1, because she watched as first the police and then EMTs came and took care of the situation. An officer came over and talked to her—or he must have, but she found she couldn’t remember anything they’d spoken about, other than that he was assuring her she had had the right of way and wasn’t at fault.

“Is the woman going to be OK?” she asked when he was done.

“Her ribs must be made of stone,” came the reply. “She seems OK, but they’ve taken her to Bennett for observation anyway.” He paused. “Did you know her?”

“Oh, we both work for Dunder Mifflin,” she replied before she thought.

“Ah.” Fortunately he didn’t seem inclined to follow up on this. “Well, I’m sure she’ll be happy to have visitors if you wanted to stop by.” He closed by taking the last of her contact information before thanking her for her time and reminding her that she might hear from various insurance companies about the incident. “But for now, you’re free to go.”

She let out a rush of air. She wasn’t going to hear from any insurance companies, she reminded herself. This was all going to reset tomorrow. None of it was permanent, and since it was her presence (or rather, her unwillingness to block the box of the intersection) that had caused the accident, it was unlikely that the other woman would be in any real danger if she didn’t come back to Stamford. Still, it didn’t seem right to just go get a massage. She was already parked, and before she could think any more she found herself out of her car and climbing the stairs to Dunder Mifflin Stamford.

The view was breathtaking, she had to admit, as she stepped up to reception and looked out at the giant picture window with a view of the ocean. She greeted the receptionist by name (the secret network of receptionists at Dunder Mifflin was a strong society) and asked about the woman who’d just left.

“That must be Karen Filippelli. Karen’s good people. You’d like her.” The other receptionist nodded firmly. “Good people.”

“Uh…I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but…” Pam detailed the accident and that Karen was being taken to the hospital for observation. “If you know her emergency contact…she was apparently stable, but I don’t know what that means or if she could contact anyone or anything.”

“Oh my god! Thank you Pam, I’ll get on that immediately.” The other receptionist was already shuffling through papers. “In the meantime…feel free to use the break room if you need anything or the bathroom or anything like that. Mi branch es su branch.”

Pam smiled, thinking of all the horrific hay Michael Scott could make out of that statement, and slipped out of the office while the other woman was dialing whoever Karen’s emergency contact was.

Karen Filippelli. Maybe she’d pay this “good person” a visit sometime when she wasn’t busy being hit by a truck. After all, she had nothing but time now, and she felt a little responsible: presumably on the previous cycles this woman had been perfectly OK. She ignored the little voice that said she’d be perfectly OK on any future cycles if Pam didn’t interfere, and drove the three hours back to Scranton in a somewhat depressed silence, only made worse because she remembered she’d have to do all of this again tomorrow, with the addition of a booze cruise.

At least with the booze cruise, nothing got hurt but her feelings.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Time to put the day before and the awful tingles running down her spine behind her—since as far as she could tell, they couldn’t have happened to anyone but her, and were now consigned to the dustbin of history—and figure out what she was going to do with today’s booze cruise. She sighed. The awful thing was that she didn’t want to do anything with today’s booze cruise. She didn’t want to do anything at all. It all felt so pointless. She was engaged to Roy, but she didn’t really want to be anymore, and she was going to have to deal with all of that on the cruise. The anticipation of what Michael’s “secret” camaraderie event might be would be energizing all of her coworkers, at least until noon or so, but it had no pull for her since nothing she did seemed to change it (which wasn’t a surprise, as even Michael had to have planned this before today). The prank on Dwight was a bright spot to look forward to, of course, but it was over so quickly and then she was staring at hours of vague to more-than-vague disquiet and discomfort.

She sat there staring at the ceiling as the alarm blared again and finally decided she might as well get up. She thought in the shower (cut short without washing her hair because she didn’t want to manage to miss the morning’s prank—and because the hair would be exactly the same “tomorrow” anyway) about how she might make today less pointless. How could it help her move towards a better life, or a better world, or whatever it was she needed to do to break this cycle of cycles?

She realized she didn’t know: but more than that, she realized why she didn’t know. She’d been too busy paying attention to her own emotions, especially that first time but just as much in the subsequent iterations of that night, to notice what was going on around her. Jim, apparently, was muttering to himself about saving her (whatever that meant: the boat wasn’t really going down, she knew. And hey, maybe he had another receptionist in mind, though she doubted it). Katy was longing to be engaged, whether to Jim or not she couldn’t entirely say, though it was probably to Jim. Who wouldn’t want to be engaged to Jim? He was funny, he was considerate, he was…anyway, he was Katie’s whatever-he-was, so of course she was probably thinking about being engaged to Jim. Maybe she could help with that? It didn’t exactly make her jump with joy to think about, but then again Bill Murray hadn’t really enjoyed catching that kid who fell out of a tree and never thanked him. And while she was doing that, maybe she could figure out who else had problems she could help solve. That was how Bill had fixed the cycling: not just figuring out his own romantic and emotional state (he’d keyed in on Rita pretty early, actually, though perhaps the rest of it was necessary to make him a person worthy of her) but fixing the world around him too. So she’d go through the cruise today like an anthropologist or a sociologist or something, observing those around her and seeing what she could help them fix. And maybe, if she felt like it, help Katy. Not that she deserved it.

OK, she probably did deserve it. Pam felt more than a little bad about how she felt about Katy, even though she couldn’t help it. It wasn’t actually Katy’s fault that Roy and Kevin and everyone had treated her like she was better than Pam just because she was hot. In fact, Pam’s brain but not her heart had to concede that it was probably just as annoying to Katy to have guys acting that way about her looks as it was to Pam, because it was 110% sexist and reduced her to nothing more than a pretty face. But Pam still couldn’t help but resent a little bit someone who had been a cheerleader, someone who her own fiancé leered at, someone who had pursued her own dreams (or at least so Pam assumed, because she didn’t know how you got into freelance purse-selling otherwise), someone with a sufficient sense of self that she could break out into a high-school cheer at a booth on a lake cruise without self-consciousness. Sure, that might indicate that Katy was just as mired in high school as Roy, but the rest of her life pointed in the other direction. She was dating Jim, for god’s sake, she obviously had her life in order. Which…well, if Pam had had hers in order, she wouldn’t have this endlessly repeating day to relive, would she? So she’d see if she could help Katy, even if it grated a bit to do so.

But right now she’d get in the truck and go to work, because she’d somehow managed to dress herself, make breakfast, and wait for Roy on autopilot while she debated what to do with the day. That wouldn’t do. She had to maintain her focus, or else she wouldn’t be able to help anyone because she’d be too wrapped up in her own head—again.

One prank later (back to the tried and true pencil cup, though this time she also noticed a bundle of pencils in one slot and shook things up by buying two items so she could fill the cup with Dwight’s stuff as well) she was making a spreadsheet on a piece of graph paper of who she could help and how. Unfortunately, it would be erased (or maybe retconned? She still wasn’t entirely sure on her terminology) when she rebooted tomorrow, but it helped her organize her thoughts.

Katy: wants to be engaged to Jim: ask hint to Jim? Answer her question about engagements?

Jim: unclear: ask don’t stare for 27 seconds pay attention to him

Kelly: wants Ryan: hint to Ryan? Get Jim to throw him at her?

Toby: needs happiness: ?????

Michael: wants to be the center of attention: keep him and Captain Jack apart?

She didn’t have anything for the rest of the office, but she was sure it would come to her. Maybe she could help Dwangela with their relationship somehow? But the fact that it was entirely undercover (or potentially entirely in her own brain, but she no longer believed that after the last few months) meant that might not be a good idea because it implied forcing them to acknowledge it.

Tentatively at the bottom she added the one thing she thought of:

Pam: doesn’t want to be with Roy:

Then there were footsteps in front of her and she crumpled the paper and shoved it forcibly into her purse.

“Whatchya got there, Beesly?” Jim was taking a jellybean and for some reason she couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Just…something I’m working on.”

“Well, I hope it wasn’t a sketch, because I think,” he leaned over and whispered and she found herself leaning closer to hear him “you might have ruined the paper.” He straightened up. “Just a guess, but I do know something about paper. I work for a paper company, you know.”

“You do?” She brought her hand to her mouth in mock-shock.

“Indeed. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s kind of a big deal, called Dunder Mifflin?”

She looked up at him with wide eyes. “Wait, you do work?”

He shook his head. “Not if I can help it.” They smiled at each other. “Anyway, I came up to tell you I’m going to get Stanley to check out this camaraderie event.”

“Sounds good. When he tells you it’s a booze cruise, act surprised.”

“A booze cruise?”

“Mhm. On Lake Wallenpaupack.”

“In January?”

She shrugged. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”

“You wound me, Beesly. Of course I trust you implicitly.” They exchanged another grin. “If this turns out to be right, though, I want you to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Only use your powers for good.”

“You got it, Halpert.” He grabbed another jellybean, tapped the top of her desk, and headed over towards Stanley. His words, however, remained with Pam.

“Only use your powers for good.”

Yes. That was what she was going to do. She needed to stop thinking about it as helping individual people and think about it more holistically: she was going to do good.

Seven hours later she was feeling like “doing good” was the last thing she wanted to do. She’d tried nudging Jim about Katy (“so, how’s that going?”) and received a noncommittal reply (“I guess you could say it’s going”) that had combined with her own mysterious reluctance to actually prod Jim in that direction to stymie any further conversation. After that failure she’d stopped trying to intervene tonight, remembering her earlier resolve to observe this time around and reload for more do-gooding in the future once she had all the information she could.

She was sitting back in the booth now noticing people around her. Kelly was edging closer to Ryan every few moments as if afraid he’d startle like a little bird. Dwight was outside “steering the ship” and…actually, she hadn’t seen Angela for a little while. There she was, just coming in, and boy did she look pissed. Maybe that was something to explore next time. Toby hadn’t actually made the boat: she’d seen him pulling up just as they cast off, and unsurprisingly Michael had refused to let them turn the boat around for him. Kevin was clearly having a grand old time, as were Darryl and the guys (and Katy) all doing snorkel shots. She slipped out to find Jim, and saw him standing by the rail staring out into space.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

She wasn’t going to ask about Katy. She wasn’t going to ask about Katy. She wasn’t going to ask about Katy.

“So, um…” Oh god neither of them had any idea what to talk about. What was wrong with them? They always had something to say to each other.

“It’s getting kind of rowdy in there.” It hadn’t really worked that first time, but it was better than nothing.

“Yeah.” Jim cocked his head to listen. “Darryl! Darryl! Darryl!” he mimicked.

She was not going to let this turn into that awkward conversation from the first time around. “At least his name’s easy to chant. Can you imagine if he was like…Aloysius? Or Obadiah?”

“Nehemiah.”

“Erasmus.”

“Hezekiah.”

“You’re just going through the Bible.”

“No, I’m listing Dwight’s cousins.”

She laughed. “Yeah. Mose! Mose! Mose!”

He pushed off the rail. “It’s getting kind of cold out here. You want to go in?”

“Sure.” He opened the door for her and they slipped into the cabin, only to be greeted by Michael with a frantic look on his face.

“Thank God you’re here, Jim, Captain Jack’s gone mad with power!”

Jim rolled his eyes at Pam. “Did he tell you you can’t capsize the ship as a training exercise?”

“That’s…that’s exactly what he did. Jim, you have to help me get through to him! It’s a Business Emergency!” Pam could hear the capital letters, and exchanged another eye roll with Jim as he was led away.

She found herself once again at a booth with Katy, and apparently the topic of engagements was an inevitable one. This time she let herself probe a bit.

“You and Jim, huh?”

“Well…” Katy blushed. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but…”

Pam did not want to hear the end of that sentence, so it came as a relief when someone tapped the microphone and interrupted Katy—but only for a millisecond, because she realized with a heavy heart that it was Roy. Of course. She hadn’t interfered with his plans tonight, or with Captain Jack’s stupid stories, so naturally here he was about to set a date.

She didn’t have the energy right now, not with Katy’s evident enthusiasm for an engagement with Jim, not with all the plans for helping everyone else pulsing through her brain, not with the swaying of the boat and the beer in her hand. She just went with what Roy said, what Roy asked, and wasn’t that always the way it was? Her going along with Roy? But at least this time she knew that it wasn’t permanent, that she could still come back and redo this moment and end up not engaged. Well, not with a June 10 date. No, not engaged at all, dammit. If she didn’t want to get married to Roy on June 10, and he didn’t want the same, they shouldn’t get married at all. Not this cycle—not any cycle.

And then Jim gave his painfully heartfelt toast, and Dwight interrupted him, and she noticed Jim slipping out of the doors with Katy.

Oh god, he was going to propose to her. It was suddenly clear to her in a flash. That was why Jim had been so awkward about his relationship with Katy. He was going to propose, and he didn’t know how to tell her that he was proposing to Katy, and so he’d dodged her questions about her being a cheerleader and about how their relationship was going. And now Roy had stolen his thunder, which was what made the toast feel awkward, and he was sneaking out on deck to do it while the feeling of romance was fresh.

She ignored the gaping holes in this theory, as well as the assumptions she was already making (why, for instance, would Jim find it so hard to tell her that he was marrying Katy?) and slid away from Roy’s side. She’d let them have their moment, of course, but she wanted to be there for him like he’d been there for her with the toast and everything. She snuck out a side door to the cabin and came up quietly behind Jim and Katy, trying not to look like she was eavesdropping while being very sure to do so as efficiently as she could. She wondered if he’d get down on one knee, or if he had a ring already. But no, they were standing side by side: if he was going to do anything, he must have done it already. Or maybe she was too early? She snuck closer and clung to the life rafts to stay out of sight.

“Roy looks so happy.” Katy gushed.

“Yeah.” Jim almost grunted the word.

“Do you think that will ever be us?” She was smiling up at Jim. Pam felt sick to her stomach. This was the moment.

“No.” Pam stifled a gasp, which was muffled by the sound of Katy turning on the squeaky deck.

“What is wrong with you? Why did you even bring me here tonight?”

“I don’t know. Let’s break up.”

“Whoa. What?” Jim turned away from Katy as she exploded in shock and Pam, feeling his gaze glance over her hiding space and pass onto the lake, took that moment to scuttle away.

What the hell was going on with Jim?

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Oh god, another day.

She knew she didn’t have it in her to even think about the booze cruise, or more specifically what she’d overheard towards the end of it, so she busied herself by spending an alarming intensity on her day-to-day tasks. She made sure the temperature on the shower was exactly what she wanted. She decided on oatmeal for breakfast, but one of those fancy oatmeals she’d seen on a kitchen blog she occasionally read for fun. As she was chopping apples and wondering if they still had the walnuts her aunt had given them for Christmas stuck somewhere in the back of the pantry, she focused on the people she could help.

Michael: it shouldn’t be too hard to find a way to get him to embarrass himself in the way he liked instead of the way he didn’t. Maybe she could get him some props for his business lecture that he could use inappropriately, but which wouldn’t cause people on the boat to throw themselves overboard.

Toby: well, he was probably actually pretty happy not being on the boat, but not about not being excluded by Michael intentionally. Maybe she could gently recommend that he come a little earlier…and there was probably something she could do to help on the happiness front, but she couldn’t think of it right now.

Dwight and Angela: was there something she could buy from the vending machine that would get Dwight to pay attention to Angela on the ship?

She sighed. This should be easier than it felt. Then again, how many times had Bill Murray had to do this? It must be thousands. She didn’t want to wait that long, but at least she could believe that she wasn’t being slow. It was just a matter of her not figuring things out. It took time.

Maybe she needed to get out of her own head.

As she ate the oatmeal (the recipe was disappointing, but she was glad she’d tried something new) she thought about the one person she had definitely hurt, not helped, during these cycles. Karen Filippelli. Apparently, according to Laurie, she was good people. Pam trusted Laurie as a judge of character; she’d known when Antonio at Utica was stealing supplies, after all. And Pam felt a burning need to know more about the woman she’d inadvertently caused to be hit by a truck, even if the woman in question was undoubtedly perfectly fine right now and the truck collision had happened in another dimension.

Well, she knew where she was driving this afternoon.

As to how she was going to actually talk to Karen or get introduced beyond hitting her with a car…she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

First, though, she had to go to work. Roy came charging in late again, they made their way into work in silence except for the radio, and she walked into the office at the normal time. This time she bought Dwight’s Rolodex.

At her desk, she flipped through the addresses and phone numbers. Most of them were duplicates from the directory system, of course. That made sense, because Dwight had always told Jim (loudly enough that the whole office could hear) that “you can’t trust the computer system. They can delete things remotely!”

Jim had, of course, replied by asking why the company would choose to delete its own customer database, but Dwight had just sniffed and told Jim he wouldn’t understand.

That seemed to be his default response when he was bested, she’d noticed.

But there weren’t just customers in here, or if they were customers they weren’t in her directory (it did occur to her for a moment that Dwight could be right about the company’s systems, but she dismissed this as unlikelier than that he was using the Rolodex for other information).

The best part was when she got to the Ms. Martin, Angela was in there. She quickly flipped back and forth and confirmed there was no Beesly, Pamela or even Halpert, James. No one else in the office at all, in fact. Just Martin, Angela.

And there was a surprising amount of information about Angela Martin contained on this device. Birthday. Phone number. Favorite food. Favorite food (subcategory: beets). Favorite animal (sub-category: non-feline). A myriad of other preferences. Address. Parents’ names. Best friends’ names. This last category confused Pam for a little while until she registered that they were all cats.

It was actually an overwhelming amount of information. Pam didn’t know half these things about Roy, and they were engaged. Dwight Schrute had clearly been doing his homework.

Jim stepped up to her desk, and she instinctively filed the Rolodex over to G (Gebrasalassie, Hailie). She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want Jim using this in a prank against Dwight. She’d told him about her suspicions before and he’d doubted her; he didn’t deserve to use it now, and more to the point Angela and even Dwight deserved the chance to let their love flourish.

That didn’t mean, though, that she wasn’t glad to talk to Jim. And as they bantered back and forth about the Rolodex (though not the Angela page) she started to think about Jim more seriously.

She knew his birthday (October 1, 1978). His phone number (570-555-8872, though she didn’t have it programmed into her phone because…well, she wasn’t entirely sure why but the idea of Roy finding it terrified her for some reason). His favorite food, his favorite animals (even the ones that weren’t cats), all of it. His parents were Gerald and Elizabeth: always Gerald, never Elizabeth, he’d once joked, because his mother’s mother was also Elizabeth (Liza) and so his mom was Betsy, but his dad hated the name Gerry.

Why did she know this? Because she’d noticed it, she realized. Because he’d mentioned these things one at a time over years and she had, without really being aware of what she was doing, clutched at everything he’d told her. She wondered if he’d done the same. She wondered if he’d done the same with Katy and felt guilty. She didn’t even bother to wonder if Roy had done that for her, just as she knew she hadn’t with him. Oh, she knew most of it because they’d been together for years, but his favorite animal? Maybe a dog? Roy wouldn’t have told her that because he’d never have thought about a question that frivolous, and she wouldn’t have told him hers because he wouldn’t have cared.

She realized she was thinking about Roy in the past tense.

At some point she slipped out of the office (it was becoming a habit) and turned the car north towards Stamford. The three hour drive gave her some time to think.

She liked Jim. This much was obvious. They were best friends. He’d been her best friend for…longer than she cared to realize, actually, since Izzy who had been her best friend had stopped hanging out with her. Well, that was unfair. She’d stopped hanging out with Izzy, because every time she had made plans with her Roy had come up with some reason she couldn’t go, or he’d gotten mad that she’d gone. Not ostentatiously mad in the way that made for obvious abuse. Not even really angry. Just put out and pouty and wondering where his dinner was. It wasn’t that he ever prohibited her from seeing Izzy, he just made it more unpleasant to do so. He sucked the joy out of it, and eventually they just stopped seeing each other very much. But he couldn’t stop her seeing Jim, and he hadn’t even managed to make her dislike seeing him—though he had, she realized, made her feel guilty about it. Why else was Jim’s number not saved in her phone, so that the rare calls they made to each other looked like he was someone unimportant: the dry cleaners, maybe, or the mechanic. He was her best friend, dammit. She pulled into rest area and programmed his name into her phone. Jim Halpert. There. It wouldn’t last the night, of course, but that was hardly her fault, and it made her feel better.

Jim was her best friend. But was he more than that? He was always there for her. She thought he might like her, actually, when she first started. Well, not just like her. He clearly did like her, or at least find her less objectionable than everyone else in the office (which was admittedly not a high bar now that she thought of it). He went out of his way to hang out with her. He seemed to smile at her more. She’d thought at first that meant he like liked her, like Roy did or something. Their first lunch out when they were just starting out at Dunder Mifflin had felt a lot like a date: Cugino’s wasn’t the most romantic spot in Scranton, but it also wasn’t the sort of place most people ended up in a short lunch hour, and he’d stared into her eyes in a way that had made her face feel warm. She’d ended up mentioning Roy in passing as they walked back to his car and now that she thought about it (and while she hadn’t thought about it thought about it in years, it had felt oddly like a raw tooth that you can’t help poking with your tongue, so she’d thought about it enough in the intervening time to remember well) he’d almost stumbled when she’d said it. He’d played it off as some kind of joke, she couldn’t remember exactly what, but it had been the first time she’d seen what she thought of as Jim’s Roy-face: the little twist in his mouth he sometimes got when she mentioned Roy.

That face had bothered her for years, actually, because she felt disloyal to Roy that she let him do it, but she didn’t feel like it was such a big thing that she should actually say something to Jim. But she usually surprised it out of him: it didn’t just come every time her fiancé’s name was mentioned, so she let it slide. And besides, most of the time he made it, she agreed with him. He’d made it when Roy had cancelled their romantic weekend in the Poconos to go to Vegas with Kenny and he’d been surprised to see her at work when she was supposed to be on vacation. He’d made it when she’d worn her winter coat with the hole in it (just a little one,  but still, a hole) two weeks after confiding in him that she’d been planning to buy a new coat at a Macy’s sale, and she’d had to confess that Roy had spent the budget she’d had for that on rims for the truck. Most recently, he’d made it when she’d told him Roy hadn’t supported her about the graphic design internship, just for a moment, and she’d blown up at him because she couldn’t blow up at Roy.

And, she admitted to herself as she changed lanes, because every time she saw that face it felt like an I told you so.

But what if it wasn’t an I told you so? What if it was something more…personal? More intimate?

What if it was an I could do better?

Before today—not this particular cycle, this whole damn day-within-a-day process she was apparently condemned to—she would have been angry if she’d let herself have that thought. How dare he think he knew better than she did? How dare he judge her relationship? But today, she didn’t feel that upswell of indignation. She felt hope. She felt like there was the possibility—just the possibility—that she wanted his face to mean that. And that terrified her almost as much as knowing for sure that Roy didn’t really want to marry her had.

She pulled into Stamford and decided against going directly to Dunder Mifflin. She couldn’t decide how to meet Karen Filippelli (did you just march up to the desk and say “tell her not to cross the street at 3:30?”) and so she headed instead to the shiatsu massage place—but she parked the block before so she couldn’t trigger that horrible accident again.

The massage place was just as good as she’d imagined it had to be if there was going to be a flier for it in Scranton. She felt relaxed, calmed, at peace. Even with the turmoil roiling her life, she was able to breathe more easily.

She was standing in front of the cash register waiting to finish paying (there was a surprising line; it must be a really popular place) when Karen Filippelli walked out of one of the other rooms, carrying some stuff in a shoulder bag labeled “Dunder Mifflin.” Pam recognized it as free swag given out by corporate for some kind of logo rebranding and environmental push two years ago.

“Hey.”

“Hi?” The other woman seemed skeptical of this stranger trying to address her in a public space.

“Do you work at Dunder Mifflin? Sorry, I noticed the bag.” Pam gestured lamely at the bag which proudly proclaimed “Using Only Old-Growth Trees!”

“Oh! Yeah, I…I’m sorry, have we met?”

“No, no, sorry! Pam Beesly, I work at the Scranton branch.”

Karen stared at her strangely. “Karen Filippelli. Scranton’s a long drive. What are you doing all the way up here?”

Pam gestured widely at the massage parlor around them. “Would you believe there was a flyer for this place in the Scranton public library?”

“Seriously?” Karen grinned, and her face was totally transformed. Pam felt like she could like that face. “That’s a long drive on a workday.”

“Yeah, but I really needed the massage.”

“Apparently.” Suddenly Karen clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh god. Scranton. You work with Michael Scott.” She grinned again. “You do need a massage.” She leaned past Pam to the woman working the cash register just as Pam moved to the front of the line. “Put her on my card, Anna.”

“You really don’t have to…”

“Oh, no, I’ve met Michael Scott. This is the least I can do for someone who has to deal with him every day.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.” Karen handed two cards to the lady at the register. “Besides, it gets me another punch on my frequent buyer card.”

“You come here that often?”

“It’s just across the street. And anyway, my boss might not be Michael but…it’s still a man’s world up there if you know what I mean.”

Pam nodded. She did. “Thanks. Can I buy you a coffee or something? Least I can do after you got the massage.”

Karen tucked her arm into Pam’s. “Sure. It’s not like I was looking forward to going back to work anyway.”

Karen led Pam down two storefronts into a Dunkin’ Donuts.  They ordered drinks (black coffee for Karen, iced latte for Pam) and sat in the window.

“So…Scranton…is it really as crazy as everyone says?”

“How crazy do they say it is?” Pam wasn’t sure how much to tell this woman, even if Laurie did think she was good people—and even if she was being incredibly nice to her.

“Well…let’s just say that every single training we have to do, Josh says it’s because of something down in Scranton. And I did meet Michael at the last sales convention, because Jan insisted I come as a female representative of the salesforce, and he wouldn’t stop talking to Jan.”

“Then no, it’s not as crazy as they say.” Karen looked briefly disappointed until Pam smirked. “It’s worse.”

She proceeded to tell Karen about the time their diversity day had turned into a stereotypes hour, and then about the time she and Jim had made up disease names to prank Dwight. She surprised herself by having the other woman in stitches by the time she was through. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself as funny, but Karen was literally gasping for breath.

“No, no, he didn’t say that.”

“I swear.”

“Oh god.” Karen wiped her eyes. “So how long have you and Jim been dating?”

“What?”

“You are dating, right?” Karen looked at the ring on her hand. “Oh! I’m sorry, you’re engaged! Congratulations!”

Pam turned beet red: she could see her own reflection in the window and worried it was going to try to run away. “No, I…I’m engaged to someone else. Roy. He…works in the warehouse.” Then she realized: she didn’t have to do this. Nothing she said had any consequences, and anyway, she didn’t want to be engaged to Roy anymore. So she could say what she wanted. “Well, I was…I don’t think it’s actually going anywhere.”

“I should say not!” Karen scooted her stool a little closer to Pam. “Come on, you’re really not dating this Jim guy?”

“…No.”

Karen rolled her eyes. “Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re super enthused about this Roy character either. You didn’t mention him once before I asked if you and Jim were dating.”

“No, as I said…I think that’s going to end sooner rather than later.” Probably before “today” actually ended, she thought, though obviously not this cycle.

“And then you’ll date Jim?”

“Why do you assume I’m going to date Jim?” Pam was red again, she could feel her face burning and the reflection looked almost maroon.

“I mean, I could say ‘because you talked about him nonstop’ or ‘because if he looks anything like as hot as you say he’s funny, you need to snatch that up,’ but I’ll go with ‘because you blush every time I say his name.’” Karen elbowed Pam lightly and winked. “Jim.”

Pam felt flames up the side of her face.

“See?” Karen glanced at her watch. “Look…Pam, I have to go, our boss has us doing a camaraderie event at 5, and I need to kick his ass at Call of Duty, but it was really nice to meet you. Give me a call some time—here’s my number—and tell me how things go with Jim.” She winked, tossed her cup into the trash, and walked out.

Pam sat and stared at her reflection, willing it to turn a normal color. It took a long time—but on the plus side, at least she got a second drink out of her iced latte, once the ice melted.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She took a deep breath in as she turned off the alarm. OK. Today was a simplified dry run: time to figure out if she could make some of her coworkers a little happier. Her mind shied away from the idea that she could, of course, try to make herself or Jim happier by breaking up with Roy. Even though that felt inevitable, she wasn’t sure she had the momentum built up to do that yet. Today was simpler. She had only two targets: Toby and Kelly. Everyone else could wait.

Well, she might indulge herself a little. After all, she already knew how easy it was to get Jim not to bring Katy, and she did like Larissa…

She prepared breakfast as usual, limiting her rebellion this morning to just not making Roy’s—she knew he’d come running out of the bathroom and forget it anyway. She bought Dwight’s nunchucks: he wasn’t even supposed to have them, so all it took was a pair of slightly widened eyes, a voice pitched slightly higher than normal, and the overly earnest delivery of the line “oh, were these your nunchucks? I was just going to hand them over to Hank as a safety violation” to send him fleeing in retreat. She smirked at Jim and initiated what she thought of as the Larissa protocol by asking about how she was doing, and hinting broadly that she was hoping to spend a lot of time this evening chatting with her, “that is, if you’re not bringing someone else to whatever it is Michael has planned for us.” Soon Jim was on the phone again, trying not to let her hear as he called Larissa. She giggled to herself. This was just like a giant prank on the universe, making it line up the way she wanted it to.

She had a flash of inspiration at the meeting where Michael officially unveiled the Booze Cruise plan. Remembering her earlier decision that she and Jim needed to help Brenda, she decided to take action. She swung back to the annex to suggest to Toby that he show Brenda around and keep her away from Michael. But apparently her throwing those two together was unnecessary: she found Toby and Brenda in a comfy coze in the break room, discussing something she didn’t quite process about Corporate’s new paperwork requirements. She slowly made herself tea (in her lovely new teapot! She needed to find a time to thank Jim properly for that) and waited for the perfect opportunity to drop in her two cents.

Like raindrops under dark grey skies, it was inevitable. Toby mentioned something about getting dinner before the cruise and Pam swooped in before Brenda could respond.

“Oh, you two should totally get dinner before the cruise.” She sat down next to Brenda, who looked at her somewhat oddly. Toby’s head jerked up—obviously he’d somehow managed not to notice she was standing behind him. “Sorry to interrupt, it’s just…” she bent closer to Brenda and stage-whispered. “You do not want to get stuck with Michael for dinner.” She winked at Toby, whose face turned an alarming shade of puce. “Hang close to Toby. He knows all the best ways to make Michael leave you alone.” Mostly just by being Toby, but Brenda seemed to have much more in common with the quiet HR rep than their overly enthusiastic boss. She turned to Toby with a smile. “Oh, Toby, do you have Sasha tonight? You should totally take her to dinner with you.” Leaning back to Brenda, she enthused quietly about Toby’s daughter and his devotion to her for a moment, recalling stories Jim and Toby had both told her about the girl (who Jim babysat due to his longstanding friendship with Toby). Then she stood up and grabbed the teapot with both hands. “I mean it, though, Toby—we’d all love to see more of Sasha.” It wasn’t a lie, precisely: she did like the girl. But she felt as awkward around her as she did around all children. Still, Brenda had perked up at the description of Sasha and anything that would keep her away from Michael (while giving Toby some company) was worth it, even a little light prevarication.

She was extremely pleased to note that Brenda and Toby both missed the boat’s sailing time, even though Michael insisted on holding it for ten minutes “just in case that hot corporate broad is running late.”

On the boat, she enjoyed her time with Larissa and Jim, and kept an eye open for ways to help Kelly. One time she noticed Ryan slipping out of the cabin, caught Kelly’s eye, and nodded towards the door, but generally he kept to himself and Kelly sat a table away staring at him while chattering overly-gaily to a couple of non-Dunder-Mifflinites she had aggressively befriended—most likely because of the location of their table, Pam thought.

Michael was being a lot better this evening, she thought. Maybe the absence of Brenda meant he didn’t feel quite as pressured to perform; or maybe it was just a trick of her memory. But one person’s better was another person’s worse, and she couldn’t help but frown as she watched Michael sit down next to Ryan and start making “hottest in the office” jokes. She was going to have to do something about that.

Since when was she responsible for Michael? Apparently since she was gifted some kind of power to redo every day, she thought. She looked for ways to intervene, but before she knew it, though, Roy was striding up towards the microphone, and she had to grab Larissa, blurt “bathroom” at Jim, who merely raised his eyebrows, and drag the younger woman outside with her.

Once they were at the rail, she shook her head. “Sorry, but I could tell Roy was going to propose back there, and…”

“Wait, back up.” Larissa held up her fingers and counted off points one by one. “First, aren’t you two already engaged? Second, why are you running away from him, engaged or not? Third, why bring me along?”

There were clearly more points, but Pam knew she didn’t have a lot of time. “First, yes but he doesn’t really count it. Second, I don’t want to be anymore. Third…it was you or Jim, and I’m not up for having this conversation with him yet.”

Unfortunately, Kelly chose that moment to burst out of the cabin. “PAAAAAM! Ohmigod! I can’t believe you’re out here, you totally need to come in and hear what Roy’s saying!”

Pam shoved herself wearily off the railing. “Did he just suggest we get married on June 10th?”

Kelly and Larissa stared at her. “How did you know? Did he already talk to you in advance? Ohmigod, Pam, can I be a bridesmaid?”

Pam glanced over at Larissa. This conversation was more important. And at the thought of smiling through another date-setting she knew was going nowhere, something inside her snapped. She turned to Kelly. “No.”

“What? Why? PAM! Is it something I did? Is it something I said? Is it….” Kelly was going to keep on listing questions and getting increasingly worked up so Pam stopped her the only way she could think of—with a full-body hug.

“No. It’s just that I don’t think I’m going to marry Roy.” Saying the words suddenly made things feel very clear to Pam. “Did he even notice I wasn’t in the room?”

“I mean...but…ohmigod, Pam, you’re not going to marry Roy?” For once Kelly was speechless. Pam gave her a pat and released her before extending a hand to Larissa. “Come on. I think I’m going to need some support.” But before she could talk to Larissa, she still had one thing to do. “Kelly, could I ask you a favor?”

“Anything! Ohmigod, this is crazy. Does this mean you aren’t engaged anymore?”

She smiled at her friend. Kelly was excitable, but she was a good person underneath all the poorly expressed enthusiasm. “Probably. But what I wanted to ask you doesn’t have to do with Roy. It has to do with Ryan.”

“Ryan?!? What’s going on with Ryan?” Kelly glared at Pam. “Wait, you’re not breaking up with Roy to take Ryan, are you? That’s, like, totally not fair. You have Roy and Jim, you don’t get to take Ryan too!”

“Hold on Kelly. I don’t have Ryan. I don’t have Jim, either, not that it’s any of your business, and we just discussed how I don’t think I’m going to have Roy much longer anyway. That’s not what this is about anyway. It’s just that I noticed Michael’s been kind of monopolizing Ryan’s time, and I think he could maybe use a distraction? Maybe someone really cool and hot and awesome who could take him somewhere on the boat and make him forget about Michael’s particular brand of humor?”

Kelly didn’t even bother to utter a spare ohmigod as she sped away from Pam back into the cabin.

“You do, you know.” Pam had almost forgotten Larissa was out there with her.

“I do what?”

“You do have Jim.” Larissa shrugged. “My brother’s completely gaga over you. I figured you knew.”

Pam felt her face flush hot against the cold air blowing off the lake. “Would it help or hurt if I told you I only figured it out today?” For a generous definition of today, but Larissa didn’t need to know that.

“So…” Larissa leaned against the railing and cocked an eyebrow at Pam. “Do I need to ask what your intentions are towards my brother? Because until tonight I’ve been telling him he needs to get the hell over you, but now I’m not so sure.”

Pam leaned up next to her. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t do that, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Which? Ask you your intentions or keep warning him off?”

Pam laughed humorlessly. “The second one. Or I guess, both, though I’ll happily tell you my intentions towards your brother once I can articulate them to myself.”

Once again she was interrupted by an eruption out of the cabin, this time by Roy himself, champagne bottle in hand.

“Pammy!”

“Hello, Roy.”

“Did Kelly tell you? We’re getting married on June 10!”

Pam sighed, and Larissa slipped an arm through hers for support. She looked her thanks and leaned against the other woman. “No, Roy, we’re not.”

“What?” He whispered the word as if he couldn’t find the breath to say it out loud.

“I said we’re not getting married on June 10.” She stood up, still holding Larissa’s arm, but no longer leaning on it. “In fact, I don’t think we should get married at all.” She worked the ring off her finger and put it into a stupefied Roy’s hand. “I’m sorry, Roy.”

“You’re SORRY?” His voice, which had died to a whisper, exploded into a roar. “Ten years and you’re sorry? I put myself on the line! I proposed to you in front of all our friends and coworkers, and this is how you repay me?”

Pam was shaking her head. “No, Roy, you didn’t even do that. You ‘proposed,’” and she made sure to pronounce the scare quotes “to a room full of friends and coworkers, but you didn’t propose to me. You didn’t even notice I wasn’t there. I left right before you walked up to the microphone, but you didn’t even see me. I’ve loved you Roy; I think a part of me will always love you. But I can’t do this anymore. Come on Larissa.” And she turned to walk away.

The rest of the night was a muddle: Captain Jack ended up having to tie Roy to the railing before he either attacked Pam or threw himself overboard, and Pam couldn’t find a time to continue her conversation with Larissa because she was instantly surrounded by Michael Scott (who insisted he would find someone else to marry her) and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin crew—with the notable exception of Kelly and Ryan, who she saw out of the corner of her eye sneaking into a supply closet together. So there was another good deed done.

Now she’d need to figure out a way to do it without causing this almighty ruckus when she broke up with Roy. But that was for another cycle.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She strongly considered just ignoring it out of spite at Roy, but thought better of it after the sound annoyed her. Anyway, Roy didn’t know what he’d done—this repetition thing really ruined the joy of a good sulk—so she turned off the alarm and went about the start of her day.

Today, she decided, she was going back to the abstract art class at the library. Well, “back” was such a relative term. But back for her, even though no one would have seen her before. Shit, she’d have to remember to introduce herself, even though she already knew these people in her mind. Well, that was OK. She’d manage. After all, she wasn’t that great with names and faces anyway, so it shouldn’t be too hard to re-make friends without seeming overly creepy. Should it?

The real question was, what should she do with the first half of the day, the part before she could sneak out of the office? She was pretty happy with how things had gone with Brenda and Toby; she could probably manage that again. It had also seemed to calm Michael down, but calming Michael was definitely something that had to be done in the moment: he was like a child that way, and no matter what she might say to him before 1pm he wouldn’t remember (or at least, wouldn’t act like he remembered it, which was kind of the point) by the time the actual cruise came along.

But she was not going on the cruise again. She was not. These even cycles were hers, dammit, and she wasn’t giving one up. She wanted to paint. She deserved to paint. She was going to paint. That was all there was to it.

But who else could she help? She thought about it as Roy drove her silently into work. She could do more work on Ryan and Kelly, she supposed; that hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped, though there was very clearly something there to work with. But that really left Jim and Katy—and Dwight and Angela, but their issues were definitely beyond her. She could maybe help them on the cruise—run interference? Pledge to both that she’d never mention their secret to anyone?—but not today. Today was about Jim…because she wasn’t going to see Katy anyway.

She shut her eyes and took a deep breath before delving into the morass she’d been trying vainly to avoid for two cycles now. What had Jim been thinking, breaking up with Katy? She’d seemed so serious about him, with her questions about engagement and her longing looks. She was gorgeous. Everyone said so, and Pam could see it herself. She wasn’t Pam 6.0; she was something completely and utterly different. It was like saying the sun was a lightbulb 6.0. When she walked into the room, people noticed. She still wasn’t entirely sure Roy, her fiancé (well, soon-to-be-ex, once she could figure that out, but still, her fiancé of three years so far) noticed she was in the car with him.

As if to emphasize this point, Roy started digging for something in his nose. Pam remembered reading that people only did that when they thought they were alone. And she could see why: it was disgusting to watch.

So, Jim and Katy. Why had he broken up with her? It had been when Pam had accepted Roy’s suggestion of June 10. Had he done that the other times she’d accepted Roy? Had he done it the last time, when she’d rejected him? She was suddenly, guiltily aware that she hoped the answer to both questions was yes. She knew she shouldn’t feel too guilty about her own feelings—even though Roy was sitting right there next to her, he’d been very clear a few cycles ago about how little he thought of them as a couple—but she felt guilty for not caring about Katy’s. She’d seen the hurt in Katy’s eyes when Jim had rejected her so quickly and utterly. What kind of person was she to hope for another person experiencing that kind of sheer unhappiness?

She needed to figure some things out about that relationship, even though she’d been trying to avoid doing so for months. Katy hadn’t been at Jim’s barbecue back in the fall, but he’d softly shot down Ryan’s question about getting her number (Pam felt a flush as she realized how well she remembered that short exchange). She was at the booze cruise, but it was the matter of a single sentence to get Jim to replace her with Larissa. Was this a casual thing for Jim? Did he even do non-casual relationships? Katy was the longest-term girlfriend of his (if she was that) that Pam could remember. Not that she and Jim talked about that (she forced herself to think his relationships, no, his love life) all the time, but still. Maybe he just did casual, and that’s why he was so thoughtless about poor Katy’s feelings.

Or maybe that was a one-time thing. He was her best friend. He read her like a book. Maybe he could see how unhappy Pam was even while she was trying to fake her acceptance of Roy’s suggested date. Maybe he’d told Katy they’d never be like that because he wanted to be better than that, more than that.

But then he hadn’t said that, had he? He’d said “I don’t know. Let’s break up.” Maybe he was trying to figure out how to help her, Pam? Maybe he was such a good friend that he’d checked out of his (probably casual? Maybe casual? Pam tried to avoid the thought hopefully casual) relationship for a moment to think about how to help Pam and Katy had just caught him at the wrong moment. Maybe he would be frantically trying to patch things back up now that he knew what was going on.

Or maybe he would be if the day hadn’t reset again. Maybe that was what she had to do to break the loop: help Jim realize he wasn’t supposed to break up with Katy for her sake. Now, why did that make her feel like she had a stomach ache?

These thoughts had taken Pam all the way up to the break room at Dunder Mifflin, and she was putting coins into the vending machine before she was awakened from her reverie by the plink-plink of a dime sliding down the slot.

Before she could think about it, she had selected the Cup-O-Noodles immediately next to Dwight’s stapler. She looked up at Jim with shy eyes (thanking heaven that she was too distracted to be blushing, because in any other circumstances the thought of looking at him while her mind was still half-focused on his love life would have had her beet red—appropriate for a conversation involving Dwight—in less than a second) and gestured with the cup.

“Sorry, my stomach’s acting up, and none of Dwight’s stuff seemed all that helpful.”

“Nonsense.” To her surprise, it wasn’t Jim but Dwight who answered her. “If my wallet weren’t in the machine,” he glared at Jim, “I’d show you the beneficial effects of powdered beet root in an infusion of hot milk.”

“We don’t have milk, Dwight, just non-dairy creamer.” Jim spoke almost absently as he looked at Pam with concern in his eyes. “But just in case…” He pulled out the bag of nickels. “Knock yourself out.” She made the mistake of holding the eye contact as he made the inadvertent pun, and they both broke out into giggles, thinking of the last time that particular bag of nickels had knocked Dwight out.

Dwight sniffed and ignored them, taking the bag of nickels and beginning to slide them into the machine. In a moment, the stapler clunked to the bottom.

“Dwight.” Jim put a hand on his shoulder while winking at Pam. “I hate to break it to you, but that’s a stapler.”

“Yes.” Dwight answered sharply as Pam filled the Cup-O-Noodles with hot water from the tap. “But then, Jim, you were never that observant. A good salesman sees not just the outside, but the inside.”

“Of a stapler?” Jim leaned back. “I assume the inside is…staples.” He gestured grandly. “How marvelous.”

“Obviously there are staples in the stapler.” Dwight pried the top out to reveal a small baggie of red-purple powder slotted into the mechanism behind the staples. “There is also powdered beet root.” He shook the baggie in Jim’s face. “One never knows when one will need a panacea.” He started for the fridge. “Also, I brought fresh milk with my lunch. Mose extracted it just this morning.”

“I didn’t know you had cows on your farm.” Pam dug into the drawer for silverware.

“We don’t.”

“Then how…”

“Mose knows how to milk a lot of things.” He poured a bit of the milk—Pam was glad to see it was white, at least—into a mug from the cupboard, sprinkled the dark powder on top, and put it in the microwave.

“Can you at least promise me it’s fit for human consumption?” Jim was still leaning against the wall, but his eyes were intent.

“I drink it.”

“That didn’t answer my question.”

Dwight gave a curt nod. “It is. An…a friend has vouched for its superior quality over and above cow’s milk.” He turned back to the microwave, his face thunderous.

Pam intervened before Dwight could get too embarrassed over his near slip. “I don’t need it to be superior, just drinkable.”

Jim shot her an astonished look. “You’re really planning to drink that stuff?”

Pam shrugged. “I don’t think Dwight’s planning to poison me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Thank you Pamela.” Dwight seemed to take that as a compliment. The microwave beeped. Dwight pulled the concoction out, stirred it with a wooden stir stick from the coffee supplies, and handed it to Pam. “It is best to drink it all in one go.”

“Best for my stomach?”

“Best for your throat.”

 Before Pam could think through the implications of that statement, she’d tossed it back—just like snorkel shots, she thought, and almost choked—and felt a warmth coursing through her body. “Huh. I do feel a bit better.”

“I told you. Now that that is resolved, it is my responsibility to tell you both that your breaks expired thirty seconds ago.”

“Dwight…” Jim started, but Dwight held up a hand.

“In light of Pamela’s…indisposition, I believe we can consider the matter closed if you both return to your desks.”

“The matter was never open,” Jim grumbled, but he and Pam went. After all, the prank was pulled, and Pam had drunk Dwight’s weird drink, so what was left to do in the break room anyway?

Pam’s stomach did feel better, though whether it was the Cup-O-Noodles, the weird powder, or simply the fact that she wasn’t thinking about getting Jim together with Katy, she couldn’t be sure. Unfortunately, the last issue was like a pink elephant—as soon as she was aware of not thinking about it, she thought about it.

Jim’s presence lingering by the candy dish after Stanley found out about the cruise didn’t exactly discourage the thought, and her stomach lurched again.

“Hey, Jim?”

“Yeah?”

She couldn’t just straight up ask him about Katy. He’d wonder why she was asking, since her name hadn’t actually come up in…several weeks, from his perspective (rather shorter, of course, from hers). But while she was deciding that, her mouth took over, and her brain looked on in horror at the question she did ask.

“Have you ever been in love?”

The question hung in the air; more accurately, it became the air, as if she and Jim were somehow just breathing in and out the same question until it became a part of them—but in the same way that you don’t answer the air (even if it talks to you), they remained silent, until her embarrassment finally got the better of her still recalcitrant tongue.

“I mean…”

Her breaking the silence was apparently his cue to break it as well, just half a beat later. “Well, I…”

“You go.”

“No, you.”

She took a breath, inhaling the awkwardness. “I’m sorry, that was a really rude question.”

He grinned sadly. How did one grin sadly? How did she know he was doing that? How well did she know him anyway? Her mind raced as he grinned and then continued. “No, it wasn’t.” The grin turned less sad. “It was an impertinent question, but we’re…it wasn’t rude.”

We’re what? she wanted to yell. Unbidden, Karen’s thoughts from two cycles ago ran through her head. How long have you and Jim been dating?

To chase the thought away—this was supposed to be about him and Katy, and now that she’d started it she’d need to finish—she fell back on her default conversational gambit with him: sarcasm.

“Impertinent? What are you, seventy? I knew you’d stolen all of Dwight’s stuff, I didn’t know you stole his personality too.”

He snorted. “Hardly. He’d have to have one first.”

She giggled, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned a little bit over the desk, glanced around, and lowered his voice.

“Do you really want to know?”

She couldn’t pretend not to know what he meant, but she also couldn’t breathe enough to form an answer. But her head went on and nodded, almost on its own.

He let out a breath he’d apparently been holding in. “Yes. Once,” he whispered, then straightened.

She realized when she’d seen him act this way before. It was exactly how he behaved when they were passing plans of a prank around without Dwight overhearing. The same semi-casual stance. The same instant return to an even-more-casual position. The same whisper, even.

She could come up with two explanations. One, Jim was playing a prank. Two, Jim was nervous about being overheard.

Or both, of course.

She hoped it wasn’t a prank, but she wasn’t sure why else he’d be nervous. And she wasn’t sure what to do with what he’d said either. Once? What did that mean? It could mean one time or it could mean sometime in the past…which one did he mean?

“Are you still?” Her filter was apparently nonexistent today.

He stared at her, then slumped almost imperceptibly against the desk. “Yeah.”

Pam’s breath came short. He was. He was in love. It had to be with Katy, right? Why else would he have brought her on the booze cruise? But in that case, whatever had made him break up with her? She pushed away the rising thought what if it’s not Katy and took a deep breath.

But Jim spoke before she had a chance to. “What about...” He shook his head. “No, that’s stupid,” he whispered as if to himself. He straightened. “Well, Beesly,” he said in a tone that sounded calm but she could tell—seriously, how well did she know this man?—was anything but. “I guess you were right.”

“What?” How did he know what she was thinking? What was she right about?

“I guess I did get Dwight’s personality, because it’s time for me to get back to the paper…and stuff…” he trailed off a bit and gave her a sheepish smile as he grabbed a jellybean and turned back towards his seat.

Underneath the teasing edge she could tell something was bothering him. Maybe that was what made her, instead of making fun of him for referring to “paper and stuff,” smile back at him and say “you can always talk to me, you know.”

She could swear he stiffened as he walked back to his desk.

She didn’t have time to think about what was going on with Jim, though, because Michael chose that moment to call their all-hands meeting to announce what everyone already knew (her most of all, of course) was already going to happen.

The first time she really had a chance to think about what Jim had said was after she’d snuck out and camped out at the library waiting for the class. He was in love, apparently. She didn’t think it was with Katy—but was that just wishful thinking?

And why would wishful thinking lead her to think that?

Was this about Jim or her? What kind of friend was she if she kept interjecting her own wishes and desires onto his situation—especially when she wasn’t even sure of what those desires were herself?

She’d tried to curl up with a good book, but the thoughts kept coming. Should she be throwing Jim and Katy together, or keeping them apart? Why did her stomach hurt when she thought of the first option?

Oh god, was she in love with Jim? Karen clearly thought so—she’d thought they were engaged. But Karen hardly knew her. Roy clearly didn’t think so, even if he sometimes got jealous of Jim, or else he wouldn’t…

Well, actually, everything about Roy’s behavior could be explained by the fact that Roy really didn’t care about or notice anything outside of himself, the Eagles, the Flyers, and the 76ers. Sometimes the Phillies, too. Certainly not Pam herself, except insofar as she impinged on his life. And she was good at not impinging. Good at disappearing into the edges of life.

She needed an outside expert. Well, she’d had one of those in Karen. She needed an inside expert, then. She pulled out her phone and dialed.

“Hey sis.”

“Hi Penny.”

The line was silent for a moment, until her sister cleared her throat.

“So, to what do I owe the honor of a call?”

“Oh!” Pam hadn’t realized how long the silence had lasted. She didn’t really want to go through the pleasantries—and one of the benefits of a sibling, she realized, was that she really didn’t have to. “Am I in love with Jim?”

“Hm….that’s a tough one,” her sister mused in the voice she’d always used when Pam came to her with some kind of conundrum that she thought Pam was overthinking. Given their two personalities—Pam the deliberate, cautious, but creative one, Penny the quicksilver, impulsive, but surprisingly scientific one—that had been frequent when they were growing up. The only question was: what did she think was the obvious answer here.

This being Penny, though, she wasn’t going to just tell her. No, her sister (her maddening, wonderful, frustrating, helpful sister) always wanted Pam to understand the thing she was asking for help about. So instead of saying yes or no, she asked a question back. “What makes you ask?”

Pam sighed. When they were twelve and ten, she would have tickled Penny to stop her from asking her dumb questions. When they were sixteen and fourteen, she would have told her stop being annoying and just tell her. When they were twenty-two and twenty, she’d have yelled at her for being no help. Now that they were twenty-six and twenty-four, she just answered. But how to answer in a way that didn’t bring up the unbelievable fact that she’d been reliving the same day over and over? “I’m trying to help him with a relationship thing, and it’s making me feel weird.”

“Weird how?” This was how Penny operated: no statements, no answers, at least not on topic. Just the Socratic method until it was obvious what she thought. If this was what Socrates was like, Pam could understand why the Athenians gave him hemlock. Not that she didn’t love her sister…

“My stomach hurt. I thought it was some kind of illness, and I drank something Dwight made…”

“Oh god, it’s serious then.” Penny laughed. “What made your stomach hurt?”

“I don’t know!” Penny was silent until Pam grudgingly admitted the truth. “Thinking about how to get him to propose to his girlfriend.”

“Do you think it’s because you have a problem with people getting engaged?” That was Penny, going right to the heart of things with a bluntness Pam had learned to find endearing. And she’d never had much time for Roy anyway—something that should have been a red flag, in retrospect, Pam thought.

“No. Honestly, I’m about ready to end things with Roy anyway.” Pam listened to her own words and winced. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Jim, though.”

“Doesn’t it?” And all of a sudden the penny dropped. Sometimes Pam thought that was why her parents had named her sister that way: she was capable of real social errors (she didn’t seem to be able to figure out how people right in front of her were related to each other: once she’d asked one of their dad’s friends if his second wife was his daughter) but when you got her on an analytical string like this she could both lead a horse to water and make it drink. In other words, she always knew how to make the penny drop, as it had in this case. She was in love with Jim.

“There are a lot of reasons to break things off with Roy.” She could hear the defensiveness in her words and rushed on before Penny could ask another simple, devastating question. “But none of them mattered until I met Jim.”

“And what have we learned today?” Penny was relentless, but Pam could hear the amusement in her voice.

“I’m in love with Jim.”

“That’s right. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.” But she had all the time in the world to figure it out. Before she hung up, though, there was one more thing she needed to establish. “How long have you known?”

“How long have you known Jim?” That was not the answer she was expecting, and it just gave her more to chew on. But a glance at the clock told her it was time to drive over to the YMCA for the art class, and she didn’t plan to miss that. “Thanks, sis.”

“Anytime.” Her sister sounded amused. “I’m always here to help you through your epiphanies.”

“Yeah, like I said, thanks.”

Her head was whirling; she was never sure how she got from the library to the Y, and it was a miracle in retrospect that this cycle wasn’t cut short by a car accident. Her discombobulation made it easy to forget people’s names at the class and she found herself once again sitting next to Melanie. This time she knew to steer the conversation towards school and their mutual friend Larissa, and the conversation was a nice respite from her wild thoughts of love and how to grab it. Her painting had improved too: this time it almost looked like a Rothko, she thought, giant bars of paint layered above and below in a way that brought her peace.

But when she drove home that night her thoughts were anything but peaceful. They hinged on one crucial thought. She loved Jim, but did he love her back?

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Usually she was filled with thoughts of what the day might bring (even on this, the longest day of her life) but today (or rather, this time) she could only think one thing: I’m in love with Jim.

She daydreamed for a little bit about what it might be like if he loved, or even liked, her back. She had an inkling this might be the case; he was always so friendly with her, for instance, and Karen, Penny, Larissa…even Kelly had seemed to think there was something there. But on the other hand, he’d straight up told her he was in love with someone yesterday, and he was dating Katy, so what were the odds he was in love with her, Pam? And add to that that she knew Jim was a highly moral person; what were the odds he’d have confessed to being in love with her while she was engaged to Roy?

That was the biggest problem of them all, of course, and it decided right then to turn over and grumble about how she’d set the alarm to snooze. Roy. She couldn’t afford to indulge all these new and exciting feelings about Jim because she wasn’t free to do so. She needed a plan to deal with Roy.

She thought long and hard about what to do with Roy as she showered and changed into the by now so familiar clothes. She laughed softly to herself: Jim had teased her a few times about the fact that she only wore various combinations of the same clothes, and Roy had made some cutting remarks (fuddy-duddy being the kindest) about her wardrobe as well, but they’d both lose their marbles if they realized how many days in a row she’d worn the exact same clothing. She thought back to the debacle that was two times ago when she’d rejected Roy’s proposed date. He’d screamed about how she couldn’t make up her mind, how he’d finally gotten nagged into setting a date and she’d decided she was too high and mighty to take him up on it. It was not an experience she cared to repeat, but she had to break up with him or she couldn’t kiss Jim.

She was definitely interested in kissing Jim.

She tried to think about when might be the best time to break up with Roy. Obviously not after he’d drunk enough to set a date. So, earlier, before he started drinking: that meant, before the cruise. Maybe that would be kind: maybe breaking up with him after work but before the cruise would be best. That way they’d be alone: no audience for Roy to play to, no public shame for either of them in breaking a long engagement, lower stakes.

It seemed like a good idea, so she went about her day with that in mind, and decided to enjoy herself beforehand. She bought Dwight’s stapler, then pretended to need to refill it, discovering (as she’d known she would) the small baggie of dark red, almost purple powder. She forced out a high-pitched squeal like she imagined a woman in a 1960s sitcom might give seeing a mouse.

“Aieeeee!” OK, so she sounded like a bad parody comic panel. It still did the job: everyone came running.

“What is it, Pam?” Jim was looking at her strangely, and she felt a warm feeling bubble down from her chest into her stomach and points south as she met his look of concern. How could she have pretended for so long to herself that she was not in love with this man? He wasn’t even looking at her anymore—his attention had shifted to the bag on the desk—and she still felt folded in a warm psychic embrace by his very presence. It was like she’d surfaced after swimming for a long time underwater: long enough that she’d gotten used to her lungs burning, and the sudden ability to breathe freely was an unexpected pleasure. His smile was oxygen, and she was going to huff the stuff like it was going out of style.

But first, she made sure to meet his eye again and winked, hard.

His face flushed every so slightly, and she wondered if she looked as discombobulated as he did—because she certainly felt the same difficulty breathing.

“Jim! I found a…mysterious substance in my new stapler.” She lowered her voice to a piercing stage whisper that she knew from experience would carry farther in the office than her normal speaking voice ever did. “Do you think it might be drugs?”

Jim’s eyebrows quirked and she could tell from the way he oh-so-casually half-turned to make sure his voice also carried into the rest of the room. “You know, I was just hearing about a new street drug that’s dark purple. The kids call it…The Red Death.”

“That is highly illogical. Why do they call it The Red Death if it’s purple?” Dwight had taken a half-step towards Jim and Pam. Now she just had to lure him all the way.

“I think I saw the same article. It was on CNN…or maybe NBC?” She pursed her lips in mock befuddlement. “CNBC? Anyway, I hear one snort of it and you feel like you can fly.”

“But if you use it too often, your skin starts to fall off.” Jim was clearly getting into the spirit of the thing, and they both made sure not to actually look at Dwight, though she was sure Jim was just as aware as she was of their coworker’s scrutiny.

“And then they powder the skin again to make a new batch.”

“That’s right. That’s what gives it the color: human blood.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Dwight had joined them at the desk and all Pam could think was gotcha. “You said it was purple.”

“It is purple!” Pam waved the baggie in front of Dwight. “But they call it The Red Death because…”

“Because you know how the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for red?” Jim jumped into the breach. “This is like that.”

“Blue, Jim.” Dwight glared at them both. “The ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for blue.”

“Right, anyway, this was named like that.” Jim wasn’t backing down, but he didn’t make it obvious; instead he just tossed it off like he was sure of himself. That sense of sprezzatura was one of the things she loved about him, she realized, and she felt her face flush as she let herself think the words.

“Clearly you are lying. Pamela’s blushing gives it away.” Dwight snorted. “Try harder next time, you two. Or better yet, don’t and actually let some people get some work done around here.”

“I wasn’t blushing about that! I was blushing about…something else.” Pam’s desire not to let the prank die (or perhaps dye, in context) almost got the better of her determination not to say anything to Jim until she was a free agent. “Anyway, the name comes because whoever named it thought it was more like a maroon or a Harvard-style crimson than a purple. I mean look at it.” She gestured with the baggie again.

“Then why isn’t it The Maroon Death, Pam?” Dwight argued. “And what else were you blushing about?”

“None of your business,” Pam sniffed. “And it’s The Red Death because it sounds better. And maroon’s a type of red, anyway.”

“Or purple,” Jim added, semi-helpfully.

“Or purple,” she conceded to Jim, “but in this case, Red.”

“In that case…” Dwight looked torn between trying to continue proving them wrong and his desire to take control of the situation. The latter instinct won out as he grabbed the baggie. “I will conduct a thorough investigation of this incident.”

“Good luck!” Jim shouted at his back as Dwight disappeared back into the break room. “Nice work, Beesly,” he added in a more normal whisper as he turned back to her.

“Nice work yourself, Halpert.” She grinned back at him. “How long do you think it will take him to realize that’s his own baggie from his own stapler?”

“Somehow it will be both too long and not long enough.” Jim shook his head. “Wait…what is in the baggie? It’s not actually drugs, is it?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s powdered beetroot.” Pam giggled.

“Of course it is. And that’s somehow…not a drug?”

“Not even a little.” Though it had helped her nausea yesterday, but she was still pretty sure that had been psychological.

“Awesome.” He grinned, and when she met his eyes and smiled neither one of them wanted to look away. Pam counted in her head. After twenty-seven seconds of eye contact Jim abruptly turned away. “Anyway, I guess these sales won’t make themselves.”

“Guess not.” She was disappointed, even though she knew it was unfair. She wasn’t single yet, and for all that Jim had an uncanny ability to tell what she was thinking, it wasn’t really telepathy, so he couldn’t tell that, along with counting, she’d been screaming kiss me at the top of her mental lungs. After all, she reasoned, if he initiated it it wasn’t really her fault—even though she knew, deep down, she’d still have felt guilty. So maybe he did know her thought processes pretty well after all. Or maybe he wasn’t actually interested in kissing her—lowering thought.

The rest of the day went about as normal, or at least the new normal. She tipped Brenda and Toby away from the cruise, made an excuse to send both Kelly and Ryan into the supply closet for different things in the space of twenty seconds, and carried on a light flirtation with Jim. At the meeting she sat beside Roy and tried not to think about how this was probably the last time they’d sit next to each other. When five o’clock rolled past and the office started heading out en-masse to the cruise, she made Roy wait until everyone else had pulled out of the parking lot before asking, in a smaller voice than she’d intended, if they could go somewhere and talk.

He sighed. “Seriously, Pammy? We can talk on the boat.”

This put her back up. “Seriously, Roy. It’s important.”

He rolled his eyes and started up the truck. She was preparing to yell at him for ignoring her when she noticed they were pulling into the parking lot of Poor Richard’s. Of course, for Roy, “somewhere to talk” meant a bar.  They went in and sat down at the bar and Roy ordered a Coors. She realized she was going to have to talk fast, before he got the booze into his system.

“Roy…” she faltered, then realized she wasn’t going to get any help so she might as well do this herself. “There isn’t any easy way to say this, so…I think we should break up.”

“WHAT?” His hand crunched around the Coors can and a spurt of beer slid down the side and onto the bar. She watched it intensely, not feeling up to meeting his eyes.

“I think we should break up.”

“I fucking heard you the first time, Pammy. I meant what the hell are you talking about? ‘We should break up.’ ‘There’s no easy way to say this.’” He mimicked her voice. “Bullshit.”

“What’s bullshit?” She was passing quickly from nervous into angry, and she was pretty sure he was well past her there.

“You. You’re bullshit.” He gestured wildly with the Coors and more beer fizzed over the side. “Ten years I have to deal with your nagging about marriage, and setting a date, and…”

“And you never fucking did it!” She exploded at him, pointing her finger in his face. “You proposed to me three years ago, but that didn’t count, did it? You never meant to marry me. You just wanted to keep on going on like we’ve been going on! Well, that doesn’t work for me, Roy, and I’m done.”

“Of course I wanted to keep on going like we’ve been going! We’ve been happy, Pammy, haven’t we?” He was transitioning from angry Roy into sad Roy, the Roy who’d wept on her shoulder when his favorite uncle died—in some ways, her favorite Roy, but not now. Not when they were having a serious conversation, because while angry Roy might yell and throw things, at least he listened. Sad Roy just wallowed.

“You’ve been happy, Roy. I’ve been…stationary.” She grabbed the keys to the truck off the table. “Get one of the guys to pick you up—they all know where Poor Richard’s is, after all. I’m leaving.”

“But I love you, Pammy!”

She didn’t turn, but she paused before walking out the door. “I’m sorry, Roy.”

She heard a crash from behind her, as if someone had thrown a mostly-full can of Coors against the window in the bar, and she quickened her stride as she made her way into the parking lot. She got into the truck, pulled the seat forward, and locked the doors before letting out a huge sigh. She wanted to go on the cruise, wanted to go jump into Jim’s arms and give him a kiss, but she realized that Katy was with him, because she’d forgotten to get Larissa onto the cruise, and she didn’t have it in her to kiss Jim with his girlfriend sitting next to him in the booth. One major emotional step in a day, she thought, before laughing mirthlessly at the thought that if that was so she was probably never going to get out of this loop. The laughter turned into sobs and she wept into the steering wheel for a lot longer than she cared to admit to herself.

She was about to start up the truck and finally head to the cruise, just to have somewhere to go, when Darryl’s car pulled into the lot and he rushed into bar. She cracked the window of the truck just enough to hear him saying something about “lucky I had my phone on” and “gonna have to pay for that you know” before she caught the most important phrase: “it’s a booze cruise, right?”

So Darryl was going to take Roy on the cruise to drown his sorrows. That tore it: she wasn’t going there herself. And that meant this was not the right time to break up with Roy after all. She’d have to do it what—earlier? Later, on the cruise itself? No, she couldn’t be on that cruise with a Roy who was fresh off their breakup, who hadn’t had any time to process or sober up. That meant this whole cycle was a waste, and she was going to have to avoid the cruise after all.

Dammit. She’d been looking forward to kissing Jim. Well, she’d just have to remember to invite Larissa along next time, so there were no other distractions once she’d…dealt with Roy.

The thought of Larissa turned her towards Melanie and the YMCA. Tonight’s abstract piece was all blacks and grays, with a tiny little smudge of white in the upper reaches that could be a bird flying through the clouds, or the sun peeking through to cast daylight on the world. But in her heart of hearts she knew what it was.

It was hope, not quite present but never quite extinguished.

She crashed on Melanie’s couch that night after putting together a sob story that was, at its heart, entirely true. She fell asleep with the thought that for Melanie this was a sort of kindness to a near stranger, while for her it was just crashing at a friend’s place.

This repeated world was a real mindfuck, she thought as she finally fell asleep.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Well, if she’d had any doubt about how this thing was going (and how could she, after so many repeats of the same day?) she now knew that falling asleep somewhere else didn’t stop her from waking up at home. She knew that her and Roy’s bed was, in all reasonable meanings of the term, more comfortable than Melanie’s couch, but she couldn’t sit still. She wiggled out of bed, turned off the alarm, and hurried her way through shower, clothes, and breakfast.

Today’s job was to figure out when she could break up with Roy, and do it—and try to do it in such a way that she could still accomplish all the other things she was planning on: setting up Brenda and Toby and Kelly and Ryan, calming Michael as much as possible, doing something for Dwight and Angela, was there anything else?

Oh right, kissing Jim Halpert. Preferably not in front of his cheerleader maybe girlfriend—because if it turned out that in order to get out of this cycle she had to get him engaged to Katy, she was never getting out. That was just not on.

But to do that, she’d need to break up with Roy more easily, more effectively, and less messily than last time. Apparently “immediately before the cruise” was out, just as she’d found out that “on the cruise” was obviously suboptimal. One thing was for sure: she wasn’t going to skip out on the cruise this time around, since she’d missed it last time.

She contemplated other times to break up with Roy. During the workday seemed like the best option, since he’d be surrounded by friends and in a place (unlike the bar) where he couldn’t be too rowdy. She felt like a coward for contemplating that last point, especially since Roy had never actually been violent with her before, but one thing this set of repeated days had taught her was that she had to face these sorts of things head on. Dodging around these sorts of issues (Roy’s temper, her own feelings towards Jim) just meant another round of the same problems. She had to admit that it made her feel better to think about Roy finding out that she didn’t want to marry him—or even continue dating him—in a safely public place, or even a professional setting.

She sat in silence in the car, considering how she would phrase things when the time came. She was afraid to be too direct: Roy with his hackles up wouldn’t listen to her (witness last night). So she’d have to sidle her way around to it. But that was going to be hard to do at the warehouse, so…maybe she’d need to get him to confess he didn’t want to marry her? But he’d needed to be entirely foxed, hammered, smashed before he’d admitted it before, and she didn’t think he’d do that at work.

Oh well, something would occur to her. She bade Roy a distracted goodbye and headed upstairs and bought Dwight’s bobblehead.

“But it’s part of a set!” Dwight looked heartbroken.

“You’re right.” He perked up and she could almost see the thought that she was going to give him the bobblehead back move across his face before she pulled out her wallet. “I need to buy them all, or they’ll be lonely.”

“Gotta catch ‘em all.” Jim nodded sagely.

“Pokémon? Really, Jim?” Pam teased.

“Fact: Pokémon is short for ‘pocket monsters.’” Dwight intoned.

Jim rolled his eyes at Dwight. “Everyone knows that, and I’m not sure it’s relevant right now, Dwight.” He looked at Pam speculatively. “I’m more interested in how Ms. Beesly here recognized my reference so quickly.”

Pam thrust her chin up as she bought more bobbleheads. “I don’t have to answer to you about my hobbies.”

“Hobbies?” Jim looked delighted. “Are you telling me you’re a Pokémon master?”

“Yes, Jim, I am indeed the very best. Like no one ever was.” She winked and whisked her way out of the break room with her booty.

She was setting the bobbleheads up in a line on her desk later when Jim wandered up and reached over them to the jellybean dish.

“So,  Beesly, I’m going to need a bit more data here.” He idly tapped a bobble’s head and watched it wobble. “Favorite Pokémon? Are you an original 151 girl or are you open to modern innovations? Ash, Misty, or Brock?” He popped the jellybean into his mouth and grinned down at her.

“What do you think, Halpert?” She grinned back up at him.

“Hmm…obviously Misty—I can totally see you as a water-type specialist.”

“Very astute.”

He tapped each bobblehead down the row and pursed his lips. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re not a traditionalist, but that you do…prefer the original 151.”

“Right again.” She wasn’t sure what it meant that Jim understood her feelings about imaginary Japanese monsters, but it made her feel warm inside.

“So…” he watched the bobbleheads sway for a moment. “A water-type, from the original 151.” She watched his fingers idly move across the heads of the toys and marveled at how attractive she found his hands. He glanced up and she blushed at the thought he’d caught her staring. He looked quizzically at her and continued looking down at the bobbleheads. “You strike me as a purist: no half-types for you.” He started placing jellybeans on the bobbleheads’ heads, pursing his lips in concentration, and she wondered what he’d look like looking at her with the same concentration—and then distracted herself entirely by wondering what those lips would feel like if he just leaned over and kissed her right then and there. She almost missed his words as he continued.

“I think you’re the sort of person who likes Pokémon because they aren’t real animals—you like the sense of whimsy—so nothing too closely connected to actual nature…” He started scooping up the jellybeans on the bobbleheads and eating them one by one, and she watched his mouth the whole time, glad his eyes weren’t on her to see the blush she was sure still stained her cheeks. “I don’t think you’d be too obsessed with the actual power of the creature, or in the combat mechanics of the game, so the real powerful ones are out…” He tapped the first bobblehead she’d bought and watched it sway again. “I think you feel sorry for the smaller, unevolved ones, and you probably got attached real early, so…I’m gonna go ahead and say Squirtle.” His eyes snapped up and pinned her in place.

She could hardly breathe. He was staring at her with exactly the degree of concentration she’d imagined when he was placing the jellybeans, and it was mesmerizing. She forced herself to shake her head gently and watched his face fall.

“You missed the fact that I got into the game through the TV show.” She didn’t know why she was whispering, but it felt appropriate for the moment. “I felt sorry for…”

“The Psyduck.” Jim nodded sharply. “I should have known.”

She smiled. “Yup.” She tapped the same bobblehead he’d last touched and focused her eyes on its irregular movement. “But when I started the game, I did pick the Squirtle, just like you said.”

“I bet you never let it evolve, either.”

“Nope.” She grinned up at him. “But you know, I don’t have to go through that whole rigmarole with you.”

“Oh?” He smiled back down at her. “Give me your best shot, Beesly.”

“Come on, Jim. You’ve admitted to liking the show, you know the original 151 like the back of your hand, and you’re a guy. It’s obviously Pikachu.”

He clutched his chest. “You wound me, Beesly. You think I’m that predictable?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yes. Even more because you didn’t actually say I was wrong.”

“That’s because you’re not. I’m just hurt that you guessed it so quickly.”

She shrugged. “Pikachu’s cute. Nothing wrong with being a fan.”

“I’ll have you know I didn’t pick Pikachu because he was cute.”

“Oh?”

“Oh indeed. I was a boy, Pam, I didn’t choose based on something like cuteness. I chose Pikachu because he was a rebel who refused the pokéball.”

“You know that’s just the one Pikachu, right? The rest of them are normal.”

“It just takes one, Pam, it just takes one.” And with that he nodded to her and headed over to ask Stanley to figure out what today’s camaraderie event would be.

“It just takes one.” Pam repeated this to herself hours later as she headed down to the warehouse to break up with Roy. “Even if I get this wrong, I can do it again. It just takes one.”

“Hey, Pam. Roy’s over there.” She felt guilty at the way Darryl greeted her so friendlily. Not that she wanted him to be unfriendly, or anything, but she was about to drop a sad, angry ball of warehouse worker into his lap, even if he didn’t know it yet.

“Thanks.” She slipped around to the forklift, which Lonny was bringing into position with Roy spotting him.

“Hey, Pammy.” She gritted her teeth—Darryl got her name right, why couldn’t her soon-to-be-ex-fiancé?—as Roy waved and then hollered up at Lonny. “No, you idiot, a foot to the left.”

“Roy, can we talk?”

“Sure, go ahead.” He waved Lonny ahead. “No, your other left, dumbass.”

“Um…I was hoping to talk in private.”

He laughed. “Pam, Lonny has headphones in. Why do you think I’m making fun of him to his face?” He waved again at Lonny. “That’s right, shit-for-brains.” He grinned at her. “So, what’s up?”

If she hadn’t known she could do this again if it went wrong, she wouldn’t have had the courage, but she repeated to herself Jim’s accidental mantra: “it only takes one.”

“I…I think we should break up.” She blurted it out, and it felt as if the words were hanging in the air. “I don’t want to do this anymore, Roy.”

“Sorry, Pammy, I didn’t quite catch that.” He tugged something onto the forklift and turned to her. “What did you say?”

“I said I think we should break up.” To her surprise, he broke out into laughter.

“OK, I suppose I deserved that. I’m sorry, I’ll pay attention now. What did you want to talk about?”

“I meant what I said, Roy.” She was getting annoyed. How hard could it be to understand a simple sentence? “I think we should break up.”

“I…you’re serious. Is this because I didn’t come home last Saturday?” He looked concerned. “I told you, babe, I didn’t think it was safe to drive, and I slept on Darryl’s couch. Nothing else happened.”

She had to cast her mind back—“last Saturday” was five days ago for Roy, and more than two subjective weeks for her—but she did remember eventually that yes, she’d stayed up until 2am wondering if Roy would come home and had been very annoyed with him on Sunday when he’d stumbled in at about 10 the next morning.

“It’s not…actually, it kind of is about that, but not in the way you think.” She looked up into his eyes, willing him to understand. “It’s more about what we want out of life. You want to go out with the guys, and I want…”

He interrupted her. “You want us to get married, I know. I promise, Pammy, we’ll find a date soon. There’s no reason to get worked up.”

She shook her head. “Are you even listening to me? I want to break up, Roy. I don’t want to marry you.”

A scoffing laugh was his only response, and it put her back up. “I’m serious, Roy. I don’t want this anymore. We’re through.” She turned to go, but he grabbed her wrist.

“We’re through when I say we’re through.” His eyes were hard. “You are not breaking up with me this way, babe.”

“Then how am I supposed to do it?” The question was more than rhetorical for her, but she could see he didn’t know that—which made sense, given that he didn’t know she’d be doing this again—and he didn’t answer. He just tugged her closer to him and bent down to kiss her.

It was an excruciating experience. She didn’t dislike Roy’s kisses: they were fine. But this one just felt tawdry, and she couldn’t help but think “I hope Jim kisses better than this.” She pushed him off her as soon as she was able, and was dismayed to see that he seemed to think that embarrassment of a kiss was a legitimate argument for staying together. “Come on, babe, you know you love me.”

She started to walk away. “You’ll always matter to me, Roy, but we’re not in love anymore. It’s over.”

“It’s not over, Pam!” She could hear him yell at her as she walked up the stairs towards the office. She paused with the door ajar and heard him posture in a softer voice to Darryl and Lonny. “She’ll come crawling back.”

Her spine stiff, she headed back to the office.

She threw herself into the rest of her self-imposed tasks when she got back. She threw Kelly at Ryan, encouraged Brenda and Toby, and gave Michael softly phrased tips on how he might use the cruise for a “legitimate business purpose, like Jan keeps saying you need to have.” She ignored his “I’ll give her a legitimate business purpose,” complete with hip thrust, and slipped back to her desk.

The whole thing with Roy had made her forget again about ousting Katy, and the cruise itself was a disaster. She got a ride there with Kelly, who filled the time with chatter about Ryan, and spent the whole time ducking Roy, to the point where she was barely able to spend any time with Jim (to whose arm Katy was unfortunately glued all evening). The one benefit of ducking Roy was that she was able to begin getting the first inkling of how she might help Dwight and Angela. Hiding from Roy out on the deck, she noticed Dwight steering the ship—or seeming to do so—and Angela periodically slipping out talk to him. She wondered if there might not be some way to get Dwight to pay more attention to his lady-love than to the ship’s wheel, though nothing in particular occurred to her immediately.

By the end of the cruise she was exhausted, and after begging a ride from Phyllis when it became clear that Kelly and Ryan were heading towards Kelly’s car together, she fell asleep in the back of her car.

The next five cycles were no better, although she was able to determine by trial and error that Roy was no more open to being broken up with at lunch (at Cugino’s, in the office, or, in a desperate attempt inspired by Michael, at Hooters), after the meeting where they found out about the booze cruise, or in the parking lot before work (this last leading to him making a scene at the all-office meeting that made even Michael look at her with sympathetic eyes). She thought of the sequence in Groundhog Day where Andie MacDowell slapped Bill Murray multiple times in the same evening. They’d eventually gotten their happy ending, but she was afraid there was no such chance for her and Roy. After all, all Bill Murray had had to do was figure out what Andie MacDowell liked; she had to figure out how Roy could be convinced both accept their breakup and leave her alone. The double whammy was proving tricky, since he always got angry. Always.

And when he was angry, she never got a real chance to be alone with Jim. It was enough to make her cry herself to sleep—as indeed she did in the back of Phyllis’s car night after night.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Dully, she let herself move on autopilot, turning the alarm off and moving through her morning ablutions. She dressed in the same drab familiar clothing as every day: not just every day in this ridiculous cycle of repetition but, it occurred to her, every day of her life. What was the point? Roy wouldn’t give her up without a fight, and yet she was equally sure that without breaking up with him she could no more move forward beyond today than she could fly to the moon. That would, ordinarily, mean that she’d just have to have that fight, but every time they clashed it seemed to interfere with whatever else she had planned to try to break herself out of this artificially imposed rut she was in.

Only the biggest rut wasn’t artificially imposed at all. The biggest rut was simply the fact that she was Pam Beesly, world’s boringest woman, she thought to herself. She did the same things every day, went the same places, ate the same food, wore the same clothes. The lone bright spots in her days were the unpredictable moments when Jim Halpert did something fun—but with the cyclical nature of her existence now, even that would probably begin to pall. What was the point of all of this? Why was she trying to become some kind of fancy new Beesly when she and everyone else around her knew she was just plain old Pam? She could do whatever she liked today—go get on a plane, jump into the lake, get a tattoo—and she’d just wake up tomorrow the same as ever. Sure, that was literally true now because of this stupid curse or whatever, but it was no less true on any other day of her life, she realized. She’d been trapped in a repetitive cycle for years now, and just like this magical one only more depressingly there was no way out.

She felt the fight drift out of her. Why bother doing all the things she’d been trying? Why visit Karen in Stamford (and have to reintroduce herself) or Melanie at the YMCA (and…ditto) or even try to break up with Roy? None of it mattered. None of it did anything, except for cause pain and heartbreak and…well, some not too terrible art if she did say so herself, but still. None of it changed anything.

She waited for Roy to rush through his morning routine—again—and sat in near-silence as the truck pulled into the office. She accepted his tossed off “love ya, Pammy” and crept upstairs, punched in the buttons to buy Dwight’s pencil cup, and went through the motions of the day. The same banter fell from the same lips—even Jim’s and hers—as she let her instincts take over and her mind wander. Stanley found out again about the booze cruise and she feigned surprise. Brenda was horrified by Michael and she barely cared. Everything was always the same. Why had she never noticed before? Why had it taken a million repeats of the same day to make her realize how much of her life was already that way? And why should she try to do something about it, when nothing she did got any purchase on the problem?

The rest of the workday passed in a haze, but then again they usually did, didn’t they? What was one more seemingly endless cycle in a string of actually endless repetitions of the same dull life? At least she wasn’t aging, or she had to assume so, given her impressions of Bill Murray’s life. Though he did appear to be a near-immortal who always looked the same, so maybe she would. Maybe after an actual million times through this same damn day she’d wake up to discover her bones had crumbled into dust—or was that, not wake up to discover it? Either way, it was sad that the best outcome she could think of right now was that her purely physical body would wear away and let her rest. Though who was to say she’d be able to even then? Maybe some vital essence of her would continue to float through these endless office meetings and stupid camaraderie events until the heat death of the universe.

At five she met up with Roy and they drove towards the dock again in silence. She let him lead her aboard the boat and couldn’t even muster disgust at Michael’s inane Gilligan’s Island references. Didn’t he know those people got stranded? She supposed this was at least better than his earlier Titanic references. At least if they got somehow stuck in the world of Gilligan’s Island they could eat Michael to survive. Though if his spirit infected them when they did, they’d be worse off than before.

Oh look, Katy, it turned out, was a cheerleader. What a shock. And, astonishingly, she was good at taking snorkel shots too. Was there anything she couldn’t do?

The first real feeling she’d felt all day washed through her. Yes, her jealous mind recalled, there was something she couldn’t do. She couldn’t get Jim to marry her. Though, she thought, people who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. It wasn’t like Roy actually wanted to marry her, either. But it was mildly amusing at least to consider that she had gotten him to propose the first time, even if he said it didn’t count, and that she knew Jim was probably going to break up with Katy on this cruise. She didn’t feel good that she found that amusing, or that she was gloating internally about an event that, she remembered, had left Katy devastated, but she clung to the fact that she was feeling anything at all beyond a dangerous lassitude that threatened to swallow up her limbs.

She pushed her way outside and, as before, as always, Jim followed her. They had the same stupid little stilted conversation about Katy and the same idiotic staring contest—why didn’t he do or say anything in all that time? She pushed aside the mirroring question “why don’t you?”—and she gave up, again. “I’m cold.”

And she did feel cold. The kind of cold you feel after hypothermia has set in and there’s nothing you can do now to help yourself; the kind that sneaks over your body like fog settling in over a bay at night, only noticeable because what seemed like darkness has been replaced by the real thing, the stars and moon winking out imperceptibly in an instant; the kind you die from. She couldn’t feel her fingers, or her heart.

She wandered back inside and, for a lack of anything else to do, sat down in the same booth. Katy joined her in a moment and they had…oh god, her mind had blocked out this conversation…but they had it nonetheless, the excruciating one about engagements and how you became engaged. You don’t, she thought. And I can’t get out of mine. Which of us is really worse off?

And there was Roy, and that same drunken loutish grin on his face making promises she knew he had no intention of keeping, except if she was lucky by inertia—and who was to say if that luck would be good or bad? And Katy was pushing her onto her feet and she was being kissed (he tasted of beer and tequila, and how had she not noticed that the first time? Oh right, because he always tasted of that. She wondered what someone else—Jim, say—might taste like, but the brief flicker of interest morphed into something else when she saw him getting up to make a toast). Jim’s toast was…almost painful this time, because she could see what she hadn’t seen before: the pain in his eyes. He did his level best to make his voice sound like it always did, and he’d fooled her before, she realized, but there was something inside him hurting, and she wished—she hoped—she prayed she knew what.

It was almost enough to make her feel again, but then Dwight wrested away the microphone and she settled back into her daze. What was the point? Even if Jim loved her like she loved him, what could she do about it? Nothing ever changed. There was no point. She might as well just let it be.

She was wandering around the ship later, having slipped away from Roy when his drunken caresses became just too much for even her dulled soul to bear tonight, when she heard low voices coming from the railing. She wandered closer to see Michael tied to the rail—had she known that had happened before? Had it happened? She couldn’t remember—and Jim standing next to him. They hadn’t heard her yet, so she stopped to listen.

“What a night.” Jim was staring out to sea (lake?) so she couldn’t see his eyes but she could hear the same pain in his voice, less disguised this time.

“Well, it’s nice for you. Your friend got engaged.” Of course Michael couldn’t hear Jim’s pain. If she’d missed it the first time, what hope did someone as self-centered as Michael have? But then again she’d been pretty self-centered that first time around too.

“She was always engaged.” She almost snorted. Tell that to Roy. But then again, she’d always known Jim seemed to take her engagement more seriously than Roy ever did: he certainly was more thoughtful of her as an engaged woman than her own fiancé, because it came up at the oddest times. They’d be chatting about something or trading jokes and Roy’s name would come up and…it was never explicit, but there was always an awareness, she thought, that she couldn’t quite label, that never got above the surface, but that always lay in wait to snare their conversations and steer them in another direction.

“Roy said the first one didn’t count.” Oh God, he’d said that to Michael? Who the hell else had he said that to? The dry cleaner? The florist? Of course not, because he didn’t do any dry cleaning and he’d never bought her flowers except for prom, but knowing how Roy felt about Michael she could be damn sure he’d told everyone he had actually talked to that the first one didn’t count—everyone but her and Jim, that is. God, what a prick she was engaged to. Her dander was coming up, and it was a welcome feeling because it filled the emptiness that had been threatening to take over her soul.

“That's... great. You know, to tell the truth, I used to have a big thing for Pam, so...” Wait, what? Run that tape back please. Jim had a thing for her? She’d always suspected, maybe hoped, but he dated people like Katy. He could get anyone he wanted—sure, he could be a little schlubby, a little nebbishy at times, but underneath that was a smart, funny man with a great smile and a surprisingly ripped body. Thinking about him having a thing for her felt…egotistical. Even now that she’d come to realize how she felt about him, she hadn’t really fully hoped he’d reciprocate without some serious convincing. She felt something more than anger start to seep into the gaps where her ennui had been, but she kept listening.

“Really? You're kidding me. You and Pam? Wow. I would have never have put you two together. You really hid it well. God! I usually have a radar for stuff like that. You know, I made out with Jan...” Leave it to Michael to turn the conversation towards him and Jan (not an image Pam needed more of) but she felt irked that he’d never thought of them together. Sure, she hadn’t dared think of it herself until a few cycles ago, but Michael didn’t have to worry about being faithful to Roy! He could have seen it if he’d wanted to.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Yeah? Yep. Well, Pam is cute.” Given that this was Michael, at least he hadn’t said the words “big knockers.”

“Yeah. She's really funny, and she's warm. And she's just... well, anyway.” No! Keep going! She wanted to yell, but she knew that if she showed herself now he’d just start sputtering in awkwardness, and she didn’t want that. Anyway, she’d have another shot at this: it wasn’t like she wouldn’t wake up in the same day tomorrow. But unlike this morning, that finally felt like a blessing, not a curse.

“Well, if you like her so much, don't give up.” When did she start agreeing with Michael?

“She's engaged.” Why, oh why, did Jim Halpert have to be a good guy? Not that she really would have wanted him if he weren’t, but it was damn inconvenient to think that both of them were stymied by an engagement that she’d since found out to be not just a shambles but nearly a sham.

“BFD. Engaged ain't married.”

“Huh.” Was Jim actually thinking about it? And when had she become the sort of person who wanted him to think about it? Actually, she knew the answer to that: today, but not this today. The today when Penny had made her face the reality that, yes, engaged wasn’t married—and that if she wasn’t careful, she’d end up married to someone other than the man she loved, the man in front of her now.

“Never, ever, ever give up.”

Pam let Jim wander away, Michael’s advice ringing in her ears. Sure, he meant it for Jim, and she hoped Jim would take it—although he, of course, wouldn’t remember it later because “later” would be today again for him—but she felt it take root deep within her heart. She’d almost given up today because the last few times of trying to break up with Roy had taken so much out of her. But she couldn’t. She had to do what Michael told her—and when had she thought that before with anything but doomed resignation?—and never, ever, ever give up.

Tomorrow wasn’t a new day, but it was a clean slate, and she’d be damned if she let herself write the same things on it as she had today.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Today was a new day. OK, it was the same day, it was always the same day, she could tell because she was in the bed she shared with Roy and not, as she’d been last night, sitting in a hotel room near Lake Wallenpaupack, with a notebook full of ideas of how to deal with Roy sitting defiantly beside her as she fell asleep. She had realized, late last night, that buying a hotel room was functionally a victimless crime—or maybe it would be better to say, a free expense. She paid for the room on her credit card (somehow she and Roy had never gotten around to joining their finances, which she was beginning to both be grateful of and to realize might have been a sign of later lacks of commitment to come). The charge (presumably) reset like everything else. She got a bed that wasn’t filled with Roy, all at no actual expense to her.

Of course, no matter how empty of Roy the bed she fell asleep in might be, the bed she woke up in was half-full of him. She had decided, in a fit of pique last night, to…sidestep the Roy question today. She would figure out something to do with him one way or another, and if all else failed she would just put up with his angry, sulking figure on the cruise. She didn’t have to kowtow to his wishes or his frustrations. But today, she was going to ignore him and move onto the other parts of her plan for the day: improving everyone else’s life, and making sure she was right about Jim. Not that she had any worry that she wasn’t right about her feelings for Jim: admitting to herself that she was in love with Jim was like dropping two successive long blue pieces down a prepared slot in Tetris, in that it made everything else so much simpler afterwards and you couldn’t really go back. She was calmer; more settled; clearer about her own wishes and desires than she ever had been, except maybe when she’d been a seven-year-old loudly insisting to everyone she met (stranger, friend, or family) that she was going to be a dog doctor (the term “veterinarian” having proven difficult for her youthful tongue). The main difference between herself now and at seven years old (besides the ability to pronounce and even spell “veterinarian”) was that her present self had actually weighed her plan for the future against other options and decided on it, as opposed to getting whisked away by the impression of the smiling figure in white who had made Mr. Barksdale feel all better. If anything, she had been whatever the opposite of whisked away was by Jim; her regard for him had slowly crept up on her like a sunrise, not flashed down like lightning, and as with the sunrise she did not anticipate any immediate return to the prior condition.

She frowned at her own similes. It was probably good that her medium of choice was paint, not words. She might be an artist, but she was pretty sure she wasn’t a poet. Not that that mattered. She was decided on Jim; that was what mattered. So she was going to spend today making sure that he was just as decided on her. She was pretty sure of it from what she’d pieced together across the various cruises: his mutterings about “saving the receptionist” instead of the customer; his strange break-up with Katy; that conversation with Michael most of all. But it was time for her to take some direct action. Not to cheat on Roy; for all his sins, he didn’t deserve that. Even if she had broken up with him so many times she was losing count, the resets meant that she wasn’t free until she did it again in whatever cycle it was she did so. Just some light prodding to make sure she was on the right track. After all, it would be awful in more ways than one if she was actually supposed to help him get with Katy and she screwed up her chances to get out of this mess by misunderstanding Jim’s mind.

The pre-work routine went about as usual, and she and Roy pulled into the office parking lot right on time—which was to say, about five minutes late as usual for today. She rushed upstairs and decided to buy the pencil cup again. After all, that had been what she’d chosen to start this whole mess, which meant it was the most default-Pam choice, and if she was right about things Jim liked default-Pam. She certainly hoped so; even though she was evolving, she still wanted to be herself, and she wanted to be with someone (hopefully Jim! Definitely not Roy!) who liked her that way.

Like clockwork, Jim lingered at her desk while they sent Stanley in to talk to Michael, and she decided to make her first move.

“Hey, Jim?”

“Yeah?” He paused, jellybean in hand.

“Who are you planning to invite along on the cruise?”

He looked at her oddly and, for the first time in their acquaintance that she could remember, put the jellybean back down.

“What cruise?”

Shit. Stanley hadn’t told them it was a cruise yet. “The cruise that I’m betting Michael is sending us on.”

“Why do you think it’s a cruise?” He picked up another bean and she slapped at his hand playfully. “What?”

“I see what you did there, mister. You take that original jellybean back or so help me…”

He reached back in with a smirk. “You should know I’m a one-jellybean-man.”

“Didn’t look that way to me,” she sniffed.

His smirk shifted into a more serious look, eyes intent, brows slightly pursed, and he settled his hands on both sides of the bowl. “Maybe that first jellybean was attached to the bowl. Maybe it wanted to be right where it was. Maybe by taking it, I was disrupting a lovely jellybean-in-bowl life.”

She picked up the first jellybean and held it out towards him. “Or maybe it was just waiting for you to come and grab it.” She tossed the bean up in the air and he caught it in his mouth, which she was glad of, as she already couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. To cover the way staring at his mouth made her feel, she grabbed the second bean he’d almost taken and popped it into her own mouth. There was something almost naughty in sharing jellybeans with him this way, something that made her belatedly think that Roy might have indeed had something to be jealous of about “Halpert” as he called him, even when she first started putting the jellybeans out instead of mints. But that was in the past, and now she had a fascinating person in front of her who, she hoped, was going to be her future.

“I’m skeptical about your narrative of the love life of a jellybean, but since the other option was letting it fall on the floor—and since you ate my other contender alive—I suppose I’ll have to concede that round.” His grin gave the lie to his formal words. “So, you think this is going to be a cruise?”

She was grateful for the segue back to what she was going to say in the first place. “Yes. Think about it—what’s the nicest thing you can do at the worst time you can do it? A cruise, but in January. That’s Michael in a nutshell.”

“But the ski masks?”

“Michael.”

“The swimsuit? It’s January.”

“Michael.”

“You’re just going to say ‘Michael’ to whatever objection I make, aren’t you?”

“Yep.” She grinned up at him. “And the worst part about it is that you know I’m right.”

“Nope.” He shook his head slowly at her. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

“Oh? Is there something you think Michael doesn’t explain?”

“No.” He ran his hand through the short hairs on the back of his neck and she wondered what it would be like to do the same. “You’re wrong that that’s the worst part. Knowing you’re right? That’s always the best part.”

“Flatterer.” She could feel her face heating.

“Just telling the truth. So, what did you want to know about this cruise you think we’re going on?”

“Who are you planning on taking?” She had to make a physical effort to keep her leg from tapping under the desk where he’d hear it.

“Oh.” He tapped the desk with his fingers idly. “Hadn’t really thought…” He glanced up. “I was still holding out for the bank robbery, you know, so…” He chuckled lightly.

“You should bring Larissa,” she blurted, then tried to modulate her voice to sound more nonchalant, to what she worried was little effect. Come up with a reason that isn’t “I want to grill her about you.” “I mean, I just met one of her friends from college and I thought it might be nice to chat with her a little about…” she trailed off. “It’s stupid.”

“Wanting to talk to Larissa about a mutual friend is not stupid.” He met her eyes with a hint of amusement. “Assuming this is a mutual friend. If you’re looking to have her denounce someone, you might have the wrong woman. Larissa’s very loyal.”

“I know.” She did know—Larissa had made it very clear that she was loyal to Jim.

“So who is it you want Larissa to spill the beans on?”

You. “Melanie. Do you know her?”

“Melanie, Melanie, Melanie…” Jim tapped his lips and almost succeeded in distracting Pam from the rest of his answer. “Yeah, she’s a good kid. She and L roomed together freshman year, and the rest, as they say, is history.” He paused. “When did you guys meet?”

Pam froze for a moment, but meeting Jim’s warm gaze reminded her that this was her best friend, the person she loved, the person she could tell anything to. She took a deep breath. “Today.”

“Today?” He leaned back in surprise. “I haven’t seen her come in. Not that I’m sure why she would.” He leaned back and whispered. “You’re sure it wasn’t just Dwight in a wig?”

“Pretty sure.” She gave him a tight smile and she could see his eyes change as he noted the tension in her own face. “Listen…it was today, but not today.”

“Today, but not today…” He quirked an eyebrow. “Like how you gain a day flying to and from Australia?”

She snorted. “No. Listen, this is gonna sound weird…”

“Lay it on me.”

“I’ve been reliving the same day for a while now.” There, she’d said it.

“Like, metaphorically? Pam, is this a cry for help?”

If only you knew. “Not in that way. I don’t mean metaphorically, Jim, I mean literally. I wake up each day and the same clothes I wore the night before are laid out, clean and fresh. No matter where I go to sleep, even in a different county, I wake up in my bed next to Roy. Every day we play the same prank on Dwight—well, I don’t always buy the pencil cup, but the same vending machine prank—and every day Michael mysteriously announces that we’re going on a booze cruise on Lake Wallenpaupack. The. Same. Day.”

He looked at her steadily and then asked a question she would never, in a million years, have guessed he’d ask. “So, which thing gets the best reaction?”

“What?” Had Jim gone unhinged? Had her revelation thrown him into madness?

He sighed. “Which of Dwight’s things? From the vending machine?” When she continued to stare at him, he quirked an eyebrow again. “Look, I believe you, because you’re Pam. So this has been happening. I doubt you know why or you’d have done something about it by now, or at least told me about it, so asking about that doesn’t seem very useful. You haven’t told me what you’re doing with these endless repetitions except for changing out the details of our prank on Dwight, so tell me: which thing gets the best reaction?”

She let out a breath she hadn’t entirely been aware she was holding. He believed her. She hugged his words to her chest internally: I believe you, because you’re Pam. “The stapler.”

“Really? Isn’t pranking the stapler old hat by now?”

“There’s a packet of some kind of beet powder shoved inside it.”

“And there’s a lot we can do with a mysterious packet of powder. Brilliant, Beesly.” He frowned. “So why the pencil cup this time?”

“Because that’s what I did the first time, and it gave me courage.”

“Why did you need courage?” He was still frowning.

“To tell you.”

“Oh.” He made a motion like he was going to reach for her hand, and she caught her breath again, but then he turned it into a little flopping of the wrist gesture instead. “Well, here I am. Told.” He wrinkled his nose. “Why did you start with the Larissa stuff?”

“Because I do actually want to talk to her, and otherwise you bring Katy.” Shit, she had not meant to mention that.

“And you don’t want me to bring Katy?” He was playing with the edge of the jellybean bowl, not making eye contact, and it struck her that this was shy Jim. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really seen it before.

“Not unless you really want to.” She swallowed, then gave a half-laugh that felt artificial even to her ears. “Actually, not even then, if I’m being honest.”

“And why shouldn’t you be honest? After all, I won’t remember this tomorrow.” He gave her a sad smile. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry you bring Katy?”

“Sorry you have to do this alone.” He stood up and glanced around as if becoming aware of their surroundings for the first time in a long time. “I see Stanley’s back, and I better go hear about this booze cruise and try to act surprised. But hey, Pam?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell me next time, too.”

“You got it.” She nodded as he tapped her desk and headed over to Stanley.

The rest of the day was actually pretty normal, which surprised Pam, but then again she supposed Jim did have actual work to do during the day sometimes. She herself was sitting there stewing, wondering what had come over her to make her actually near-as come out and tell Jim she didn’t like Katy around. What must he think? What was she doing? But then again, she reminded herself, straightening her spine, she’d told herself she’d be more honest with him and with herself, and what could be more honest? Well, besides grabbing him by the lapels and kissing him, then declaring her love, but she’d try that some other time.

Around 3pm, Jim wandered up to the desk again and she felt a tremor of longing break across her. If only somehow she had already broken up with Roy, she could actually lean over and just…kiss him silly. But for now she’d have to settle for drinking up the sound of his voice.

“Soo….”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking. About this whole…Groundhog Day thing you’ve got going on.” He popped a jellybean. “And I think we need to use this to prank Dwight. Beyond the vending machine.”

“Two pranks in one day? Is that really sporting?”

He grinned. “But then again, for you it’s not really the same day is it?”

“There’s a flaw in that logic somewhere,” she mused. “But I’ll allow it. Continue.” She put her face in her hands and just…looked at him. A good use of her time, she thought.

“I was thinking…what if on this booze cruise…” he glanced up. “You do know what he does on the cruise, right?”

“Of course. He pretends to steer the ship,” and breaks Angela’s heart by not talking to her. Assuming Angela had such a thing to break, of course.

“Is there something you can do with that? Leave him a memo in the morning before Michael announces the cruise? Tell him the ship’s going to run aground, or that the wheel is poisoned, or something?”

“Oooh…” Pam realized this might be the solution to one of her biggest concerns: how to get Dwight away from the wheel and paying actual attention to his girlfriend. “I’d ask if you’ve got my back on this, but you won’t remember it.”

“But I’ll have your back anyway.”

“You will.” She wanted to melt at the intensity in his eyes, and somehow what she’d intended as a question came out as flat truth. He would have her back, even though he wouldn’t remember. He always did.

“Always.” It sounded like a promise. Probably, she reflected, because it was.

The cruise itself was almost anticlimactic. She fobbed Roy off on Darryl, Lonny, and their snorkel shots, made Darryl promise that he wouldn’t let Roy wander off and talk to the captain (saying something about how Michael was going to be sticking close to the captain’s side “and you know how Roy gets along with him”) and spent her time cozied with Jim and Larissa at their table. She chatted with Larissa about Melanie, who she was beginning to suspect Larissa saw a lot of, and with both of them about the plot of Groundhog Day. Eventually she found herself at the rail with Larissa, looking out into the lake and the dark shore beyond.

She recognized an opportunity when she saw it. “Sometimes, I don’t get Roy.”

“What’s there to get?” Larissa snorted, and then backtracked quickly. “Sorry, he’s your…”

“Fiancé, I know.”  Pam shrugged. “If it’s any consolation, he’s not going to be much longer.”

“Good.” Larissa looked like she was physically holding back any further judgment, so Pam sidled up to her on the railing and thrust an elbow into the younger woman’s arm. When did I get so comfortable with Jim’s sister? she wondered to herself.

“Hey,” she said out loud. “We’re friends, right?”

“Right.” Larissa smiled at her. “Any friend of Jim’s, etc.”

“No, no, I mean us. I’d like to be actual friends with you. And not just because you’re Jim’s sister, or because you’re super-cool, or because…”

“You think I’m super-cool?” Larissa tossed her head back and guffawed. “Wait until I tell Jim that. He’ll die.”

Pam smiled. “He just about did the last time I told him.”

“Aww, man, you already told him? I wanted to see his face.” Larissa smiled. “But yeah, you’re good people, Pam. We’re friends.”

“Thanks, Larissa.” Pam felt her face flush and thanked whatever power was responsible for such things for the darkness that shaded her face. “So, about your brother…”

“Yes?” Larissa responded with a characteristic Halpert cocked eyebrow. “What about my brother?”

“If I were…suddenly not engaged to Roy…”

“Yes?” At first Pam thought Larissa was genuinely inquisitive about what she was going to say, then she caught the glimpse of a familiar glint in her eye.

“You know what I’m trying to say!” she accused Larissa while the latter dissolved into giggles.

“Yes, but you don’t say it.” She straightened. “And besides, shouldn’t you be having this conversation with Jim?”

“I will, but only after I’m…free.”

“Ah.” Larissa nodded. “So you’re trying me out in case I say something like Jim’s been faking it the whole time, he’s super gay, so he was just feigning interest so the guys wouldn’t think he was into Oscar? So you can go back to Roy if that’s the case?”

Pam snorted. “No, I’m…it’s just…I thought you might have some insight into your brother.” She took a deep breath. “And no, once I figure out how to cut that connection, it’s cut. No going back.” She added mentally except if I keep waking up in bed with him, but even then I’ll just keep breaking up.

Larissa shook her head. “I don’t have any special insight. Just what anyone can see by looking at him.”

“Which is? Assume I’m going in blind here.”

Larissa smirked. “If you can’t see it yourself, you’re just going to have to ask Jim.” She made a zipping motion across her lips and mock-tossed the key into the lake, then spoiled the effect by going on. “Halpert solidarity.”

Pam decided to have her own fun. “So the way to find out what you think your brother thinks of me is to become a Halpert? Sounds like a plan.”

It was probably for the best that Larissa was already holding onto the rail.

Pam spent the next seven days—the next week, she would have said, if only time went forward like it usually did—perfecting the order of events as best she could. She figured out the perfect phrasing to use to get Brenda and Toby to miss the cruise; the right nudge to get Ryan to admit he was attracted to Kelly and the right admonition to help Kelly realize that she was being overaggressive with Ryan; the right way to tell Jim what was going on. She was gratified to find that no matter how she did it, his acceptance was instantaneous. She told him she was repeating the same day; he believed it. There were none of the arguments, the accusations, the speculations as to her mental health that she knew would have accompanied telling Roy—had she ever had any inclination to tell Roy. Strangely—or, given her revelations during this whole period, not so strangely—she had never felt any such pull, not even the first night when she woke up and found the same clothes laid out for her. Occasionally she told Larissa—who now accompanied them every time—and as she started to find the right places to bond with Jim’s sister she also became more and more aware that she wanted, desperately wanted, to be part of that family. She had already known how she felt about Jim, but she hadn’t been quite as prepared for the warm feeling that washed over her watching the two of them tease each other, or making a joke at Jim’s expense and seeing Larissa crack up. She felt as she never had with her own family: free, funny, open. Oh, she loved her mother and her father and her sister—Penny was awesome, especially—but the Beesly clan was a much more reserved group when they were together, doubly so if there was anyone else present. These Halperts seemed to revel in the chance to make fun of each other, and Pam couldn’t get enough of it.

She also practiced ways of getting rid of Roy: tasking Darryl with him, convincing Michael to put together an arm-wrestling competition as a “team-building exercise,” getting Captain Jack to give him (instead of Dwight) the wheel. But she was well aware that this was just busywork; the real hard labor of actually breaking up with him for good, not just avoiding him, was yet to be done. If she hadn’t realized that for herself, the simple fact that she kept waking up in his bed every morning would have done so on its own.

But she didn’t know what to do about that, so she busied herself with other tasks. She bought every remaining item in Dwight’s previous possession out of the vending machine, first one by one and then all at once. In the latter case, she went to the extraordinary length of commandeering (with Jim’s enthusiastic help) a spare folding table from the annex and setting it up as a mockery of Dwight’s desk, complete with a used computer monitor and keyboard that had once been Phyllis’s until Toby had accidentally knocked them off her desk and broken them when Michael startled him by yelling at him. Pam thought privately that the only reason Phyllis had gotten replacements at all was that Michael was able to yell at Toby more for having broken them and then charge the costs to Corporate via HR. That had been years ago, when Toby was first going through his divorce and still reacted to Michael’s taunts, of course—now the same yelling would only have received a bored “Michael, are you through yet?” But this being Dunder Mifflin, they’d sat in the supply closet the whole time, and now she and Jim hauled them out and she pretended to be Dwight for an afternoon.

“Identity theft is not a joke, Pam,” he warned. “Millions of families suffer every year!”

“MICHAEL!” she yelled.

“Oh, that’s funny. MICHAEL!” he counter-yelled.

“What?” Michael stuck his head out of his office. “Pam? Dwight? Is this one of those sexual harassment things? Because I have Orporate-Cay in the office-may so keep it down.” Brenda’s head stuck out from behind him and he awkwardly moved to try to block her view.

“No. Michael, Pam is stealing my identity.” Dwight looked self-righteous, a look he had clearly practiced in the mirror, Pam thought.

“Pam. Pam Pam Pam. Pamalamalam. Is this true?” Michael sauntered over to stand in front of Pam’s new desk space. “Jim, is…where’s Jim?” Michael being Michael, he had turned as if Pam’s desk were where Dwight’s was, which left him looking at the exit doors to the hallway since Pam’s desk was not, in point of fact, Dwight’s, despite the presence of pencil cup, bobbleheads, pictures, stapler, &c.

“Behind you, Big Mike.” Jim raised his hand.

“Yes, yes, well, Jim, that’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then, Michael?” Jim looked perplexed, as if he had no idea what was going on.

“The point is…is…is…” Michael flailed.

“Pam is stealing my identity, Michael, and thus interfering with the smooth running of the office,” Dwight said in the tone of a man used to repeating himself to get his way.

“Right. Jim, is Pam stealing Dwight’s identity?”

Jim cocked an eyebrow. “Why would she do that?”

“That’s a good point. A good point.” Michael turned, once again getting confused between the desks, then decisively pointed at Pam. “Why would you do that? You’re much hotter than Dwi…that is to say, you’re both valued employees.” He gave a nod at Brenda that he seemed to think meant something like I am not guilty of any kind of sexual discrimination at all, although Pam suspected Brenda was reading it as something more like I am a first-class dimwit.

“I’m not doing anything of the kind, Michael,” Pam answered with her hands crossed demurely in her lap and her eyes lowered, a posture she’d often found useful in deflecting Michael’s confused ire.

“Then what are you doing?” Michael seemed genuinely confused.

“Yeah, Pam, what are you doing?” Dwight sneered.

“Well, you know…” Pam batted her eyelashes at Dwight and Michael, then winked at Jim and, behind him, Brenda. “Dwight’s just so organized and efficient, so I thought if I modeled my desk on his my work would get done faster.” She dropped her eyes to her desk. “I think it was working until he started accusing me of identity theft.”

Michael turned on Dwight, only to find himself once again confused by the desks and staring at Jim. He blinked for a moment then continued his motion to face Dwight, making about a 270 degree turn instead of the 90 degrees he’d intended. “What do you have to say for yourself, Dwight?”

“Yeah,” Jim chimed in. “It seems to me that Dwight is interfering with the smooth running of the office.” He smirked as Dwight’s face started to turn purple.

“I…I…” Dwight struggled between his innate desire to be correct, his urge to defer to Michael, and the ego that told him to accept Pam’s compliment. The latter two won out, though the victory was not easily obtained. “I apologize, Pamela. You were doing what you thought best by modeling yourself after the superior salesman in the office.” He sniffed at Jim. “I commend your good sense.”

“Thank you, Dwight.” Pam knew when to let a prank go.

But knowing when to let a prank go did not mean passing up the opportunity for a second prank, and she spent several of the days in the pseudo-week perfecting her future-Dwight plans. Among the possessions of Dwight’s that were in the machine, stuffed in the bottom left of the vending machine, were copies of his own personal stationary (bought, as she had expected, with the 20% discount for Dunder Mifflin employees on individually watermarked and decorated stock). There were more in his desk, according to Jim, and they used the time in while Dwight was focused on what else she had bought to steal those. That way, when Dwight noticed the first fax come in from his “future self” and ran to make sure they hadn’t bought the copies in the vending machine, they hadn’t—which only confirmed his belief in the reality of the fax.

She and Jim spent several cycles (though of course, he only knew of one at a time) planning the perfect message, which she insisted, for reasons he could not decipher but never questioned, include the idea that he should definitively take a break from steering vehicles tonight and check your accounts. She didn’t know any other way to get Dwight to pay proper attention to Angela without giving away that she knew about their relationship, but she also avoided telling Jim they were together—after all, she thought, her escape was probably going to happen by making everything as it ought to be, not by making fun of Dwight as much as possible. That didn’t mean these were the only letters they sent: someone poisons the coffee was a favorite, as was don’t trust anyone wearing green and, in a stroke of genius, Jim Halpert is the only one who can save us. That last message led to Dwight following Jim around like a puppydog, to Pam’s poorly concealed delight.

Every night, she checked the effect of the letters on Dwight’s behavior towards Angela on the cruise, and she slowly crafted them to make them both appear as happy as they were capable of appearing. When Angela started sniping at her and Jim and Larissa one evening for being “too loud and obnoxiously cheerful,” she was sure she had accomplished her goal. It had been suspicious, not that she’d really noticed it the first time, that Angela hadn’t been more put out by an office cruise, much less a boozy one. Now Pam knew that it was concern over Dwight that had made her too focused on her own discontent to take shots at other people. As soon as Angela turned up nasty again, Pam was satisfied that her goal was met. After all, she only wanted Angela happy enough; too much Angela might make everyone else’s experience worse. It certainly did hers.

Now she just had to deal with the single biggest issue, the one she’d been putting off and dreading: how to get a breakup with Roy that would actually stick. If she could just ghost him, by now, she thought she would. But waking up in bed with him every morning no matter what she did, not to mention sharing a car and working together and going to the same office camaraderie event, made that impossible. She’d just have to find a way—the earlier, she thought, the better, because honestly? She had shit to do during this day, and Roy did not fit in.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. It occurred to her, as it did most days (not that the days were really distinguishable in this first moment before the rest of it all came crashing in on her) that there was some extreme irony in the fact that she was always waking up in bed with Roy, even though she hadn’t gone to bed with him in (subjective) weeks. She was tired of it. Not so much tired of waking up next to Roy—he had, as he literally always did because every morning was the same, rolled over to his side of the bed and wasn’t actually impeding her waking-up process at all—but tired of being responsible for Roy, even just for the (single, unending) day. She was exhausted by it, not in her body (she was just waking up, as always, fairly refreshed) but in her soul. Every morning that she woke up next to Roy; every time she slapped the alarm because otherwise he would object; every breakfast she ate alone while waiting patiently for him to come downstairs was corrosive to her well-being, to her very self. She needed to be done with it. And that meant starting now.

She wasn’t going to wait for the perfect time to break up with Roy Anderson, because he’d shown there was no perfect time to break up with him. She’d tried everything she could to break it to him nicely, to shelter him from the situation, and dammit, she was over it and him both.

She didn’t turn off the alarm clock, and it blared again.

A grumbling Roy reached over her to slam the button down. “Geez, Pammy, how are you not up yet?” He rolled away. She briefly recalled having taken the momentary peace of not, for once, being the first one up (as in out of the bed—she was always the first to awaken) as a respite in a previous iteration of the same interaction, but she had no such plans today.

“Why should I be up, Roy?” If she didn’t say something, he’d just go into autopilot and this would just be another wasted day in a string of wasted days that stretched literally into infinity as far as she could tell or decipher. She hoped bleakly that this wasn’t all aging her, because if there was one thing worse than repeating this stupid day ad literal nauseam, it was doing it with a crick in her neck.

“You’re always the first one up.” Roy stretched and stared at her.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Pammy.” She couldn’t tell if he was genuinely uncertain or sarcastic, until his next sentence gave it away with the cold snap of a grumpy man. “Maybe because you make breakfast so there’s no point in me being up first.”

“Why do I make breakfast?” She crossed her hands behind her head and stared up at him.

“What?”

“Why do I make breakfast?” She shrugged. “Why don’t you make breakfast?”

He looked at her strangely and then started to chuckle. “You’d hate it if I made breakfast.”

She shrugged again. “Maybe I’d like it if you actually did something in the morning.”

“I do plenty!” He glared at her. “I shower, I shave…”

“I do those things too, Roy.”

“It’s different. You’re a girl.” He raised a hand before she could speak. “Sorry, woman.” They’d had that fight—well, to Roy they’d had that fight a week ago, when he’d called her a ‘girl’ seemingly every sentence when talking to his parents on the phone, but to Pam it was much longer ago. For a moment, Pam was glad that he’d apparently internalized the lesson, until he undercut it by muttering, ostensibly under his breath, “whatever.” She rolled her eyes.

“So because I’m not a guy, I have to do more?”

“C’mon Pammy.” Roy wiped a hand through his unruly hair and sighed. “What do you want me to say, huh? You do the home stuff, and I do the work…” His eyes went wide as he realized what he’d begun to say. “I mean, I do the…other stuff.”

Her voice flat, Pam raised an eyebrow. “What other stuff?” When Roy tried the little boyish half-grin he always used to wheedle his way out of unfortunate situations, she snapped at him. “Were you going to say I do the home stuff while you work? Is that it? Do you not think I work?”

“Pammy…” Roy’s hand was busily unstraightening whatever it had straightened in the last brush through his hair.

“No, seriously, Roy, what is it you do?” Pam knew she was being a little unfair, because it wasn’t like Roy did actually nothing, but she was done with having her contributions to the household treated like they didn’t matter while whatever it was he thought he was doing was somehow so important.

“I do the grilling.”

“Once since September.”

“I fix the truck.”

“Except the last time you ‘fixed’ the truck we ended up paying double for Gary down at the Exxon station to re-fix whatever you did.”

“I…I don’t need to explain myself to you.” Roy was getting heated, even though Pam hadn’t raised her voice. But she wasn’t going to let his temper tantrum cause her to back down. She made deliberate eye contact and didn’t say anything, until his annoyance caused him to burst out again. “If I do so little, why do you even keep me around?”

“I don’t know, Roy, why do I keep you around?” For a horrified instant she worried he would answer sex and reach out for her, but apparently he was beyond actually looking for an answer. Instead he was yelling.

“Well, maybe you won’t have me to keep around, you ever think about that?” He stomped over towards the bedroom door. “Maybe that’ll make you realize how much you need me.” He stood in the doorway, not entirely aware (at least, Pam hoped he wasn’t entirely aware, for his sake) of the comic figure he cut, with his too-small Flyers t-shirt with the holes in it that he chose for who knew what reason to sleep in undercutting any pretension he might make to dignity. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll lose the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Pam took a deep breath, but it didn’t calm her heartbeat. “Meaning you, I take it?” The irony that she had spent so long in this endless day trying to “be careful” to lose Roy was not lost on her. “What if I’m OK with that?”

“You can’t be serious.” At first she wondered if he’d soften, but then she saw the anger slide back into place behind his eyes.

“Oh, I’m deadly serious.” She met his eyes again. “What if I tell you I’m done with this, Roy?”

“Then this is your fucking lucky day.” He grabbed his work clothes from the dresser and turned to face her again. “When I get home tonight, you better not fucking be here.” He seized his towel and turned towards the bathroom. “And fucking stay away from me at work, too.” He slammed the bedroom door on his way out.

Pam looked around the bedroom in Roy’s absence, and realized for the first time how little she was going to miss it. Not just because she had become sick of the endless repetition of this particular day—after all, she woke up in this bedroom most days, even if everything else wasn’t the same—but because so little of this house, this room, this existence was actually hers. There was Roy’s old clock from his childhood bedroom (even though it was on her side of the bed, so she’d have to hit the snooze button in the morning). There were the ugly dressers Roy’s mother had cleaned out of the Anderson attic into this house when they’d moved in together (insisting that “you need couple items” when Pam had mildly protested that she already had a dresser from her college dorm room). There was the pile of Roy’s athletic gear just next to the hamper (and honestly, he hadn’t actually used it in months, and yet there it was still). Not pictured? Her art supplies (stuffed under the bed so Roy wouldn’t ask her, again, how much she’d spent on them this month). Her clothes (admittedly, only because they were in the dresser and the closet, but since they never went anywhere all she had were the same dozen work-appropriate outfits and the periwinkle dress from when she’d been her cousin’s bridesmaid three years ago). Her actual art (on display at her parents’, but not here). Why not simplify: anything of hers. It was all Roy’s, or worse, that horrible hybrid that wasn’t quite “theirs” but wasn’t actually either of their preference at all. They’d never come to anything like a real compromise between their preferences; instead, all the items that were “theirs” were there because they were the easiest, the default, the least-controversial option that they had chosen after a fight. No. She was not going to miss this room in the least.

She pulled the big green suitcase her parents had moved her to college with (and back out of college with, her dad grumbling about how she could at least have lasted two years “for an associate’s”) and started to fill it. Art supplies, clothes, shoes, and she was done up here. She snatched a duffel bag up and stuffed today’s clothes and her purse in, then headed downstairs. There she added her laptop (a Christmas present from her parents two years ago), a few charging cables, her favorite mug (the rest, like the plates and silverware, were more Anderson hand-me-downs she could do without) and all the tea in the house. Then she twisted off her engagement ring and laid it on the kitchen table. It was hard to leave it—unlike Roy, ironically, the ring had become a natural part of her life—but she couldn’t look back. Not now.

Roy clomped downstairs, having apparently finished his shower and shrugged into his work clothes. “What the fuck are you doing?” he snarled. No, that was unfair; it wasn’t a snarl, it was just his normal voice. It wasn’t his fault, she supposed, or at least not his intentional fault, that she found it as unpleasant to listen to as a snarl right now.

“Leaving. You told me not to be here.”

“Too fucking right.” He stepped past her towards the door. “Well, don’t think you’re taking my truck.”

“It’s our truck, Roy. My name’s on the title just like yours.”

“Yeah, well, it’s mine.” He didn’t meet her eyes as he stood in the open doorway. She exhaled.

“We can figure it out later, Roy.”

“Whatever.” He slammed the door and she heard the telltale sound of the truck door slamming and then the engine starting up. Well, that’s that, she thought, flipped the cellphone open, and held down the 3 key. It was a secret she’d kept from Roy for a long time, actually, that she had Jim Halpert on speed-dial. She’d never actually used it before; if she needed to talk to him she usually dialed him from their home phone, because something about calling Jim on her personal cell felt like cheating. She should probably have paid attention to that feeling before now, but right now it felt perfect.

“Hey.” He didn’t bother to ask who was calling, which meant he must have her programmed into his phone as well. The thought warmed her.

“Hi. Can I ask you a favor?”

“You can ask.” She could hear the amusement in his voice.

“Can you come pick me up for work? Roy took the truck.”

“And left you there?” Jim sounded as annoyed as she would probably have felt if her whole body hadn’t been shouting finally at her in relief.

“Yup.”

“Still the same house?” This was a longstanding joke of theirs, starting from the second time Jim had dropped her off when Michael had made the office staff stay late and Roy had wanted to make his weekly poker game.

“Hasn’t changed yet.” This was her traditional answer, but she put an extra emphasis into the yet.

“I can be there in five.” Which implied he was already in the car, or else planning to blow through at least three red lights. She smiled, even though she knew he couldn’t see it.

“If you do, I’ll still be in the shower. Make it fifteen.” Even that would be a rush, but she didn’t want to miss Dwight’s discovery of the vending machine.

“You got it, Beesly.” There was a suspicious pause before his response, as if…well, as if he’d been contemplating the idea of her being in the shower.

“Thanks, Jim.” Pam giggled softly to herself, and headed upstairs with her duffel. It wouldn’t do, after all, to leave Jim waiting when he did get there.

Of course he still was waiting when she got out of the shower (having added her personal toiletries to the duffel, thanking god she hadn’t forgotten her razor in her hurry to get out of the house). She strongly suspected that despite her warning he’d still taken only five minutes to get there. But then again, that was Jim. She bounded down the walk, or at least as close to bounding as she could with the duffel over one shoulder and the big green suitcase trailing behind her. Jim stepped out of the car to open the door for her, as he always did, his eyebrows raising as he spied her luggage.

“Whoa, Beesly, I’m pretty sure Michael only specified one of each item on his list,” he teased.

She grinned up at him. “Actually,” she admitted, “I think I forgot pretty much everything on that list except the toothbrush and the bathing suit.”

“So what’s all this then?” Jim looked like he regretted asking as soon as he said it, but his curiosity had clearly gotten the better of him. She smiled over her shoulder at him as she shoved the suitcase into his trunk.

“All my worldly possessions.” She slid into the passenger’s seat as he closed the door for her and leaned over to unlatch the driver’s side for him. “I’ll explain on the way; we don’t want to miss Dwight’s discovery that you’ve stuffed all his worldly possessions into the vending machine.”

“Good call.” Jim strapped in, waited for her to finish fighting the buckle on her side, and started the car back up. “So…”

“No patience, huh, Halpert?” She winked at him, then sobered, remembering that of course he didn’t remember the last week of days for her. “So, before I get to why everything I care about is in this car, I should start by explaining that something really weird has been going on.”

“Weirder than you calling me for a ride to work with all your worldly possessions?” Jim grinned, then noticed her nodding and changed to a look of concern. “Tell me about it.”

“So for the last, like, month, I’ve been living the same day over and over again. Literally the same day. Like Groundhog Day, except it’s not February 2nd and I’m not a grumpy weatherman.”

“You’re prettier than Bill Murray.” Jim blurted, then blushed, which amazed her. “I guess that’s not much of a compliment, huh?”

“I don’t know…he does have those movie-star good looks…wait, is this Groundhog Day Bill Murray we’re talking about or now Bill Murray we’re talking about?”

“Definitely Groundhog Day.”

“Then I accept the compliment.” She smiled. “Anyway, I’ve been doing that for what feels like forever, and I think today’s the day I break out of the cycle.”

“OK. Sounds good.” Jim drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “What’s that got to do with the giant green suitcase?”

“Big.”

“What?”

“My dad calls it the big green suitcase.” Jim threw his hands up in mock frustration and she shook her head at him. “Hands on the wheel, Halpert. You’ve got precious cargo aboard.”

“I know.”

She smiled fondly at him. Did he realize how transparent he was being? Probably not, given that she’d been oblivious to his flirtations for years now. “Anyway, part of breaking out was breaking up. With Roy.” She twisted the charm on her necklace. “I may have forgotten to mention that when he took the truck he also told me that I shouldn’t be in the house when he got back tonight.”

“Jesus, Pam.” Jim rubbed the back on his neck with the hand not on the steering wheel. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.” She smiled up at him. “I actually…I’d broken up with him five…no, six times.”

“Because of the groundhog thing?”

“Yeah. This time, though, he broke up with me, and I’m hoping that means it’ll stick.”

With a studied nonchalance that didn’t fool her in the least, Jim kept his eyes forward on the traffic as he responded. “So…uh…what do you think you might need to do to make sure that happens?”

“I’m so glad you asked.” She rubbed her hands together. “I have a list.”

“Let’s see it.” He reached a hand out for a physical list while keeping his eyes forward and she smacked his arm.

“Not a physical list! It would have reset every night. It’s up here.” She tapped her forehead. “And item one is that we need to make it into work in time for me to buy Dwight’s pencil cup out of the vending machine.”

“Why his pencil cup?”

“Sentimental reasons.”  At his questioning glance, she broke down. Was this what life with Jim was going to be like (assuming, as she was beginning to, that she did actually get to have that)? She couldn’t keep anything from the man, and they hadn’t gone on an actual date yet. “It’s what I bought the first time. And the first time I told you about the groundhog thing.”

“Wait, you’ve told me about this before?”

“Oh yeah. Jim, you’re my best friend.” She smiled at him.

“Who else have you told?”

“You…Larissa…”

“You told Larissa? How?”

“Yeah…I may have kind of gotten you to invite her to the booze cruise most of the time. Oh, by the way, Merry Christmas, our camaraderie event tonight is a booze cruise on Lake Wallenpaupack.”

“Only Michael.” He shook his head. “Is the booze good at least?”

“Two words: snorkel shots.”

“Jesus.”

They pulled into the parking lot at Dunder Mifflin and hopped out of the car.

“OK, Beesly, you’ve done this before, give me my marching orders.”

“Just go on up and wander into the break room so Dwight follows you to monitor your break, then act naturally from there. I’ll follow in a moment.”

“Aye aye, captain.” Jim mock-saluted her and turned on his heel. She admired the view as he walked away, then followed at a more sedate pace. Once upstairs, she stuck her duffel behind her desk, then walked in to find him and Dwight engaged in exactly the conversation she expected them to be having.  She bought the pencil cup, winked at Jim, and started a once-again very familiar day.

With Jim as her active coconspirator, the rest of the day went perfectly, from Pam’s perspective at least. Dwight followed the news from his future avidly, Ryan and Kelly got themselves locked into the supply closet together (a nice side effect of using Dwight’s personal stationary—he sent the temp in to check that none of his own supply had gotten misfiled into the closet, Jim “coincidentally” asked Kelly to grab a ream of cardstock for a client who “wanted Jim to describe the weight of it over the phone” and Pam neatly locked the door behind them), Toby and Brenda bonded over Michael’s ridiculousness, and Roy sat as far from her as possible during the meeting in which Michael revealed the booze cruise. She sat, as usual, directly behind Jim, only this time she used the opportunity to pass him notes (on the cardstock Kelly had gleefully remaindered after it was heavily crinkled by…whatever it was she and Ryan had been up to) and generally enjoy herself more than she had in any Michael meeting ever. Around the middle of the afternoon, Jim sauntered up to her desk.

“So…”

“So?” she looked up at him with a brilliant smile.

“Call me slow if you like…”

“You’re slow,” she interrupted before he could continue. He grinned.

“I did set myself up for that, didn’t I?” He chuckled as she nodded her head seriously. “Well, call me slow if you like but if all your worldly possessions are…you know where.” He jerked his head outside, clearly realizing that saying “in my car” was probably dangerous in an office as gossip-filled as theirs. “Then you’re going to need somewhere to stay.”

She nodded. “That does seem likely.”

He cocked his head at her. “Have we had this conversation before?”

She shook her head. “Nope. As I said, this is the first time it’s gone in this direction.”

“Ah.” He smiled. “Well, then, I was going to say, Mark’s out of town for the weekend, and I took the liberty of calling him and he’s says it’s totally OK, so if you wanted, I, um, have a spare bedroom?” He stepped back. “I’m sorry, that’s probably overstepping, I just thought…”

She smiled. “It’s a nice thought.” She leaned forward, which had the intoxicating effect of causing him to take that step back towards her and lean forward himself. “The only problem I have with it is that, um,” be bold, she thought. This has to be the right cycle. And goodness knows you’ve wasted enough time. “I was kind of hoping we could go on a date? Tonight? And I’m not sure it’s a date if I’m just your temporary roommate.”

Jim blinked. “Beesly, did you just ask me out?”

Pam felt her face grow volcanically hot. “Maybe? Yes. Yes I did.”

“Then I accept.” He leaned closer. “And besides, it’s more of a date than when the girl goes home to her fiancé.” He leaned back casually and grabbed a jellybean. “Besides, all this means is that I’m guaranteed to get you to come back to my place.”

If it was possible for her face to grow hotter, it would have right then, Pam was sure.

“I’m joking, I’m joking.”

“Why?” Pam felt emboldened by his caution, and she realized that that was a lot of why she liked the idea of being with Jim: his willingness to both make the comment and then walk it back made her feel more comfortable making her own bolder statements—like asking him out, she supposed.

“Why what?”

“Why are you joking? It sounds to me like a great plan. Me coming back to your place.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to blush.

“Seriously, Jim, I appreciate the offer.” Pam felt a new sense of determination sweep over her. She hadn’t done this, but she knew this day. She knew the possibilities ahead of her and she could do this too. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You and I are going to skip the booze cruise…”

“What’s that, young lady?” She had been so focused on Jim that she’d somehow missed Michael sneaking out of his office. “No one is skipping the booze cruise! It’s the social event of the season! Everyone’s saying so. Right guys?” He looked around at his very unenthused office and waved his arms up and down. “Right???”

“Right, Michael!” Dwight jumped to his feet. Pam put up her hands to calm Michael down and Kelly screamed.

“PAM! Ohmigod Pam, your engagement ring! Where is it? Did you lose it? Ohmigod, is Jim helping you find it? Is that why you and Roy were sitting so far apart at the meeting? Is that why you’re skipping the booze cruise?”

“No one is skipping the booze cruise!” Michael was also yelling. Pam put both her hands up again for silence, and, as if by a miracle, she actually got it.

“Kelly! I didn’t lose my ring, Roy and I broke up today.” She made a little zipping motion in Kelly’s direction when she was about to respond. “That’s why Michael kindly gave me and Jim permission to start looking for apartments, because we’re all one big Dunder Mifflin family, and Michael’s a great boss.” She’d learned early that if you gave Michael credit for having done something, he would do that thing even if he’d never thought of it before in his life. “Jim is the one helping me because he and his sister volunteered to help me move stuff before we knew what Michael was planning for this evening. And that is all I’m going to answer until tomorrow.” Because if this didn’t work today, she was damned if she was going to talk any more to anyone about it until everything reset.

“I…uh…that’s right, people, back to work!” Michael took control of the situation as only he could. “Nothing to see here, just my highly effective leadership on display!” He leaned down towards Pam. “When did I promise that?”

“Just now, Michael.” Jim smiled. “We were all very impressed.”

“Good, good. Wait, Pam, why don’t I help you look for apartments? That way Jimbo here can go on the cruise.” Michael smiled. “After all, I always thought of you as my daughter. My hot little daughter who’s…well, not my daughter as such but…”

“Michael!” Pam cut him off before it could get any creepier. “You have to go make the awesome presentation tonight. And everyone else has to go hear it. That’s why it has to be Jim who helps me.”

“Why doesn’t Jim have to hear the presentation?”

“Because you’re going to go give it to him now.” She mouthed sorry at Jim as Michael towed him into his office babbling about management techniques—or porn magazines, she wasn’t entirely sure. He made eye contact as he was being tugged through the door and clearly mouthed back you owe me, Beesly, and she blew him a kiss.

“Ohmigod Pam!” She should probably have waited to see if Kelly was gone before doing that. “Are you and Jim…” For once Kelly found herself speechless. Pam felt very grateful that Angela was in the back room at the moment, because otherwise she was sure that Kelly’s excitement would not have been the dominant emotion on display. As it was, she took her friend aside.

“Who cares about me and Jim? What about you and Ryan?” This was Pam’s version of Jim going into Michael’s office, she realized, as Kelly took the opportunity to spend the next twenty minutes telling her in minute detail about behaviors in the supply closet that she would have sworn were physically impossible, as well as planning her and Ryan’s wedding (“it’s gonna be so awesome! I look amazing in white and of course all the bridesmaids can be in, like, ecru or beige or something, because ain’t none of those bitches going to outshine me, not that they could anyway but why take a chance? and Ryan will be in a tux, vest obviously, not cummerbund—don’t you think he’d look gorgeous in one of those like Han Solo-y black vests? Especially after he takes off the jacket for dancing—do you want to be a bridesmaid for me? Please say yes! I’d totally do it for you!” Only Kelly would insult her bridesmaids in one breath and then ask Pam to be one in the next) and how many kids they’d have (five, only she couldn’t quite decide if three should be boys like Ryan or girls like her).

After what seemed longer than some of the cycles of the day that she’d been through, she and Jim were able to meet back up and plan their evening. Jim called Larissa, who agreed to meet them at the office to make Pam’s claim to Michael that Jim and his sister were helping her move plausible. The three of them would move Pam’s things into Jim and Mark’s apartment and scour the paper for ads, then get dinner—“to take the pressure off the date later” Pam insisted, to which Jim only smiled—then Pam would go to the art class at the Y (“it’s important to me,” she insisted to Jim, who allowed that if it was important to her she should do it) after which Jim would pick her up for the date portion of their evening. “That way,” she insisted “we won’t be trying to bring my suitcases with us somewhere romantic.”

“What makes you think I’m going to take you somewhere romantic?” Jim inquired idly. “Or do you already know what I’m going to do from a previous go-round?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “I told you, this is new for me too.”

“Nervous, Beesly?”

“Just a little.”

“Don’t be.” He looked deep in her eyes. “I promise, it’ll knock your socks off.”

“I happen to like my socks.” But she was giggling, and so she expected that that took some of the edge off of her response.

Larissa was full of questions (mostly “when” and “how” not “why” or “what,” but then Pam hadn’t really expected all that much surprise on the latter points) and also of energy, and the three of them got her stuff put away pretty quickly—Pam would have said depressingly quickly if her heart weren’t beating so hard from the idea that she and Jim were going on an actual date that night. They mutually agreed that actually going out to a restaurant sounded like too much effort, so they ordered out from Cugino’s and ate it around Jim’s kitchen table while looking at apartment ads on Pam’s laptop. It felt…comfortable, not in the way that the whole day felt comfortable because she’d worn a groove in time by repeating it so much, but in the way that a towel fresh out of the dryer feels good on your face: warm, inviting, comforting.

All too soon, it was time for Pam to get ready for the art class. She remembered at the last moment that she and Jim were going out on a date right after and surprised herself by cursing out loud. Jim guffawed and Larissa asked what was up.

“I just realized—I can’t dress up for this date because I might get paint on whatever I wear.”

Larissa made a dismissive motion. “I have a friend who goes to the same class. I’ll just call her and ask her to bring an extra smock with her, and you can wear that over your clothes.”

“Melanie?” Pam asked.

“Yeah, how’d you…oh right, the groundhog thing. Well, I’ll go call her—say hi for me, will you?”

“Thank her for me!” Pam yelled after Larissa as she left the room with her phone. “I mean, before I do it in person!” She glanced up at Jim. “You know, I might have Larissa drop me off. That way you don’t get to see how I’m dressed.”

“What is this, a wedding?” Jim tried to scoff, but the idea of them getting married was apparently as active in his mind as it had been in hers, and they ended up staring at each other until Larissa strolled in and broke the tension. Jim coughed.

“Hey, Larissa, do you mind driving Pam? She, uh, doesn’t want me to see how she dresses up before I pick her up.”

“Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.” Larissa grinned. “It’ll give me a chance to pass on the dirt your new girlfriend is missing.” Pam blushed hard. Was she Jim’s girlfriend? She knew this wasn’t a rebound for her—she loved Jim—but she realized it had that appearance to someone who hadn’t been going through her repeated experience of today. She peeked over at Jim, who was also blushing, and decided it didn’t matter.

“Thanks, Larissa.”

“No problem, Pam. Now, shoo.” She gestured at Jim.”G’wan, get.”

“Are you shooing me out of my own house?” Jim grumbled, but he headed out anyway. “I’ll see you later tonight, Pam.”

“I’m counting on it.” Pam rushed upstairs and got herself dressed in the one fancy thing she’d found in her closet—that periwinkle dress—then she and Larissa headed out to the Y. On the way, Larissa didn’t actually dish any new dirt on Jim, but she did tell Pam a lot of cute stories about the two of them growing up. Apparently Jim had been a somewhat overprotective brother until Larissa had put her foot down in late high school and said that he’d never get to meet any of her boyfriends or girlfriends if he didn’t stop being such an ass.

“And that was how I came out to my family,” she chuckled as they parked. “I’m pretty sure Jim didn’t realize it until he was about three sentences into his argument about him being an ass, either.”

“Or else he didn’t really care.” Pam smiled.

“Yeah. He’s been pretty cool about it.” Larissa waved at another car pulling in. “Hey, Mel!”

Melanie parked next to Larissa’s car and gave her a hug. “Hey, Larissa! Is this your brother’s girlfriend you were telling me about?” She smiled at Pam and stuck out a hand. “Melanie. Larissa’s classmate, roommate…”

“…all-around better half.” Larissa’s arm snaked around Melanie’s waist. “It’s cool, she’s family.”

“Nice to meet you.” Pam shook Melanie’s hand. “I hear you have a smock for me?”

“I do!” Melanie swiveled around and grabbed it from the passenger’s side of her car. “And I’m glad Larissa called, because I would hate for you to get paint on that gorgeous dress.” Pam grinned. “Shall we?” Larissa kissed Melanie goodbye and the two artists walked into the Y together.

The art class was much as Pam remembered it being, except that this time she and Melanie had a much more wide-ranging conversation, since they were both dating Halperts, and the abstract she produced was full of greens and reds—“like Christmas!” Kerry exclaimed, and Pam supposed it was because she felt like today had been a gift.

At the end of the class, Jim met her by the doorway (looking extremely handsome in a sweater and slacks) and exchanged greetings with Melanie. Pam and Melanie snuck away to the ladies’ room so Pam could give her back the smock, and so, in Melanie’s words, “I can see what happens when he see you in that dress.” She winked at Pam. “Larissa will kill me if I don’t get her the play-by-play.” Pam grinned back, and then they left the bathroom one by one, Melanie passing by Jim and then turning, with another wink at Pam, to watch. Pam slipped from behind the bathroom door and saw Jim’s jaw literally drop, to her amusement.

“Hey.”

“Hi.” They stared at each other for a moment.

“So…” they both started.

“Jinx! Buy me a Coke!” Pam chortled as Jim’s face drained of color and he raced to the vending machine in the front hallway of the Y. Fortunately, it apparently had Coke, as she heard the telltale thunk and he raced back with it. She took it gratefully and twisted the lid, waiting for the hiss to subside while letting Jim proceed.

“So, I was thinking, for our date tonight…”

“Yeah?” She adored seeing Jim like this, all bashful and nervous.

“How do you feel about skee-ball?”

“Love it.” She grinned.

“Mini-golf?”

“Do you have to ask?” She was briefly disappointed that he’d somehow forgotten the minigolf day they’d spent with the office two years ago, the one whose pencil had mysteriously found it way into her teapot at Christmas.

“I don’t know, I thought maybe your opinions on it might have shifted after how you lost so badly last time.” He was grinning back at her and she stuck her tongue out.

“I still maintain you cheated.”

“Does that mean you want to keep score?”

“No.” She tucked her arm into his. “So we’re going to the fun center?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So where are we going?”

“…the fun center.” She cracked up and he tried valiantly to keep up his dignity before cackling right alongside her. “What? I want this date to be fun.”

“I love it.” She started tugging on his hand towards the parking lot. “Let’s go!”

They had a wonderful time at the fun center, which was open until midnight to take advantage of the fact that during the winter no one sane was going to do any outdoor activities that might take them out of the fun center itself. He was amazing at skee-ball, she beat him soundly at mini-golf (though she suspected he might have fudged the numbers in her favor) and they both surprisingly dominated the little Who Wants to Be a Millionaire­-themed trivia game where you pressed buttons to determine the correct answer. In the end they had enough tickets that they were able to pool them together and get a near-life-size teddy bear that Pam instantly loved with all her heart.

“What should we call him?”

“Teddy Ruxpin’s too derivative, I suppose?” Jim quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Yes.” She cuddled the bear closer. “How about Bear-ry?”

“Ugh. No puns.”

“Roosevelt?”

“No presidents.”

“Bear Man?”

“No…actually, yes. That sounds good.”

Bear-Man made his way home with them—and Pam was feeling giddy that “home” was where Jim was—and they stopped at Jim’s door. He looked at her in feigned astonishment.

“So this is where you live.”

“Guess so.” She grinned up at him.

“Thanks for the date.” He smiled down at her, but frowned when she shook her head. “What?”

“You only get to thank me for the date if it was me doing something for you. This was us doing something for each other.” She smiled, suddenly nervous. “Or at least I thought so.”

“You were right.” He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “There’s an us?”

“If you want.”

“Oh, I want.” Hearing his voice right by her ear was decidedly distracting.

“Then there’s an us.” She tried to do the same thing his voice was doing—somehow, she felt, it was caressing her as if his hand and not his words were touching her—and was delighted to see goosebumps rise up on neck.

“So if there’s an us…” he moved even closer to her ear “what does that mean we should be doing right about now?”

She didn’t have an answer for him in words, so she turned her head and kissed him.

It was everything she had imagined kissing Jim might be. First of all, it was everything kissing Roy wasn’t: not scratchy, not sloppy, not like being eaten by a monkfish. But it was so much more than that that it was unfair to even think of defining it by negatives. It was glorious; it was wonderful; it was holy. It was what she’d read about kisses in her mothers’ romance novels (stuffed behind the reference books on the shelves in the family room, as if Pam wouldn’t find them there and then show them to Penny). It was somehow a coming together not just of lips but of souls, and it tugged at her heart as well as deep in her gut—and lower. When they finally came up for air there was a beat of silence, as if neither of them could really believe what had just happened.

“Inside,” she gasped, and he fumbled for the key.

In the moment it took him to unlock the door, she made a decision. They were not going to have sex that night. She wanted to—and she was pretty sure Jim wanted to too—but there was absolutely no way she could sleep with him if she had any chance of waking up in bed with Roy the next morning. Even if she now knew how to get here, it would hurt too much to go back.

So when her head hit the pillow that night, her lips thoroughly kissed, her body enflamed and enamored and a-tingle, there was only one thought in her mind besides “I love Jim.”

Please, please, don’t make me do this again.

Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Or rather, five seconds before her alarm clock would have gone off, because as her eyes opened they were met with a ray of sunshine arcing across the bed—a ray that could  in no way have come into the bedroom she shared with Roy, which faced north, and which in any case had (for every conceivable iteration of the day she’d just spent) had its curtains firmly drawn and its shutters closed. This had, in fact, been true for most of the time she had lived in the house, since Roy was extremely uninterested in ever having sunlight interfere with a good hungover drowse.

This room, however, was brightly lit, and there was no alarm clock in sight. She stretched and yawned and then flopped back flat on the mattress as the implications of this sank in. She was in Mark’s room. In Jim’s house. Not with Roy. That must mean…she scrambled for her cellphone, plugged in by the bedside, and checked the date.

Yes.

After so many todays, it was finally, blessedly tomorrow.

Every single thing that was different seemed to call to her with a caressing tone in its voice, and she couldn’t help but respond. Hello, clothes that aren’t set out for me in the morning but crammed into a big green suitcase, she wanted to yell. Good morning, slightly discolored spot where I’m guessing Mark usually hangs a picture Jim didn’t want me to see. Greetings to you on this fine day, pack of tampons sitting on my duffel bag because it was on top and I needed to get under it to my toothbrush last night. She grinned and shuffled through the clothes in her suitcase for the least-wrinkled things she could wear to work. Gray, gray, gray…why was everything she owned in muted shades? If ever there was a day for bright and garish, it was this gorgeous, glorious new day. She briefly flirted with the idea of calling Kelly just to ask for something more colorful, but if she was right and things had gone the way she hoped, she might be interrupting something there.

Thinking of “interrupting something,” she thought back to last night and felt her color rise, not in embarrassment of what she and Jim had done, but in anticipatory excitement for what she thought they might just do tonight, now that she was no longer caught in the loop.

She hustled out of the bedroom and took a moment to reorient herself in the apartment. She’d been here once before, of course, when Jim had hosted that barbecue and she’d found her way into his bedroom on the “tour,” but it felt different knowing that she and Jim were alone in the house. She was pretty sure she remembered which door was the bathroom, but even that was uncertain: the barbecue had been a while back, and she’d been so focused in the evening on worrying about whether she’d wake back up in Roy’s bed that she wasn’t confident that she retained anything about her nightly ablutions.

Fortunately, Jim chose that moment to open the bathroom door and walk down the hall towards his bedroom, whistling. Even more fortunately, he did so wearing, as far as she could tell, only a towel. He didn’t appear to notice her—at least until someone let out a wolf-whistle and she blushed again to realize that it was her.

“Uh…hey there Beesly.” He clutched the towel tighter, which had the effect of moving it further up his legs, while she allowed herself to appreciate the motion before replying.

“Hey yourself.” She had done it. She had gotten through to tomorrow. What was a little embarrassment compared to that? She refused to let it stop her. “Looking good this morning, Halpert.” She was delighted to see that when he blushed, he blushed all over, just like she did only…different somehow. Maybe because watching the red cascade over his chest drew attention to his chest hairs, maybe because she was used to herself being easily flustered but amused and warmed by the thought of him being equally so.

“So, uh, apparently your, um, problem got resolved?” He was stammering. It was cute.

She decided to lean into his embarrassment a bit. “It did. It looks like you have a problem there too…” she let her eyes drop down to the towel. “Anything I can help with?”

He grinned as he reached the door to his bedroom. “Maybe later.” He leaned around the door as he slipped his body inside, his head still in the corridor, and she heard a distinct clump that could only be the towel hitting the floor. “Breakfast in fifteen?”

So this was the meaning of the phrase “hoist with your own petard,” she mused, as she fled into the bathroom, barely squeaking out a “fine” in answer to his question. She hurried through her routine, trying desperately to remember if this was a day for washing hair or not washing hair, and ultimately deciding that she might as well skip it, so that she could be sure to make breakfast in time.

It only struck her when she got downstairs that when Jim said “breakfast in fifteen,” he meant that he would be making breakfast. The scent of bacon wafted by her nose and…was that a waffle iron? Jim looked up from the stovetop, where he had two different…no, three different pans going, and grinned at her. “I didn’t know how you liked your eggs, so I made both fried,” he gestured to the right, “and scrambled,” the left.

“You didn’t have to do that.” The waffle iron beeped and she instinctively went to flip the waffle out.

“I know. But I wanted to.” He grinned. “Nothing but the best for my Beesly.” The grin faltered just a little. “Uh…”

The shower had renewed her font of courage, and she hadn’t spent the last two weeks of subjective time staring at Jim’s face not to be able to know what he was thinking, so she decided to put him out of his misery. “Yes, I’m your Beesly.” She opened a cupboard. “Where’s the syrup.”

“Already on the table.” He gestured to where she saw syrup, butter, and two mugs sitting beside two full table settings.

“Great.” She went and retrieved a plate from the table and flipped the waffle into it, then filled the iron again from the little bowl of batter beside it. “You did all this in fifteen minutes?”

“I’m a fast dresser.” He flipped the fried egg and the bacon and continued stirring the scrambled eggs. “And it did take you longer than fifteen minutes.”

“It did not!” She glanced up at the clock. “OK, maybe twenty.”

He grinned again. “Twenty-two.”

“You timed me?”

“No, I timed the waffle.” He reached for the plate she was still holding, and started shoveling bacon onto it. “Which kind of egg?”

“Why not both?”

“A woman after my own heart.” He filled her plate and shooed her over to the  table, where she noted that one of the mugs was full of tea, the other coffee. She sat by the tea-mug and contemplated him. He was dressed as she usually saw him, in the same work clothes he usually wore, but there was something different about him—or maybe about her, or about the way she was watching him. Seeing him in his own home, in his own kitchen, moving around un-self-consciously made her aware of just how large he was. At work, he stretched and slouched and generally made himself look longer but shorter than he was. Here in the kitchen he was all Jim, and she liked what she saw—so much so that it took a moment for her to notice that he was talking to her.

“I said, can you pass me my plate? Geez, Bees, my eyes are up here.” He winked at her and her face warmed again as she passed him the plate. She rallied quickly though, and cast an appraising eye up and down his form.

“I don’t know, Halpert, who said I was interested in your eyes?”

“I happen to think they’re one of my best features.”

“Look at yourself in the mirror much?”

He shook his head and started eating, and she followed suit. The food was surprisingly good—or perhaps not surprisingly, as Jim had clearly had some practice cooking breakfast. She broke the silence first. “So, is this always how you eat in the mornings, or…”

“Nah, but I’m the earlybird in the family, so whenever I’m home for Thanksgiving or Christmas I get up and cook for whoever’s staying there. I mostly specialize in breakfast foods, as you see.” He gestured to the full table. “After 11am, my menu is much more limited.”

“The famous grilled cheese?”

He flashed a smile, clearly glad she’d remembered—as if she could forget. “And the occasional PB&J.”

“Classics.” She sipped her tea. “You know, I’ve heard some people say—and don’t get me wrong, I know this is a radical proposition—“

“That’s you, Pam, always on the edge of things.”

She dipped her head. “Exactly. As I was saying, I’ve heard it said that you can—and stop me if you’ve heard this—eat breakfast all day. Even,” she lowered her voice, “for dinner.”

He clasped a hand across his chest. “No!”

“Yes.” She grinned and he grinned back and she reveled for a moment in the joy of knowing that they were here—both metaphorically and literally—and that she didn’t have to go back. They went back to eating, and as they were cleaning up the dishes afterwards—she insisted on helping, and Jim insisted on not letting her do them alone—she brushed her arm up against his and asked a question that had been nagging at the back of her head since before they ate. “If I’m your Beesly, what does that make you?”

“Whatever you want me to be, I suppose.” He resolutely scrubbed a plate, not looking at her.

“How does my Jim sound to you?”

“It sounds perfect.” She was never sure which of them moved first, but they were kissing, and it was just as good as the night before, at least until she put her elbow into the suds—which led to a sud-fight that made them both late for work.

It was, she reflected, worth it.

Things at work were surprisingly normal, except that she kept expecting them to repeat the day before. Michael was on time, which shocked her; Dwight’s stuff was already out of the vending machine; Angela was giving her the stink-eye for…well, Pam didn’t know exactly what for, but it was probably something to do with being a hussy, but since thinking of other people as hussies was what made Angela happy she supposed it counted as a good deed. Kelly came up to her not to ask about Jim or Roy but to gush about Ryan, who in turn slunk about the office like a hunted thing, but always within sight of Kelly so Pam supposed it had gone about like she’d expected. Toby showed up to work with a giant smile on his face, which was confusing, but five minutes with Michael in his office put things back to normal there as well.

The only fly in the ointment came about 10:30 am, when Roy slammed his way upstairs and confronted her at her desk. She could see Jim’s shoulders tense, as they always did when Roy showed up, but this time she could admit to herself what she was seeing: his protectiveness and love for her shining through a small crinkling of the muscles in his back.

“Where the hell were you last night?” Roy hissed at her, and she took a moment to be grateful that he hadn’t actually yelled it as he clearly wanted to.

“What are you talking about? We broke up.” She thrust a finger in the direction of his chest. “In point of fact, you broke up with me yesterday morning.” She thrust again. “You told me not to ‘fucking be there’ when you got home.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, c’mon Pammy, I…”

She interrupted him, which she did so rarely that it actually worked to flummox him. “Don’t ‘c’mon Pammy’ me. I told you we were done. I moved out. It’s over.” She picked up the phone and dialed the voicemail number. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

He reached over and pushed the button to hang up the phone. “We’re not done here.”

She glared at him. “Yes, we are.”

“We’re done when I say we’re done.”

She heard Jim’s whisper float across the office. “Dwight, I think someone’s interfering with Pam’s productivity.” Bless him for knowing that his direct intervention would only make things worse.

“Roy, we are through. I’m…” she wouldn’t say happy “willing to talk about it with you once you’ve calmed down, but you do not get to come up here and make threats.”

“Now listen, Pammy…”

Dwight’s voice cut through Roy’s like a knife through a (well-cooked) beet. “Pamela, is Royce here interfering with your work duties.”

She glanced up at him. “Why, yes, yes he is.”

“Then, as assistant regional manager, it is my duty to request that you return to your own duties, Mr. Anderson. I believe they are located in the warehouse, are they not?”

Roy looked over at Dwight and for a moment Pam thought he would punch him in the face, but then a different look—an anguished look she’d never actually seen on Roy before—crossed over his expression. He shrugged helplessly. “OK.” He turned to Pam. “I’m sorry, Pammy, I just get worked up. You’ll forgive me, right?”

She sighed. “I might forgive you, Roy, but I’m not coming back. I meant what I said. We’re done.”

He nodded sadly. “OK. Can we talk, like you said, in a few days or something? I’m really going to miss you, Pammy.”

“Mr. Anderson?” Dwight was still standing there, looking surprisingly fierce. She looked back at Roy and decided to let him down as easily as she could.

“We can talk, as long as you don’t expect me to change my mind.”

He nodded once more, then turned and walked back down towards the warehouse. Dwight yelled something after him about “counting this as your fifteen minute break” and she smiled up at him.

“Thank you, Dwight.”

He nodded curtly at her. “Pamela. The next time he interferes with your work, please do let me know.” And that, apparently, was that—except that she heard Jim whisper “thank you” as Dwight sat down, which Dwight studiously ignored.

Jim kept away from her desk for a little bit after that, just enough to make it not entirely obvious that he was checking in on her, but after about 11:30 he was up and down as much as ever. In fact, things with Jim were almost alarmingly normal, which only made her more aware of how much flirtation had been concealed behind jellybeans and pranks for all those years. He made his usual pilgrimages to her desk, the only difference being that they plotted out their evening—visiting two of the apartments on the list she and Larissa had composed, and sandwiches for dinner—and that she, ironically, blushed less during their conversations. At five, they watched the other workers slowly trickle away until, by five-fifteen, only they were left in the office.

Jim stood up slowly and walked to the coat rack, grabbing both their coats before offering hers to her ceremonially.

“Thank you, kind sir,” she mock-curtsied and he bowed back.

“Any time, madam.” They held hands and she practically skipped to the elevator, then leaned against him all the way down to the first floor. It felt so good to finally indulge in his presence—his feel, his scent, his touch.

When they were back in the car, and both strapped in, he turned to her, met her eyes, and raised an eyebrow. “Where to, Beesly? Dinner, apartments, mad dash across the country Thelma-and-Louise-style…”

She smiled at him. “You know what, Jim? Let’s go home.”

And so they did.