Jim looked around at the sodden stretch of grass in front of him and wondered again why he was here. It had seemed, inexplicably, like a good idea at the time to agree to come to his new boss’s play. It was Shakespeare in the Park; he vaguely remembered liking Shakespeare in the Park when he was younger, and it was free, always an important consideration when he’d only begun to be able to do adult things like pay bills a few months ago when he’d started at Dunder Mifflin, the least exciting but most available job he could find. But he should have known that since it was Michael who was involved, there would be some way it would all go wrong.

                               

OK, that wasn’t entirely Michael’s fault, he had to admit. A large part of things going wrong was entirely the fault of one James Duncan Halpert, or at least his hormones. Or whatever part of him it was (it felt like all of him) that reacted to the office receptionist, one Pam Beesly. Because the real reason he was here wasn’t that he liked Shakespeare in the Park, though he did, or that he didn’t want to spend money on entertainment, though he didn’t, or even that Michael had asked him to, though he had. It was that he’d overheard Pam telling her fiancé, Roy, that she was going, and he’d heard Roy saying he wasn’t, and the sheer possibility of spending some time with Pam outside of work without Roy had been irresistible.

 

So when he’d shown up to the park—not in the rain, but clearly and distinctly immediately after the rain, as the spreading stain on his jeans proved—and seen Roy sitting grumpily next to Pam, his mood had worsened. And when Roy had spent the entire performance grumbling loudly about the quality of the production, loudly enough that Jim (who had found a spot under a tree from which he could see  both performance and Pam, but studiously avoided sitting too close to her lest the urge to punch Roy become overwhelming) had had to hear ever word, his day had only gotten more unpleasant. It had briefly improved when he’d realized Michael was actually doing pretty well in the show—it was always nice to know you could genuinely compliment Michael, because he got so excited when you said anything nice about his passions—but then come down again when he’d let himself pay attention to the main plot.

 

Because really, what had he expected when he went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream? He should have done himself a favor and reread the thing before making the idiotic decision to come. A play about lovers who are planning to marry the wrong people? A play about righting those wrong pairings? A play where love conquers all? It was like William Shakespeare was reaching out from the grave and pointing a finger at him, Jim Halpert, and laughing.

 

It helped a little that it was a guy, Demetrius, who didn’t know his own mind, not a girl—but it helped not at all that the woman playing Hermia, who was being fought over by Demetrius and her actual beloved, Lysander, looked an awful lot like Pam. If you were obsessed with Pam and inclined to see her everywhere, as Jim was. Her name was Katy Moore, and according to the program she had some kind of job selling purses when she wasn’t doing community theater. Demetrius, according to the same source, was Steve Kim, and when Jim wasn’t feeling sorry for himself he had to admit the guy was doing a bang-up job. The way he turned on a dime from expressing hatred and anger towards Helena (a willowy blonde who definitely didn’t remember all her lines, and whom Jim didn’t even bother to look up in the program) to fawning over the same woman was impressive, if depressing. And the sheer joy with which he got into the physical elements of the role, running around the “forest” in search of first Hermia and then Helena, was infectious.

 

He was almost having as much fun as Michael.

 

The play ended, and the actors took their bows—Michael got the star bow at the end mostly, Jim suspected, because he’d probably made the director’s life hell until he did, but it wasn’t entirely undeserved—and Jim waved vaguely at Pam as Roy pulled her away to their pickup. He was suddenly alone on the wet grass except for the actors, the rest of the audience (which had seemed to be about 40% Dunder Mifflin employees there because Michael had offered them a late start on Monday if they came to his show over the weekend) having also departed for whatever better entertainment they had in store for themselves. But his roommate Mark was out of town this weekend, so Jim had little else to do, and almost by default he found himself walking forward towards the actors who were still putting away their minimal set and looked like they could use a hand or two.

 

“Hey, Michael,” he greeted his boss as he took the other end of the bench Michael was ineffectually trying to heft up into the back of someone’s pickup. “Nice work today.”

 

“Jimbo!” Michael let go of the bench to give Jim a hug, and while he appreciated the gesture he would have appreciated more not having the entire weight of the surprisingly heavy wooden seat suddenly sag into his arms. “Did you like it?”

 

Jim would have said he did, if he had been given a minute to respond. But he was not.

 

“Wasn’t I awesome? I mean, when they asked me to do this part, I was like, really, Bottom? I’m not a bottom, I’m a power top. Or at least that’s what Todd Packer said, and he’s my best bud, so it’s like I said it, only better because I didn’t have to make Jeffrey mad. No one likes it when Jeffrey’s mad. It’s like, hello, all that testosterone can’t be good for your heart, am I right? Have you met him yet? Not Jeffrey, he’s right here, hello Jeffrey, this is Jimbo, he works for me back at the ole DM, but we don’t like to say he’s my employee, more like my brother from another mother, right Jimmy Jim Jams? Where was I? Todd Packer. Have you met TP yet? Well, I suppose you meet TP every time you go to the bathroom, am I right? The good old BM of DM. I told Todd that one one time, for some reason he didn’t seem to like it. But I suppose he’s been on the road ever since you started, so you probably haven’t met him. Anyway Todd told me I shouldn’t take the part, something about how being a bottom was unmanly, but I thought to myself, hey, they always say you should do things top to bottom, so that has to mean Bottom is the top, right? And anyway, by the time I talked to Todd I’d already taken the part. Ralph here said it was just typecasting, because Bottom wears the ass’s ears and I’m already an ass, but I told him, you know what Ralph means in England? It means shut up. And then he did. Which is good, because I needed to concentrate on my big speech. Did you like it? The one about Bottom’s dream? I crushed it didn’t I? Thanks, Jim, you always know what to say.”

 

Jim might have actually said something if he’d been able to follow all of that, which he might have done if he hadn’t been concentrating the entire time on not letting the bench fall on his foot, or on Michael. Fortunately, Michael didn’t seem to really require a response. Even more fortunately, he finally felt the weight lift as another person took some of the load. Glancing up he saw that it was Demetrius, or Steve Kim.

 

“Thanks.” Together they slung the bench up into the bed of the truck.

 

“Thank you.” Steve held out a hand, and Jim shook it. “I’m Steve, and I know why I’m hauling stuff, but I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

 

“Jim. In case you missed it, I work with Michael.”

 

“Ah.” Steve gave Jim a sympathetic look.

 

“Exactly.”

 

“Well, thanks for the hand.” Apparently this was Steve’s truck, because he started for the driver’s side door. “And thanks for coming out—I know Michael’s been saying his whole office would come out for him, but we didn’t really know what to expect.”

 

“You’re welcome. You were really good, by the way.”

 

“Oh…thanks.” Steve grinned, then winced as Michael slung an arm over his shoulder and hugged him just a little too tight.

 

“So, Steve, I see you have met the honorable Jim,” Michael said in an Asian accent so bad Jim went past wincing and into some kind of catatonic shock. He and Steve exchanged a look that told Jim in an instant that they were going to be friends. He found himself accepting Michael’s suggestion that he come out with “his Shakes-peers” to Poor Richard’s for a drink, if only to shield Steve as best he could from any more casual racism.

 

By the end of the evening he and Steve had established that they were practically neighbors, and both played basketball down at the Y, if usually about an hour apart. A few weeks later, Mark got up late and he and Jim ended up in Steve’s pickup game, and from that point on they were fast friends.

 

It was years before they mentioned Michael to each other ever again.

To say the diversity training had gone well would be like saying Michael was a calm, measured person with no odd hobbies: not just false, but false in a way that would make an otherwise sane person question their entire view of the world around them.

 

Maybe that was what he needed, Jim reflected. A total upheaval of his worldview. A new way of conceiving the eternal frustration that stretched out around him on all sides. Maybe that was what would pull him out of the pit of quiet desperation he’d dug for himself with his obsession with an engaged woman. Maybe that would free him from the constant irritation of Dwight’s miraculous combination of utter obtuseness and sudden savvy—the kind that you had to respect, but still ate at you, like when he was such a dick about everything during the diversity training and yet managed to scoop Jim’s biggest client.

 

Actually, maybe he didn’t need a new worldview. Maybe he needed some fucking revenge.

 

He was sitting at Poor Richard’s, nursing a beer—a far cry from the champagne he’d hoped to be drinking when he closed the Decker deal, but what could you do—when the thought of how to do it entered his head. Or perhaps more accurately, when the person who could do it walked into the bar. He’d called Mark to come out and help him drown his sorrows, and apparently Mark had been hanging out with Steve playing Madden, and so the two of them together had come to “drag Halpert out of his little pity party” as Mark unsparingly put it when they sat down. But Jim was beyond caring about the little put-down, because a much bigger idea had sprouted in his mind the moment he saw Steve walk into the bar.

 

“Steve, you’re an actor, right?” He was pretty sure he got the words out in the right order and everything, but then again he’d been at Poor Richard’s for a little while before they’d shown up, so he couldn’t be quite sure.

 

“That’s right, Jim, I’m an actor. Although I expect Mr. Richardson would disagree.” Mr. Richardson was the lawyer Steve worked for as a paralegal in his day job. It paid the bills, he said, and Jim couldn’t argue with anything that did that, gave his friend all the time he needed to pursue his acting on the side, and didn’t involve interactions with Michael Scott or Dwight Schrute. “Why?”

 

Jim didn’t bother to answer the why question yet. If he did he’d probably lose his train of thought. “And you’re Asian.” He wasn’t so drunk he wasn’t aware he needed to contextualize that statement, and he raised his hand before Steve could answer. “I know, Korean-American, your parents came over two years before you were born, but we did this stupid diversity thing in the office today…basically, Michael…you remember Michael?”

 

“Say no more.” Steve shook his head and took a pull from his own beer. “You know, I had been counting down.”

 

“Counting down?”

 

“Did you realize we hadn’t talked about Michael since that first night? It’s been exactly two years, seven months, and six days since we became friends, and this is the first time you’ve mentioned him to me since then.”

 

“Oh.” Jim blinked. Mark chortled into his own drink, but then, he was always quiet when he was drinking. It was a lot of why they got along, because Jim got talkative, and that made them a good pair.

 

“Yeah.” Steve took another drink. “So, you’re my friend, you’re drunk, I’ve met Michael, let’s just take it as read that something super racist happened and you won’t try to explain it to me and make things worse.”

 

“Deal.” Jim nodded. That was a good idea—he wasn’t sure he was up to explaining Diversity Day to Steve, especially Dwight’s ‘Asian’ card. “But I do have a favor to ask. A big one.”

 

“How big are we talking?”

 

“‘I’ll owe you one’ big.” Mark and Steve raised eyebrows at each other. That was big.

 

“OK. Lay it on me.”

 

“I need you to pretend to be me.”

It was going to be the prank to end all pranks. Sure, the day hadn’t been all bad—certain aspects of it had been pretty good—but in the end Dwight had taken a large portion of his income for no good reason except competitiveness. It didn’t even help Dunder Mifflin; Decker wasn’t paying the company more, and he’d been a consistent client for Jim. If anything, competing over clients within the company was a waste of time. And speaking of wasting time…there was nothing Jim loved more than the kind of prank that could drive Dwight insane.

 

And this prank definitely had that potential.

 

But in order to truly make the most of it, he would have to plan. Steve was in: it wasn’t that he felt the need to punish Michael, he explained, but rather that he knew whatever had happened would be crazy enough that Jim wouldn’t be able to explain it properly, and since he knew Michael, he’d believe it. A quick bargain was struck: Steve would take a day off work, with sufficient warning, on a day of Jim’s choosing; Jim would run the spotlight for Steve’s community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof, running two weekends and a few rehearsals to get up to speed on the follow spot. He hadn’t run one since college but hey, how hard could it be?

 

But even after that was settled, there was still planning involved. Jim needed Dwight to truly believe in this; it wasn’t enough to annoy his coworker, he needed him to buy in. He knew Dwight, in some ways probably better than he ought to, and he knew his initial reaction would be sheer, stubborn disbelief. That was the engine that drove the train of the prank, of course, but he still had to craft the rails that would guide the engine into true memorable brilliance. Letting Dwight build up steam until he exploded was fun once; letting him drive himself down the track to self-doubt (a destination he rarely visited) would be fun forever. All of which meant that he needed Dwight to get beyond that initial disbelief. He needed to figure out what would convince Dwight that Steve was Jim, and present him with that evidence, without Dwight realizing that he was being managed.

 

Step one: keep a diary. If there was one thing Dwight loved, it was asking questions. Question: what did Michael tell us to do yesterday? Question: where were you during lunch hour? Question: what did we do with the Hanford account files? So Steve would need to be able to answer any questions that Dwight asked. And that meant that Jim needed to do something he rarely if ever did: get organized about work. He started taking notes about meetings, about clients, about everyday events. He explained it to Dwight as an edict from Jan about documenting Michael’s behavior; he got Pam to back him up on this by calling it a prank on Dwight—which had the additional benefit of being true. He wasn’t sure when he’d be ready to spring the trap, so he made himself get in the habit of note-taking until Dwight didn’t notice it anymore, and wouldn’t consider it to be part of the preparations once the prank began.

 

It took weeks.

 

But the time was hardly wasted. He found his work, to his horror, improving—but this was not an unadulterated sorrow to him, because the increased efficiency of his work gave him more time to linger in front of reception, and also, around that, to prepare the rest of the prank’s groundwork.

 

He had always kept a picture of himself with his little niece and nephew on his desk: fortunately for this purpose, the kind of pose that was easy to replicate, just two heads next to each other with big smiles, and no one else in the photo. Steve also had young relatives—not a niece and nephew, but cousins, with the generations about fifteen years off—and it was a simple thing to get him to take photos with them and print out copies to replace his own pictures when the time came.

 

Easier still were minor issues like his phone password, computer login, and so on. Technically it was a violation of his contract to give these to Steve. But was it a violation to write them down and just happen to leave them on his coffee table while Steve was over? Probably. But honestly, he didn’t really care, and anyway, Toby was on his side.

 

Actually, Toby was his secret weapon. He knew from experience that pretty much everyone in the office would go along with a prank on Dwight if he paid them five dollars or less. But just going along wouldn’t be enough for this prank. He’d need someone to actively participate: someone to confirm Steve’s Jim identity at the critical moment. Usually this would be Pam, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of anything Pam could do that would convince Dwight of “Jim”’s identity. He’d just assume she was in on the prank—as, of course, she would be. No, Pam’s role had to be not knowing about the prank. Only if she assured Dwight she didn’t know of anything going on would he be inclined to believe anything she said—and anyway, Pam was game for a prank, and smart, and funny, and…where was he going with this? Oh, yeah, she’d go along without being told. But someone would need to take an active part, and there was nothing more convincing than having Toby come out of the back with a form to sign or something like that.

 

He had several baits to entice Toby into participating. First of all, there was the fact that this was all (at least to a certain degree) about tweaking Dwight for not having participated properly in a company-mandated training. That was a weak reason, but it got him in the door. Second, there was the offer to babysit Sasha, blank check, anytime. That was a stronger reason. And third, well, Toby loved coming up front to the main office from the annex, for any reason. At first Jim had thought it was for the pleasure of his own company—after all, when they’d had desks together, they’d bonded and talked all the time—but recently, he was beginning to suspect Toby might have more in common with him than he thought…because he spent more time up at reception than he ever did at Jim’s desk anymore.

 

Well, he’d have to get in line. Not that there was a line. Not that Pam had ever indicated there would or could be a line, because she stayed with her Neanderthal of a fiancé in a way that showed, well, honor, love, and loyalty in ways that Jim would normally find delightful if they weren’t directed at Roy Anderson. But given that regrettably but honestly unswerving loyalty, he wasn’t above playing on Toby’s being in a similar state to his own to further a prank or two.

 

The last step he almost forgot. Since the entire essence of the prank involved him not being there, he needed a way to tell what was going on. His first instinct was to simply uncover the tape on his computer’s webcam, but it occurred to him that this would both arouse Dwight’s suspicions and not give him a view of Dwight, only of Steve. Pam, however, had a USB webcam she was supposed to use to generate temporary badges for recurring visitors, like important clients or outside contractors, per Dunder Mifflin corporate policy. Now, because all visitors to the Scranton Office Park got issued their temporary badges from Hank down at the Security desk, Pam had to Jim’s knowledge never actually used this USB webcam, but the corporate handbook required that she have it, which was good enough for him. She was delighted to “incidentally” place it out for “testing” every Tuesday, which left him just the task of choosing which particular Tuesday to use for the prank.

 

It had to be a Tuesday Michael was out of the office, since he knew Steve and was likely, being Michael, to simply bellow his name (or a variant thereof) to the rafters as soon as he saw him, thus blowing his cover. But fortunately it was not a difficult task to find a Tuesday without Michael in the office, since he had declared it “Anti-Hump Day” and routinely scheduled every activity he could to take himself and often others out of the place, including once, memorably, a skee-ball tournament which Jim had won decisively over (out of all people) Creed. So everything was set: all that mattered was finding the right moment to spring the prank on an unsuspecting Dwight.

On the day of the prank, Jim realized he actually didn’t have a lot to do. He had laid all the groundwork; he and Steve had spent hours together hashing out a gameplan for the day, an approach that would let “Jim” get enough work done to satisfy Dwight’s accusing mind without actually requiring Steve to be a paper salesman. He set up easy to dos for the day—a task made simpler by his better recordkeeping—and fortunately Steve seemed more amused than annoyed by the need to actually get things done.

 

Jim, on the other hand, had nothing to get done because he wasn’t at his job. But he did feel the need to be doing something as he watched the feed from Pam’s webcam, which he’d told her to turn on when he signaled her by bowing when he came into work. He figured she was tuned in enough that if someone came in, bowed to her, and went to his desk to log in, she’d turn it on anyway.

 

He hoped, at any rate. If she did, it was another sign that she was on the same wavelength as him, and he was rather pathetically invested in finding out whether she would for exactly that reason.

 

But he didn’t want to just sit at home in his underwear and watch the prank go down. He needed to be doing something. As luck would have it—or rather, extensive preparation—it had taken so long to plan out the prank that Fiddler was coming up on tech week, which meant he would have to spend next week and then the two following weekends doing the follow spot. He’d actually been in touch with the lighting designer about helping with other odds and ends of the production, as he and Steve had found themselves talking about the show as well as the prank, and he’d been in that weekend hanging lights and helping focus them. He texted with Alicia, the LD, about coming in that day and helping her set up cues (she was paid staff at the community  college theater where they were putting on the show, so she could come in during the day) as long as she agreed to let him run the feed from work on a laptop in the corner of the stage while she ran things from the booth, and she agreed. He’d mentioned the prank to her during the light hangs and it had tickled her fancy, so she was happy to see the end result, she said, and anyway it would be helpful to have someone else looking at the cues as she scripted them—and climbing in the rafters if they had to move a light.

 

So at 8:50 am sharp he was sitting in the People’s Security Bank Theater at Lackawanna Community College watching Alicia run some basic diagnostics on the light board from the booth, and connecting to the private YouTube channel he’d set up to watch the feed—assuming Pam turned it on. He supposed he could always call and ask her to turn it on if she didn’t catch on, but he found himself really hoping that he’d judged her right and she’d catch on without an explicit cue. It felt important. Almost as important as the prank itself, but unlike the prank he didn’t feel at all in control of it, which put a strange twist inside his gut.

 

But for now, the channel wasn’t live, which made sense since he’d told Steve to come in no earlier than 9:10, it being Jim’s habit to roll in just late enough to annoy Dwight but early enough that no one actually missed him at work. So he didn’t mind when Alicia asked him to start walking up and down the stage to give her a chance to judge the gaps and hot spots in the current setup. He unplugged the laptop—if he was going to spend hours watching not-him do work, he knew the computer wasn’t going to last on battery, so he’d brought his charger—and started pacing around with a hand in the air so she could better analyze the quality of the light.

 

He was about a third of the way through the stage when the laptop blinked to life, and he was presented with a compressed but recognizable image of Steve logging into his computer. He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding that Pam had indeed chosen to recognize this as a cue just as his phone beeped to life in his pocket.

 

WHAT THE HELL HALPERT

 

Pam always texted in all caps, because apparently her old flipphone had gotten stuck that way and she didn’t know how to turn it off. They didn’t text much; he never initiated, and she didn’t choose to very often. But he could still tell it was her from a mile away, even without the all-caps.

 

SERIOUSLY YOU HAVE TO WARN ME NEXT TIME

 

He smirked, and texted back.

 

Where’s the fun in that?

 

:-P

 

But then the text chain died as both he and Pam were distracted by the scene playing out in front of them—though he did have to keep moving in order to keep Alicia happy, his focus was entirely on the small patch of screen in front of him.

 

Dwight entered from upstage center, and as Jim had asked him to, Steve took the initiative. “Morning, Dwight.” One of Jim’s prime pranking rules, which he and Pam had discussed but never written down and which he’d been sure to drill Steve in over the last few weeks, was that every prank had its own pace. For some pranks—the nickels in the phone, for instance—you had to play it slow, let Dwight come to you, ignore him as much as possible until he made it impossible. For others, you let third parties take the lead: coconspirators like Pam or Toby, or unwitting allies like Michael. For a significant subset, however, you had to take control of the situation and force Dwight off-balance. This was one of those times.

 

Dwight was, as ever, predictable. Faced with someone greeting him from Jim’s desk who was not Jim, he went on the offensive. “Who are you?”

 

They were still in the playbook Jim and Steve had drawn up between them, so there was only one possible answer: “Who am I? I’m Jim.” They’d agreed, however, that that answer alone didn’t push Dwight quite in the direction they wanted, so they’d designed a follow-up. “We’ve been working together for three years. Ha, Weird joke, Dwight.” Dwight hated being called weird, not least because he knew he was, and so Jim knew that comment would keep him just enough off-kilter to move things along.

 

“You’re not Jim. Jim’s not Asian.” They’d expected Dwight to deny Steve’s Jimness, which was only fair of course since he wasn’t Jim, but the explicit move to race so quickly was something they hadn’t expected out of even Dwight. Steve, however, had three years of improv—good improve, he’d assured Jim, not Michael’s sort—and so he was up to the challenge, smoothly countering Dwight’s thrust.

 

“You seriously never noticed? Hey, hats off to you for not seeing race.” Jim was pretty sure he could hear Pam snort on the webcam feed, then turn it into a cough, and he grinned himself. Steve was pretty damn good at this.

 

“Alright then Jim.” Something about the way Dwight said Jim told Jim that they were exactly on track. “Why don’t you tell me about that sale that you made yesterday?”

 

This was like taking candy from a baby. Jim and Steve had stayed up until 11 going over every detail of yesterday at work. Steve cocked his head to the side—do I really do that? thought Jim, then realized that in the very act of thinking that he had done so, and shuddered at the realization that Steve knew him better than he’d known himself—and Jim could only imagine the puzzled look that must be on his face from Dwight’s answering glare. “Lanopy Networks? You know,  I wouldn’t have thought an Internet company would need 10 cases of 24-pound letter stock, but hey, maybe paperless isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Or did you mean the Slocum law firm? Because I didn’t close that one yet, but I’m hoping I’ve got a call from Andrew Slocum, or at least his paralegal, waiting for me.” Ironically, Steve had recommended Jim to Slocum via the local paralegal networking group. He turned smoothly to the phone and hit a few buttons—conveniently, Dunder Mifflin actually used the same phone system that Richardson’s used—then turned suspiciously towards Dwight as the phone requested his voicemail password. Covering the dialpad with one hand, he typed Jim’s password in.

 

“You have one new message.”

 

Dwight moved surprisingly fast, turning into a shower of pixels on the low-quality webcam feed.

 

“How did you know? No! No, no! That is sensitive information only for employees, not outsiders!” He hung up the phone and Steve sighed. Again, Jim wondered if he sighed the same way. It was eerie watching someone play yourself.

 

“Dwight, cut it out, I’m trying to work.” The pained resignation in his voice was perfect—but then again, he did a lot of pained resignation as Tevye in Fiddler, so he should be good at it by now, even if he wasn’t wearing a fake beard and aging makeup.

 

“You don’t work here! You’re not Jim!”

 

Jim could have kissed Toby when he sauntered out from the annex just as Dwight exploded and handed Steve a piece of paper. “Jim, corporate says they need you to fill out the change of emergency contact form again, they couldn’t read your sister’s phone number. I tried to read it to them over the phone, but they said you have to fill it out again and sign it.”

 

Steve took the form, rolled his eyes at the camera—or, Jim supposed, probably at Pam—and pulled a pen out of the correct drawer of Jim’s desk (the second drawer, the first drawer currently being reserved for prank supplies). “Thanks for trying, Toby. I’ll have this back to you in a moment.”

 

“No rush. It’s not like the fax takes a long time to get there.” Toby stopped short and looked at Dwight. “Oh, Dwight, they said you need to fill one out too. Apparently your cousin Mose isn’t considered a responsible adult under Pennsylvania law.” He handed the dumbstruck salesman another piece of paper, winked at the camera—or again, possibly at Pam, and the inability to tell the difference was driving Jim crazy—and headed back into the annex.

 

Dwight let out a huff, balled the form up, and threw it in the trash. Then he apparently thought better of it, dived into the trash, pulled it back out, and carefully unballed it so that he could fill it out. Only then did he turn back to Steve, a thunderous look on his face that suddenly turned sly. “I don’t know who you are, but you are not Jim. This is Jim!” He grabbed the picture frame off Jim’s desk that until 8:30 this morning when Toby had arrived at work, had shown off Jim and his niblings. He brandished it in Steve’s face, and seemed discombobulated by the look he saw there. He then turned the frame around stared open-mouthed at Steve and his two cousins.

 

“Oh my—! Oh d—! Oh, how did—?” He set the frame down almost reverently and backed out of the room.

 

“Jim!” Alicia’s voice shook him out of his reverie. Fortunately, she seemed more amused than annoyed that he’d zoned into the computer so much he’d zoned out. “Dude, don’t walk into the wall.” He blinked: yes, on autopilot walking around the stage he’d almost walked into the back wall. Good thing he wasn’t walking forward, or he might have ended up in the pit! Dwight seemed to have fled the scene, and Steve was quietly working on something (probably the back catalogue work Jim had been saving for this—it was tedious, but didn’t require knowing the paper business well, and Steve had assured him nothing could be as mind-numbing as going over legal contracts). That meant it was time to get back to earning his keep: he put the computer down, keeping the volume up in case Dwight exploded again, and started back downstage, hand out at Alicia’s direction to let her see the light in different places.

 

He spent most of the day there, climbing ladders, shifting lights, and then going and standing on stage while Alicia futzed with the details. Apparently this was important work, and much easier to do with just him and her than it would be with “a dozen lazy actors sitting around and complaining. Not your friend Steve—he’s chill—but, well, you know.” Given that Michael was the only other ‘actor’ Jim knew well, he assured her that he did understand, and he and Alicia parted on friendly terms, with an assurance that “dude, you’re gonna rock the spot.”

 

He did find some opportunities to check back into the feed from the camera, but apparently Dwight had acknowledged defeat in the matter of the frontal assault on Steve’s identity, meaning it was mostly just Steve casually doing Jim’s work. This gave him a twinge of guilt, but it was quickly extinguished every time he saw Dwight’s beady eyes focus in on a detail of the scene and narrow in suspicion. No, it was necessary to have Steve doing work—otherwise, Dwight wouldn’t believe a word of it.

 

But not too much work. Early in the afternoon Jim realized the one thing he’d never put into his journals, never coached Steve on, that might undercut the whole plan. He pulled out his phone and called the office.

 

“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.” He could, he supposed, have dialed his own extension, but where’s the fun in that?

 

“Hi, I’d like to speak to Jim Halpert.”

 

“And who may I say is calling?” Pam’s voice sharpened and he could tell she’d recognized his voice. “I’m happy to transfer you to Jim, but I really do need to know who’s on the phone.” Her voice had gone syrupy, and he recognized the implicit instruction to tell her not who was on the phone but who the hell was at his desk.

 

“His friend, Steve Kim.”

 

“Just a moment, Mr. Kim.” This last he thought was at a slightly higher volume, though his cellphone audio wasn’t that great.

 

“Steve!” The incongruity of Steve greeting him with his own name made Jim chuckle, and Steve chuckled too, but in a way that let Jim know he was impatient to know why he was being called. “What can I do for you?”

 

“You need to visit reception and tap on the desk.” Jim kept his tone neutral and deepened his voice in case the sound from the phone against Steve’s ear leaked out to where Dwight was now listening in intently. It was surreal to watch Steve talking to him with a slight video lag at the same time they actually spoke. “I forgot to tell you, I talk to Pam several times a day at her desk.” Now that the words were out in the air he felt the absurdity of them. “So, you know, do that. So Dwight doesn’t suspect.”

 

“I’m so glad to hear that.” Steve was evidently quite capable of having a conversation within a conversation. “I’ll be in touch about how it goes, and we can touch base maybe next week? Great.” He hung up, and Jim saw him stand, stretch a little, and saunter over to reception.

 

“Hey, Pam.” He reached over and took a jellybean, and Jim let out a sigh of relief. “So, the Kim account—he just called to say I should check in with you about its status?”

 

Jim couldn’t see the expression on Pam’s face, but her voice was light and lively as she responded. “Oh, of course. He just wanted you to know the new delivery went through without a hitch.”

 

There was more to the conversation, but after that Jim shut down the feed. The prank had obviously worked, and he was still glad he’d done it, but he really didn’t need to watch Steve taking his place talking to Pam. Even if it was the crowning glory of his Jim impression, something about listening to it just didn’t feel right.

The Tuesday began like most others for Pam Beesly: not great, because she had to be at work, but not completely awful because she knew Michael was likely to be out of the office most of the day. Now, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have to deal with him—Alexander Graham Bell had a lot to answer for, in her opinion, but instead of him answering for it, she had to, every time someone called, even if Michael called fourteen times in one hour (his current high score, as duly marked down on a sheet of paper Jim had given her labeled Office Records)—but it did mean she was generally likely to be free of his more urgent and less reasonable demands.

 

On the other hand, it also meant she was usually subjected to a great deal more of Dwight’s craziness, because with Michael out of the office he became inclined (well, more inclined) to megalomania and the belief that he was assistant regional manager and thus in charge in Michael’s absence. Her and Jim’s repeated reminders that he was in fact assistant to the regional manager, and that Stanley was actually in charge in the absence of Michael by virtue of seniority (not that he did anything with it, which was exactly what they preferred) tended to fall on increasingly unlistening ears as the day wore on.

 

So on the whole Tuesdays were pretty meh in Pam’s book. This particularly Tuesday was looking likely to be even more meh than usual because Roy had a headache, which meant he was in a bad mood, and Jim had been acting really weird on Monday. Now, often when Jim acted really weird that meant that he was planning some kind of prank, which would normally be a sign that things were going to be good the next day, but normally when he did that, he included her, and it had been several weeks since he’d last talked to her about a prank on Dwight—something to do with turning on her webcam if he bowed and his taking fulsome notes on everything at work—and while that prank hadn’t come to fruition, as far as she knew, he also hadn’t said anything about it yesterday, which made her doubt it was coming anytime soon. He told her things. It was what they did, tell each other things, especially about pranks. So if Jim wasn’t telling her something, and was acting weird, it worried her a little bit. She didn’t know what to do with it, and she didn’t like that. Jim was one of the constants in her life; worrying about him put her a little bit on edge, even more than Roy’s headache-induced frustration had this morning.

 

She got to work early—Roy hadn’t slept well, so he’d actually gotten up on time, if prickly as a bear—and puttered around waiting for everyone else to come in. Nine o’clock rolled around and there was no sign of Jim, but that wasn’t entirely unusual with Michael not there so she just kept an eye on the door while playing solitaire on her computer. At 9:10 a rather handsome-looking man pushed through the doors, bowed to her formally, and sat at Jim’s desk, tossing down a shoulderbag that she recognized as Jim’s and logging into the computer. Her eyes lingered in confusion and she noticed the picture of Jim’s family on the desk was a little off-center from where it usually was—which made her realize it also wasn’t the same picture. The very man currently sitting at the desk looked back at her with two adorable children making the same pose Jim’s niblings had made back when he’d gotten the picture a year ago. He’d shown it to her proudly, she remembered. There was no way it would be changed, let alone into a picture of someone else…unless this was a prank.

 

A prank that required the webcam. The man had bowed to her, hadn’t he? And he was acting like Jim? Well, that practically meant Jim had bowed to her, and that was the signal. She pressed the button on the top of the webcam, set up the streaming link she’d practiced, and pulled out her phone to text Jim. He owed her for not telling her this was coming! But despite her annoyance at not being in the loop, she was conscious of a swelling of gladness deep within her. This was going to be anything but a typical Tuesday.

 

Her brief exchange with Jim confirmed that she was right, and then all thought of further texting vanished from her mind when Dwight walked back in from the break room to find “Jim” at Jim’s desk. At first, she worried that whoever-this-was wouldn’t be able to deal with Dwight, but she realized she should have had more faith in Jim and whomever he chose to work with. He knew his people—the guy was just stone cold. She had a difficult time holding in her laughter as he did a startlingly good impression of Jim on the days when he just couldn’t deal with Dwight. She was desperately trying to figure out some way to help when he referred to his voicemail, and the fact that he was able to dial into it surprised her as much as it did Dwight. Toby’s heroic appearance—and wink!—told her that he was in on Jim’s prank, and assumed she was too, and she felt a little bit of sadness that this time she wasn’t, not really. Sure, she’d turned on the webcam (and he owed her for that) but beyond that…she was usually at the heart of Jim’s pranks, and she wasn’t sure exactly how she felt about being excluded this time. Especially if Toby was. Admittedly, he was Jim’s friend, but not his best friend. That was her. Wasn’t it?

 

He was certainly hers, and it would make her very sad if she weren’t his, a thought she’d never actually fully acknowledged to herself before.

 

The day calmed down after Dwight was routed by the picture—she would have been in awe of it if she hadn’t noticed it beforehand, and even then she was still a little bit in awe—and Jim’s friend, whoever he was (maybe he was Jim’s best friend, she thought, and sank a little lower in her chair) settled down to do some real work. Apparently Jim had really briefed him on the material—maybe he was another paper salesman from somewhere else?—because he was working that spreadsheet like no one’s business.

 

Just as she was starting to ease back into routine, almost forgetting that it wasn’t Jim there except for the fact that he wasn’t looking at her, the phone rang. She answered on autopilot, praying that it wasn’t Michael again.

 

“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.”

 

“Hi, I’d like to speak to Jim Halpert.” It was like her ears had been waiting all day to drink in his voice, because there was no doubt in her mind that, despite the incongruous request, it was Jim on the phone. Why was he calling? Was there something wrong with the prank? She needed direction—direction she’d have if he’d just included her in the prank to begin with.

 

“And who may I say is calling?” She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If he wanted her to transfer him to his new best friend he was going to have to tell her to, or just include her next time. “I’m happy to transfer you to Jim, but I really do need to know who’s on the phone.” Maybe he’d at least tell her something about the prank? Maybe who the hell this guy was that apparently he’d been hanging out with enough to teach him every aspect of their job? Not that she and Jim hung out after work, like, ever, but still. It was the principle of the thing, somehow.

 

“His friend, Steve Kim.” No way that wasn’t “Jim”’s real name. So at least she had something to go on.

 

“Just a moment, Mr. Kim.” She said the last a little louder than usual. The guy at the desk might not be Jim, but just having him play Jim meant that, while she was irrationally annoyed that he might be closer to Jim than she was, he was still her ally in the eternal struggle against boredom and Dwight. He deserved to know who was calling—and besides, if he blurted out Jim’s name it might ruin Jim’s prank, and she was too good of a best damn friend to let that happen.

 

The guy greeted Jim as Steve while she frantically started Googling Steve Kims in the Scranton area. It was not a rare name, so she had several false starts, but she quickly found the employee page at one of the local law firms, with a smiling “Jim” looking back at her from a brief profile on one Stephen P. Kim. The same smiling face that loomed over her desk as, phone call done, he moseyed his way up to her and tapped on the desk.

 

“Hey, Pam.” He reached over and took a jellybean, in true Jim fashion. “So, the Kim account—he just called to say I should check in with you about its status?”

 

What?. “Oh, of course.” Seriously, what did Jim want her to say? She needed to talk to him about including her next time. “He, uh, just wanted you to know the new delivery went through without a hitch.” Steve worked at a law firm, right? They were probably a client, or at least plausibly one.

 

“Great, thanks.” He rolled the jellybean in his fingers and, to her surprise, put it back in the jar. “Just put him through if he calls again, OK? He’s a very important client.”

 

“Of course, Jim.” She smiled up at him, and he grinned back, and she reflected that he really was very nice. Of course he was. No one could convincingly play Jim if they weren’t.

 

“Thanks, Pam.” He tapped the desk again and wandered back to his desk.

 

Now what was that about, Pam wondered, but then Michael called and she got distracted and it never came up again. Neither did Jim-Steve: that one appearance was his only visit to her desk that day, and she found by five pm that she’d played three times her usual number of complete games of solitaire.

 

Without winning once.

Jim and Steve met up at the Northern Lights espresso bar just down the street from the theater. Alicia had dismissed him with a smile at 5 on the dot, telling him he was welcome to come back anytime: “it’s nice to get some things focused in advance, so I won’t turn down help.” He had had a full crash course on running the spot (it was as simple as he remembered, but as she reminded him, everything would change once there was an actual actor to follow). He was feeling pretty good, actually: the prank had gone well, he felt more useful after a day of focusing than he usually did after a day of work, and except for the fact that he hadn’t seen Pam all day, it had been a good one.

 

Steve was already waiting for him at the entryway to the coffee shop, which told him he must have slipped out early. A raised eyebrow received a shrug in return: “Dwight had to leave at 4:30, something about beet planting season, so everyone just started filing out. It felt weird to be the last one there.”

 

“Fair enough.” He paid for both their coffees (latte for Steve, mocha for him because he hadn’t had any jellybeans all day and his sweet tooth was aching) and they took seats at a table by the window. Jim wasn’t sure how to break the ice about how the prank had gone, but fortunately Steve spoke first.

 

“Man, you did not exaggerate about that place.” He sipped his latte, flopped his legs out, and continued. “I swear, if it weren’t for your friend Pam, I’d say being insane was a requirement for working there.”

 

“Pam?” Jim wasn’t really sure he wanted to know how Steve felt about Pam. How could anyone spend even a day working alongside her and not fall in love with her? It hadn’t taken him three hours that first Monday.

 

Steve apparently misunderstood his questioning tone, taking it as an inquiry rather than a self-examination. “What, did you think I was going to say you? Jim, you just had me pretend to be you for a whole workday. If anyone’s crazy there, it’s you.” He kicked Jim’s leg under the table. “Just kidding, man. Seriously, I don’t know how you do it.”

 

“Mostly Pam.” Jim grinned at his friend. “If she weren’t there, I don’t think I’d get through a single day.”

 

“That’s because he’s in love with her.” Mark dropped into the third chair at their table, dirty chai in hand (Jim hadn’t seen him order, but Mark was a creature of habit). “Hey guys.”

 

“Hey, Mark.” Jim didn’t have to ask what his roommate was doing there, and he supposed that after having to listen to Steve and Jim plan the prank until all hours over the last week he deserved to be in at the debrief. He resolutely decided not to acknowledge the truth of Mark’s statement, but Steve was not about to let him off that easily.

 

“Wait, what?” Steve turned to Mark, his eyebrows raised in a parody of Jim’s own surprised face. “Jim, man, that’s kind of crucial information. An actor prepares, you know. I could have gotten into the part.”

 

“Shut up.” Jim curled around his mocha.

 

“See how he doesn’t bother to deny it?” Mark tapped his cup against Steve’s in a mock-toast. “To Pam, the holy grail.” Jim just sipped mocha and rolled his eyes, while Steve and Mark both drank.

 

“Come on, Jim, you could at least have given me a hint. I thought the whole point was to tell me everything, help me pretend to be you.” Steve wasn’t making fun of him, Jim thought—that was all his stupid lifelong friend-slash-roommate’s fault—but he still wasn’t entirely comfortable going into his feelings for Pam in even as public a place as a coffee shop, especially not without alcohol.

 

Unfortunately, Mark had no such compunctions. “No, he couldn’t do that, because, how did you put it that one time, Jim…” he tapped his chin as if in thought, but Jim was certain he knew what was coming. “‘The lady does not reciprocate.’ Which is a shame, if you ask me.”

 

“Nobody did.” Jim decided the surly tack wasn’t getting anywhere, so he pivoted to light and breezy and rolled his eyes at Mark. “Ignore him, I was really drunk and reading Jane Austen when I said that, but yes, I like Pam, she’s engaged, can we just move on to how the day went?”

 

“Wait, she’s engaged?” Steve looked back and forth between Mark and Jim. “Man, I’m sorry.” He reached over and punched Jim’s shoulder. “Seriously, I’ll back off.” Searching for a change of subject, he offered: “why were your reading Jane Austen, anyway?”

 

Mark howled in laughter as Jim muttered into his mocha “…because Pam was.”

 

Steve shook his head. “Sorry, man. Was it at least one of the good ones? Emma, or Pride and Prejudice?” He returned the incredulous look Mark was suddenly giving him. “What? I was an English major in college, that’s how theater kids reproduce.”

 

“It was Persuasion.” Jim took a long pull of his drink, only to find out he had finished it. “Can I get anyone else a refill?”

 

“I’m good.”

 

“Me, too. And hey, man, at least it wasn’t Northanger Abbey.”

 

When he came back, with a hot chocolate this time since he did want to sleep that night and he was beginning to discover his youthful ability to drink coffee all night and hit the pillow with ease regardless was wearing off, Mark and Steve were in a deep discussion about Darcy and Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice. He hovered over Mark’s shoulder long enough to hear him assert that “Lady Catherine de Bourgh was the worst” and then sat down rapidly, pointing a finger at his roommate.

 

“J’accuse!” He grinned at Mark. “I knew you were reading them when I put them down.”

 

Mark grinned back. “You got me. What gave it away? Before now, I mean.”

 

“You kept moving my bookmarks.”

 

The rest of the conversation flowed easily from there on, and he got a good idea of what Steve had done and how he’d fared wading through the catalog. They drove separately back to Jim and Mark’s place, Mark picking up a pizza on the way (he’d volunteered, with a hand on Jim’s shoulder that told him this was his apology for outing his crush on Pam in such a direct way) and spent the rest of the evening playing Madden and going over the last few details of the day so that Jim could slide back into the routine of the job tomorrow as if nothing had happened at all.

 

As Steve got up to leave, Jim walked him out while a grumbling Mark went out the back to toss the pizza box. Steve stopped as he was about to head out the door and met Jim’s eyes.

 

“One last thing: your Pam seemed disappointed I didn’t have more to say to her. I think she missed you.”

 

“She’s not my Pam.” It was like an automatic reflex.

 

“I know, but I just thought you’d like to hear it.” He tapped the door frame on his way out. “And by the way, Jim?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I was wrong. Reviewing legal documents is way more interesting than selling paper.” And with that, Steve was gone—though it wasn’t like Jim wouldn’t see him on Saturday at the Y.

For Pam, the evening was rather less pleasant than the workday had been, and that was saying something since, the initial pleasure in discovering Jim’s prank aside, the workday had been remarkably flat. Roy was still grumbling about a headache on the way home, but that didn’t preclude him from socking back two and a half beers by the end of dinner, and finishing the sixpack with the Phillies on in the background afterwards. It was a good thing Pam didn’t actually like Yuengling, or she might have been annoyed at not getting even one. As it was, she mentally added beer to the shopping list in her head and winced at the total she could already see climbing higher and higher between Roy’s drinking and the ragout she’d made two nights before that he’d refused to eat even after she corrected the misstep of calling it by a name he didn’t know and just referred to it as stew. That wouldn’t have been a problem—she liked it fine, and she ate five lunches a week without him anyway—except that he dumped the whole potfull into the trash when “washing the dishes.” That had been several vegetables and a whole chuck roast down the drain. It wasn’t that they were actually poor or going to have to miss a meal—but not much was going into the wedding savings this week.

 

Which was OK, because they didn’t have a date set.

 

Which was OK, because they had to save up anyway.

 

But thinking about it that directly made the part of her brain that liked logic puzzles and Sudoku start to twitch about neverending circles, so she didn’t think about it directly.

 

Instead she thought about the day she’d had, a day which Roy, as usual, hadn’t asked her about. It had been a strange day: usually when Jim pulled a prank, they got to air-five about it and laugh and debrief, but today it had just dragged on, and Steve-Jim hadn’t seemed to know what to do about her. Did that mean Jim hadn’t told him about her? Except he’d said Jim had. And what did she want Jim to have told his friend about her, anyway?

 

Feeling vaguely guilty about the way her thoughts kept orbiting Jim and his absence today like a tongue around a missing tooth before the adult teeth came in, she perched next to Roy on the couch—now watching old reruns of The Price Is Right, since the Phillies had won a quick game 3-1—and asked him about his day instead.

 

As she’d expected, this lead mostly to a report about all the various things in the warehouse that were unfairly hard to do when you had a headache, like lifting boxes, driving the truck, and apparently also inventory recording. To her pleased surprise, it also produced a grunted question about her day, and whether “anything interesting” had happened.

 

Aware that her vague feelings of guilt about obsessing over Jim’s absence would exponentially intensify if she kept her thoughts about Jim from Roy, as they had that time he’d caught her holding hands with Jim completely innocently after his “alliance” with Dwight, she made sure to mention it right up front.

 

“Well, Jim had a friend come in and pretend to be him, so that was interesting, I suppose.”

 

“Huh.” Roy grunted and leaned back on the couch. “Did he get away with it?”

 

“I guess so? Dwight got pretty mad but he couldn’t do anything about it, and Michael wasn’t there.” This was nice, she thought. She and Roy were having an actual conversation about her day. They’d done this a lot more back when she first started at Dunder Mifflin, but somehow it had gotten away from them.

 

“Nice.” Roy nodded. “Wish I had someone who’d take a shift from me down at the warehouse, especially if I still got clocked in for the day.” He finished the last beer and set it down with a thud next to its fellows on the optimistically-named coffee table. “Fucking Halpert, man. Some guys have all the luck.” And with that he got up, scratched his butt, and headed for the bathroom.

 

Conversation over.

 

But not thoughts over, because Pam was left pondering, as she washed out the bottles to put in the recycling, why it was that Roy’s focus was on Jim skipping out on work, rather than on her day. Sure, she’d agree that Jim’s prank was the most interesting thing to happen—that was why she led with it, that and the amorphous guilt thing she was decidedly not thinking any more about—but she’d been prepared to tell him how it had impacted her day in the way he’d told her how his headache had impacted his. How it had felt like the day plodded along while Steve-Jim did some kind of spreadsheet and Dwight stared at him first suspiciously and then with growing respect for his apparently increased work ethic. How she had begun to suspect that her computer was holding a grudge against her as solitaire game after solitaire game had ended in defeat. How she’d almost hunted down Toby and forced him to tell her whether there was anything more to the prank, anything she could be involved in. OK, she probably wouldn’t have told Roy about those last two, but the basic idea was still there. She’d wanted to share, and all he’d taken from it was that Jim had found a way out of work.

 

That was, she realized, typical of Roy. He often called Jim and the rest of the upstairs office workers lazy, because they didn’t have to lift and carry like the warehouse workers (leaving open, she noticed, the question of whether she too resembled that remark). But he was fundamentally lazy himself: only the physical gifts that had made him a high school football star and still lingered into his twenties made him capable of the warehouse work. He didn’t put in any extra effort to maintain himself, and she knew (because he boasted about it) that he put in the least work possible on the job. Of course his mind went straight to not having to do work. It was his main focus anyway.

 

Just as it was hers, she had to admit, but in her case it was because too often “work” meant cleaning up after Michael Scott or undergoing the third degree from Dwight or Angela about something minor. Which reminded her: if she really wanted to help with Jim’s prank, she needed to make sure that that photograph of Steve wasn’t on his desk when Dwight came in tomorrow, or if there was a fourth degree, he’d use it.

 

Glad to have a purpose to tomorrow’s workday, even if it did mean dragging Roy to the office early, a prospect they both usually abhorred, made the cleaning up go by much more quickly, and she fell asleep with a smile on her face.

Jim got into work the next morning at 7:02, grabbed the picture of Steve and his family and shoved it in his satchel, then headed out to Starbucks for some coffee. Recognizing that he needed to stay on his coworkers’ good sides after literally skipping a day of work—even if he’d paid them five bucks, they’d still had to work around his absence, he knew, and it must have been at least a little disruptive to deal with Dwight—he loaded up his order beyond his own need for sugar and caffeine in the form of a caramel macchiato. Stanley drank coffee, black, two sugars; Phyllis liked the same but two creams added; Toby was (for some reason) a devotee of a tripleshot Americano, and so on down the list. Jim wasn’t sure when exactly he’d internalized these orders, but he knew them all by heart. Juggling several drinks carriers, he backed through the doors of Dunder Mifflin again at 8:17 and proceeded to distribute cups to workspaces with quiet efficiency. When he arrived at the front again, carrying only two cups, he noticed that he was no longer alone.

 

“I see you already switched the picture frames.” Pam was sitting at his desk, spinning slowly in his chair and kicking her legs. It was all he could do not to pull out his phone and take a picture. She looked adorable, and she looked like she belonged there, and how could she not see it? Fortunately for his ability to continue to be just a friend to her, his hands were still full, at least until he handed over…

 

“One Raspberry Zinger tea, extra hot. And yes, it wouldn’t do me much good if Dwight found Steve’s picture on my desk today, now would it?”

 

“Thank you.” Pam took the tea and blew across the lid opening, making an atonal sound that was somehow still endearing. “No, I didn’t suppose it would.” She stopped spinning but continued kicking her feet against his drawers as she took a sip and hummed with pleasure. He felt a shot of something—maybe desire, maybe just yearning—zip down his spine and around into his gut. “You know,” she continued as she slowly let the boiling liquid tease across her lip, “I really wish I could make this here. The microwave either boils the water entirely off or doesn’t get it hot enough—I swear, it’s like a 1-second window where it’s actually drinkable tea—so I end up drinking whatever disgusting coffee someone’s made in the other machine.”

 

“Why don’t you use the spout on the coffeemaker for hot water?” Jim perched on the edge of his own desk and admired the view.

 

“Psht.” She made a shooing gesture with one hand, the other still clutching the rampantly hot tea. “Somehow whenever I do that, the tea comes out tasting like coffee.” She shrugged. “It shouldn’t be possible. I actually asked Dwight once to fix it, before you started here, and he told me there’s no connection between the coffee filter and the hot water spout, but I swear it still tastes wrong.”

 

“Well, I certainly trust you over Dwight.” Jim smiled.

 

“Do you?” She swung around on the chair like a Bond villain.

 

“Yes?” He wondered what this was about, but in true Pam fashion she didn’t continue whatever thought she’d been having, opting instead to sip her tea again, then fiddle with placing it on his desk. He decided it was time to cut the surprising tension with a joke. “Oh, God, does this mean you found out about my secret identity as Dwight’s beta reader?”

 

“What?” Pam looked up, shocked, and Jim struggled to keep a straight face. “How do you even know that term?”

 

“How do you know it, Beesly?” He leaned towards her, pivoting his hip on the desk, taking heart when she didn’t push the chair away.

 

“Harry Potter.” He nodded, understanding at once. One of the first things they’d bonded over in the office was their shared love of the series, and he could easily believe her enthusiasm for it had pushed her into those particular corners of the web. “And maybe a little bit of Darcy/Bingley, in high school?”

 

“Pamela Morgan Beesly”—he’d gotten her middle name out of her after making great fun of his own the year after Midsummer when Michael had been Duncan in Macbeth—“I’m surprised at you! Slash fiction? At your age?”

 

Neither of them had heard the door open, or Dwight stride towards the desks, so it was with great surprise to each of them that he interrupted.

 

“You are correct, Jim. Slash fiction should not be read by those under thirty. And although Pamela is rapidly approaching that age, she has not reached it yet.”

 

Pam and Jim had different but equally outraged reactions to that statement.

 

“She’s only twenty-four!” mingled with “Dwight, you aren’t thirty!” and then Jim couldn’t meet Pam’s eyes and she was grabbing her tea and moving back to her desk and he was sitting in his chair and why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut?

 

But for all he was embarrassed and discombobulated by his own reaction to Dwight’s slight to Pam, he was not so out of it that he would miss Dwight’s attempt to get him back for yesterday.

 

Not that it was hard to catch. “So, Jim, where were you yesterday?” Dwight asked.

 

At least he could have the dignity to do that when he’s not drinking the coffee (black, like the soil that grows good beets) I provided, Jim thought, as he leaned over and withdrew the forms Steve had filled out the day before (on the computer, of course, since Dwight would naturally check the handwriting, but they had to be signed so they were printed out). “Right here, Dwight.” He resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder at Pam, but he could feel her grin beaming on the side of his face. “Don’t you remember?”

This day was a much better day, Pam decided. It wasn’t that the sun was shining or the birds chirping or Michael not being an asshole. None of that was true, though it would have been nice if it had been. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew it had something to do with Jim’s presence. He livened up the office somehow. Not just by continuing the prank on Dwight (seriously, how did he keep a straight face while reciting off the extremely boring catalog details Steve had apparently done the day before?). Not just by bringing everyone their favorite drinks (though the thought was nice—and there was something very soothing about having her giant cup of tea to clutch while listening to Michael screw up another conference call with Jan). Not just by coming up to her desk after Dwight finally subsided (sipping the coffee Jim had brought him of course) and making her laugh with some inane comment about cardstock. No, it was deeper than any of that. A kind of innate Jimness that lightened the mood and made everything feel better than it had in his absence.

 

She supposed that was why the brilliant prank, while it had been fun while it lasted, hadn’t made a deeper impression on her. Steve was great at what he did, beyond great, but he just wasn’t Jim, and if it was obvious to her it should have been obvious to Dwight. You couldn’t fake or teach Jimness. It just was.

 

She tried to find the words to tell Jim this, but they kept coming out wrong in her head, so she never let them past her lips. How did you tell someone you could recognize them blindfolded and muffled without making it sound like you meant something more intense than what she intended? He was her closest friend. She had missed him. But every time she tried to find a way to tell him that, it foundered on the reef of language. She and Jim weren’t a couple, just a couple of besties, but she couldn’t find the words.

 

So instead she retreated to what she could find the words for: her disappointment that he’d let Toby in on the prank instead of her.

 

“C’mon, Jim,” she teased in the breakroom that afternoon while Dwight was safely out on a sales call. “You could have told me. You can tell me anything.”

 

He was facing the soda machine, so she couldn’t see his face, but he just shrugged and she sat down with a flop. “I wouldn’t have let Dwight know. You can’t seriously think I would have let him know?” The thought that maybe he really didn’t think of her the way she thought of him bolted through her mind and left a sizzle of apprehension down her spine.

 

“No, Beesly.” He plopped his grape soda down on the table—whatever Starbucks drink he’d had this morning was long gone, tossed into the trash can from an impressive distance—and followed, folding his long limbs into the chair in front of it. “But…” he fiddled with the pop tab, “I felt like Toby had the authority to pull it off.” The tab finally popped and he waited for the fizzle to die down. “Like, if Toby says it’s me, Dwight’s gonna believe it, right? Whereas you…” he trailed off for a moment and then continued. “You’re always up for a prank. I mean, so is Toby.” He took a sip of soda. “But Dwight doesn’t know that. I’m pretty sure he’d just have scoffed at you and said ‘of course you’d say that, you’re in on it.’”

 

She felt a little better hearing that explanation, but that last sentence deflated her again. “But I wasn’t in on it.” She sipped her now-cold tea, which she held onto like a talisman against further conference calls. “I could have, I don’t know, given him a fax or something, something specific to you.”

 

“Yeah, but are you sure Dwight trusts the fax system?” He cocked an eyebrow.

 

“Implicitly.” She grinned. “He once told me that the fax machine was the superior invention to the telephone, since it predated it.”

 

“Huh.” Jim looked thoughtful, like he was checking a mental box, then grinned at her. “Well, I suppose I could have, then. But you were in on it, Beesly. How else would I have gotten that wonderful cinemascope view of the entire thing? You were amazing. I knew I could count on you to figure it out.”

 

“Yes you could. And don’t you forget it.” She definitely felt better having that out in the open, but she couldn’t deny—it still bothered her just a little that he didn’t think of her first when doing such an elaborate prank. She didn’t know exactly why, and the itch of that carried with her all the way home, resulting in burned garlic bread and overboiled spaghetti—but at least Roy wasn’t there to carp about it, because Wednesday night was darts night, and he and the boys rolled in at 11:30 to sleep in the living room.

 

At least it wasn’t past midnight because, as she had reminded him a dozen times if she’d reminded him once, Thursday was still a workday.

 

Whatever. Wednesday was also the day she got to actually paint, as long as she cleaned up the living room before Roy got home, and so it was still a pretty good day. She amused herself this time by painting Dwight’s face from yesterday morning when he’d first laid eyes on Steve.

 

It was a pretty good likeness if she did say so herself.

 

Of course, there was no one she could show it to, since Roy wouldn’t care, she didn’t think she could sneak a canvas past him into the car to show to Jim (or Dwight), and she had no idea how to contact Steve. But still—she was proud of herself. And that had to count for something, didn’t it?

A few days later, things had calmed down in the office, or so Jim thought, until Michael had the bright idea of arranging a basketball game against the warehouse workers. On the one hand, Jim found he was actually a little bit excited about the opportunity to show off his not-entirely-absent basketball skills in front of the office. OK, in front of Pam. But in front of everyone, really, if in a different sense. There were relatively few things Jim was good at. He could read faster than even Dwight (not that he’d ever let that on, because the opportunity to slow-roll reading reports and thus not do work was irresistible). He could recall sports statistics back to the founding of the leagues, at least for the sports he cared about. He could, surprisingly, sew a decent, straight, neat handstitch, a result of his mother throwing up her hands when he was 14 and insisting that he if needed the knees patched in another pair of pants, so help her God, he was going to do it himself. Most of these things, for obvious reasons, he did not bruit about widely within the office sphere.

 

But basketball? That he could safely let them know about. That he could revel in. He played basketball with Mark and Steve every week, and he’d actually been pretty darn good back in high school. Not “college team” good, but “star of the intramural team” good. “Win a few free beers at HORSE” good. “Continue playing at the Y even as a grown adult” good, to be precise, though not everyone at the rec center league was actually good. He knew that Michael and Dwight each played regularly enough to have had a snit about whether Dwight could play pickup with Michael, but he was fairly confident that if they were layups he was a smooth three from downtown, nothing but net, and running back on defense to guard the opposing star.

 

It helped that he had several inches on Michael, though he had to admit Dwight was around his height and actually in surprisingly good shape. It was probably the martial arts he’d been doing, or maybe the farm work. Neither was practicing his shot, however, so Jim was pretty sure he was going to show some people up unless he tried very hard not to.

 

Not that his officemates were his opponents, of course. No, that was the warehouse team, and he had a healthy respect for them. Not because of their muscles—basketball was, ideally, ballet on parquet, a non-contact sport where savvy and skill won out. But he knew Darryl and his guys were the ones who’d put the hoops in, and he was pretty sure that meant they knew what they were doing on the court.

 

When Michael put working Saturday on the line, he wasn’t that worried. Even Pam’s observation that Roy was pretty competitive just made him feel even more competitive. But what shifted him into overdrive was the trash talk from Roy just before the game.

 

He’d decided to be the bigger man, not literally of course but metaphorically, and wish Roy a good game.  “Have a good game, man,” those were his exact words. Sportsmanship.

 

It was a surprise then to get a smirk. “Yeah, you too. Should be fun. You sure you don’t need to get someone else to shoot your baskets for you? ‘Cause down here we actually work on our game.”

 

He glanced over at Dwight, who fortunately was having a staring contest with Lonny and hadn’t heard. “Dude, that was a prank.”

 

“Yeah. Smart of you to get someone else to do your dirty work for you.” Roy was clearly intending to guard him, which meant there was no escape from the banter. “Won’t work here, though. Ball don’t lie.”

 

The reminder of what they were about to do centered him. “No, I don’t think it does.” He flashed Roy a smile, with teeth this time. “I really don’t think it does.”

 

Roy continued to swagger as Michael ordered Pam down to do the tip-off, saying something to her about sleeping in the car, and Jim saw red. He’d always planned to show off, but now? He might not have Steve with him, but he was definitely going to be playing with the power of two.

 

That worked until Roy decided to take matters into his own hands, or rather elbows, and Jim had to exit the game to get the bleeding under control. He briefly considered calling Steve up and actually swapping out in the middle of the game, but common sense took control and he just used the styptic pencil, wincing at the pain. No pain, no gain, he supposed.

 

He subbed back in and made sure to run Roy through a series of screens, mostly impacting on Dwight. By the end of the game the upstairs workers had won handily, but of course Michael wimped out and didn’t make them work Saturday. Worst of all, Jim had to endure Pam and Roy cuddling on his own desk as everyone got ready to go home. Well, that was worst until Roy glanced over at him as they were heading out and tossed out another “guess we’ll see who actually shows up at work tomorrow” at him as he pushed through the doors. He supposed that for Roy that was intended as a peace offering—a tribute to his wiliness in getting Steve to come in for a day. But to him it was just a reminder that Roy didn’t get his pranks—and that Pam, who did, had chosen to be with a guy like that.

Seriously, what the hell had gotten into Roy?

Pam wondered this more often than she liked to admit, although she usually knew the answer: alcohol, more alcohol, and buffalo wings. But today he’d been at work. She was pretty sure Darryl didn’t let them drink on company time, and even if he had, she’d mostly been around him because of the silly basketball game.

 

Maybe that was it. She knew Roy got competitive—she’d even warned Jim about it—and so maybe it was just that. He hated losing, and hated even more losing and feeling like he was responsible for it. If the Eagles lost, he’d sulk around but eventually cheer up. If his fantasy football team lost, he’d throw his beer can at the wall (fortunately he had learned not to throw the bottled beer, but only by experience). So maybe the trash talk and the elbow and the little digs at Jim were just that side of him coming out in public.

 

She didn’t like that side of him coming out in public.

 

She didn’t love it in private, either, but at least he didn’t have an audience. There was something about Roy with an audience that just egged him on. That was probably why he’d thrown the elbow into Jim’s face: he was just that little bit more amped up with people watching. It had made him a great high school football player. It was a little less endearing now that he was her fiancé and worked in a warehouse. And now that he was elbowing her friend in the face.

 

She had a sneaking suspicion that this was actually more typical for Roy than she’d like to admit. That she was getting used to excusing bad behavior and passing over minor things like trash talk and macho posturing because they were the background noise of her life with Roy. If she thought about it too much, she might be able to convince herself that the only reason she really minded it so much right now was because it had been directed at Jim, her one real friend in the office. If Roy had elbowed Michael…well, actually, if he’d elbowed Michael she’d have had to do deal with injured Michael, one of her least favorite Michaels, so she wouldn’t have been OK with it. But if he’d elbowed Kevin…she would have thought it was over the top, but she wouldn’t have cared that much, she had to admit. She certainly wouldn’t have connected it to the trash talk before the game, or the little dig after the game. She’d just have thought “that’s Roy,” apologized for him, and moved on.

 

Of course, she hadn’t apologized to Jim. But just as she didn’t really let herself think about how she’d have felt if it had been someone else Roy had pushed around, she didn’t consider why she’d defused Roy instead of Jim. Usually if Roy was a dick she let him be, and talked to the other person. Today she’d gone the other way, with that little comment about getting him in a tub, in order to keep him moving and get him out the door.

 

Now he was soaking in the tub—fortunately for her sanity right now, the tub was almost too small for him, let alone them both, so she’d been spared being asked to join him on a day she really didn’t feel like it—and she was downstairs cooking. Or rather, not cooking. She’d pulled out a pot, but then realized that she hadn’t gone grocery shopping yet this week, and Roy of course hadn’t done so, and so there was really not much left in the cupboards. She’d planned to do the shopping this afternoon, but then she had had to take care of Roy and it hadn’t actually happened. She put the pot down, then paused and put it back where it came from. She picked up the phone and put in an order for wings (Roy) and a calzone (her). They’d be there in thirty  minutes, they said, and she listened to the sound of Roy splashing upstairs and went to get her paintbrush.

 

In half an hour, she could probably get some watercolors done.

When Jim gets to work, he’s only a little late. Not the latest he’s ever been, that’s for sure. There was the time he and Steve went to one of Steve’s friend’s shows, and then out to the bar and…that was neither here nor there. Here was that he was probably twenty minutes late to work; there was that Steve and Mark had had an epic Mario Kart battle the night before and he’d stayed up to play referee. So he was a little tired when he got into work…ok, it was probably more like half an hour late.

 

But he wasn’t tired enough to miss the fact that someone had taken over the conference room, someone he vaguely recognized. He slipped into his desk, taking advantage of Dwight’s distraction by the visitor to avoid another annoying scold, and looked a question at Pam. She rolled her eyes and shrugged, and he pulled out his phone to text Steve.

 

Dude, what was the name of that girl in your show, the one you did with Michael?

 

He did his best to get to work, exchanging periodic glances with Pam as Michael, Dwight, and the rest of the guys in the office proceeded to make idiots of themselves over the woman selling he had finally figured out was selling purses in the conference room for some reason. Just as he decided to take a coffee break, his phone buzzed.

 

Which girl? Dude, that show had a lot of girls in it.

 

The one you and the other guy were fighting over.

 

Hermia?

 

Weird name, but ok

 

No, she played Hermia. She’s Katy. Why?

 

She’s here at the office

 

WTF??????

 

Yeah

 

Cute, tho, right? I had a total crush on her

 

I guess so

 

What’s she doing there?

 

Selling something?

 

Oh yeah, that’s her day job

 

You work for a lawyer, she sells stuff in other people’s offices?

 

Crazy world, right?

 

He was leaning against the wall texting when Michael and Kevin walked in talking about how hot Katy was. Apparently Kevin thought she was hotter than Pam, and Michael agreed, telling Kevin about how he thought she was “Pam 6.0.” Knowing Michael, this wasn’t the first time he’d said that today—hopefully not in front of Pam, but Jim had his doubts. He coughed, loudly, and his coworkers turned his way.

 

“Jimbo!” Michael slung an arm around his shoulders, which was awkward given that Jim was up against the wall, but his boss just hung there like a very strange kind of wallpaper. “Did you meet the purse girl yet?”

 

“She’s hot.”

 

“Thanks, Kev. Great insight.” He straightened, which had the not insignificant benefit of disassociating Michael from his shoulders, and decided to play dumb. “Purse girl?”

 

“Yeah, some girl came by to sell purses, so…purse girl.” Michael grinned.

 

“You mean Katy?” Jim had no particular interest in this woman, but she deserved to have her own name—and maybe that would stop Michael from insulting Pam, to her face or behind her back.

 

“You sly dog.” Michael dug his elbow into Jim’s ribs. “Already making a move there, huh? Trying to steal a march on the old bossman?”

 

“She’s hot.” Kevin was apparently still rebooting from whatever interaction he’d had with her, in reality or in his mind. Jim rolled his eyes and went to grab the coffee he’d come in for in the first place.

 

“No, I just remember her from that play you were in together. She played Hermia, right?”

 

Michael did a double-take, staring over his shoulder towards the conference room and then back at Jim. “Wait, what?”

 

“I’m pretty sure it’s the same woman.” Jim reached for the coffee carafe, but Michael shoved a paper cup into his hands instead. It was hot.

 

“Here. I don’t actually like Starbucks. I just…nevermind.” He practically ran back into his office from the breakroom, shouting something over his shoulder about finding a program. Frantic sounds of cupboards and drawers being flung open came from his office door.

 

Jim took a sip of the drink. It was definitely a dirty chai—he’d recognize it anywhere, since Mark had made him drink enough of it in college—and he didn’t doubt Michael had just bought it because it had the word ‘dirty’ in the name. He also hadn’t actually gone to Starbucks, even though he’d said he had—the label on the cup was clearly from the little mom and pop coffee shop around the corner from the office. Jim remembered a prank from a year ago, when he and Pam had convinced Dwight that that shop was secretly a Starbucks ‘in disguise,’ a Trojan horse to infiltrate the smaller coffee markets. Apparently the trick had worked longer than they’d though—and not just on Dwight.

 

Since he was running behind, it was later than usual, and he was still in the break room when Roy and Pam came in to have lunch—he wondered why Roy was upstairs for lunch, although the way his neck was craning towards the conference room didn’t leave much doubt. Roy elbowed him in the ribs, in the exact same spot Michael had hit. “Hey, Jimmy what do you think of that little purse girl, huh?” Jim carefully avoided looking at Pam, and also managed not to roll his eyes in the way he wanted to over Roy’s choice of language. Instead he shrugged, taking a sip of the very cooled tea.

 

“Cute, sure, yeah.” Whatever, Roy, he thought, and remembered Michael’s words. If he were Roy, with Pam, he didn’t think he’d even noticed Katy: she wasn’t Pam 6.0, she was Pam 0.6, an early access version not yet ready for the market. Not that she wasn’t cute, but she sure as hell wasn’t Pam.

 

Roy wouldn’t let it rest there, though. “Why don’t you get on that?” He wondered why Roy cared. Maybe he wasn’t as good at hiding his own interest in Pam as he’d thought—it might explain some of the weird aggression from Roy—in which case no wonder Roy would be interested in making sure he had his eyes firmly set somewhere else. “She’s not really my type.” And if she wasn’t, he supposed, that would imply Pam wasn’t, without actually lying. She wasn’t his type because his type was very specifically one person. Otherwise, maybe she would have been, even as Pam 0.6. But that answer should satisfy Pam’s jealous fiancé.

 

But this guess was evidently wrong, since Roy was barking up another tree entirely—maybe even in another forest. “What, are you gay?” He laughed at his own joke, and Jim resisted the urge to look at Pam and see what she thought of this exchange. “Hmmm….” He took one little peek at her and noticed her hands were almost white in tension around the cup she was holding. “I don’t think so, nope.”

 

Kevin interrupted, surprising Jim, who had actually forgotten he was there. “What is your type?”

 

He took another glance at Pam, but kept his attention primarily on Roy. Pam was important, but he couldn’t risk admitting…well, anything with her fiancé in the room, and anyway he was pretty sure she wasn’t interested in hearing it anyway, hence the existence of said fiancé. “Moms, primarily.” He saw her snort, and decided to keep going and make the joke really obvious. “Yep. Soccer moms. Single moms. NASCAR moms. Any type of moms, really.”

 

Roy, of course, didn’t get it. “That’s disgusting.”

 

Kevin, he thought, did, but of course continued the joke in his own Kevin-like way. “Stay away from my mom.”

 

He grinned. “Too late, Kev.” Point to Halpert in the ongoing game of chicken that was conversations with his horniest coworker.

 

Katy chose that moment to stroll through on her way to the vending machine—apparently selling purses was hungry work—and Jim watched Pam watch Roy as the latter’s eyes followed her in and out. She was barely out the door when Roy said, not at all quietly, “Man, I would be all over that if I wasn’t dating Pam.” He nudged Jim again in the ribs. “Or maybe I oughta take a page out of your playbook, huh? Get someone else to be me while I go have some fun?”

 

Jim was seriously worried about his ribs, but he was even more worried that Pam’s fingers were going to shatter the mug she was holding into bits as she threw Roy’s words back at him. “That’s disgusting.” She stood up and forcefully but carefully placed the mug in the sink. “And we’re not dating. We’re engaged.”

 

Roy waved a hand. “Engaged, yeah.” Pam strode out of the room without another word and Roy rolled his eyes. “Girls, right?” He looked up at the clock. “Shit, I gotta get back downstairs. Wish I’d pulled a Halpert today, but what can you do.” He laughed at his own wit, and headed out, not without another look over at the conference room as he left, right in front of Pam.

 

Jim tossed the dirty chai into the trash and followed Roy out, but at the last minute decided not to go to Pam’s desk after all. Instead, he detoured by his own desk. After a few minutes of work, he started engaging with Dwight, who seemed to be just as distracted by Katy as the rest of the office men. A short exchange had Dwight, who really was easily led when he wasn’t paying attention to who was leading, heading into the conference room to hit on Katy as well. Only then did Jim let himself wander towards reception.

 

He deliberately ignored the exchange he’d seen in the break room and his role in Roy’s part of it, and instead let himself distract Pam from her troubles by providing imaginary dialogue for Dwight in a high-pitched, unDwightlike but (if he did say so himself) very funny tone. It seemed to work, though she was still subdued for most of the rest of the day. He noticed her going in to talk to Katy later and admired her spirit—he also paid close attention to which purses she seemed to like.

 

Roy showed up later, on what must have been his legally mandated fifteen minute break during the afternoon, and tried to coax Pam into a better mood. Of course, being the asshole that he was, he did so by tickling Pam. On Jim’s desk. While he was trying to get work done. OK, that last was a lie, but the other two parts were true, and intensely frustrating. The small mercy was that Pam still looked plenty mad after Roy had left, though he was pretty sure Roy didn’t realize it, because it could be difficult to tell enforced tickle-laughter from real forgiveness.

 

If you were a dick.

 

Later, when it seemed safe, he went in and chatted with Katy a little bit, not really flirting, just getting to know her enough to drop his little bomb.

 

“Hey, weren’t you in Midsummer Night’s Dream a couple years ago?”

 

She looked up from her purses. “Yeah, I was.”

 

“With Michael?”

 

She grimaced. “Yeah. I don’t think he ever actually looked me in the face, though.”

 

“That would explain why he’s been digging through his office for the program from the show off and on for the last three hours.” Jim did not mention that he’d sent Michael on that search himself.

 

“Oh, is that what he’s been doing?” She rolled her eyes. “Should I hope he finds it, or not?”

 

“Not is probably safer.” He leaned against the wall. “So, uh, this may seem a little forward…”

 

She smiled, and he thought it was a genuine one. “Are you going to ask me out too?”

 

He grinned back. “Does it count if I do it by proxy?”

 

“Why would you need a proxy?”

 

“Oh, not me...” he raised his hands slightly. “Not that I…never mind. It’s just…do you remember my friend Steve? Kim? He was in the show with you?”

 

“You know Steve?” Her face lit up. “How’s he doing?”

 

“Pretty good, except my roommate kicked his butt at Mario Kart last night.” Jim twisted his hands together. “So…you didn’t hear it from me, but Steve kiiiind of has a crush on you, and…”

 

“Yes.” She smiled at him. “If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, the answer is yes.”

 

“Great.” He relaxed, then tensed again. “You are saying you’ll go out with Steve, right? I didn’t miss anything there?”

 

“No. I mean, yes. I am saying that.” She was bouncing a little on the balls of her feet.

 

“Great.”

 

She looked over his shoulder at something, and bit her lip. “Um…this might be weird, but could it be tonight? And can you drive me there? Because, um, my ride cancelled, and then Michael offered..”

 

“Say no more.” He pulled out his phone and texted Steve: Meet me at Poor Richard’s at 5:30. Dress nice. “We got this.”

 

“Thank you.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Seriously, thank you. If you want a purse…”

 

“I’ll let you know.”

 

“You do that.”

 

As he stepped out of the conference room, his phone buzzed twice. Sure. Why?

 

You have a date

 

What?!?

 

You still think Katy’s cute, right?

 

Say you didn’t ask her out for me

 

I mean, I can say it if you want but…

 

I’m going to kill you. I’ll see you at 5:30

 

He was going to tell Pam the hilarious news, but something stopped him. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if she thought it was at least possible someone else might be interested in him. So he found himself mentioning he’d be seeing Katy that evening, even though he was just planning to drop her off at the bar and let Steve take her home, and he joked about matching tattoos, hoping against hope that he’d see even a little bit of jealousy or that she’d realize that if the tattoos were a joke maybe the dinner and a movie were too. But instead she just looked defeated, and said something about helping Roy’s cousin move, and his own jealousy flared up. If she was going to act like everything was OK between her and Roy, after that scene he’d witnessed, he wasn’t going to let her in on the joke until Monday.

 

She’d probably still think it was funny then.

 

He hoped.

 

The only thing that raised his spirits a little at the end of the day was that, as he’d expected from their reactions, Katy and Steve seemed to really hit it off. Not that he stuck around to see: third-wheeling their date was not his style, he had enough of that in his life already even if he wasn’t desperately in love with the woman this time. Instead, he went home and proceeded to show Mark that he might be better at Mario Kart than Steve, but he couldn’t hold a candle to one James Duncan Halpert.

 

If only you could win someone’s heart on the GameCube—though even if you could, he thought, he’d probably get hit with a blue shell anyway.

Sitting at her desk at the end of the day, Pam reflects that she would like it very much if life would stop punching her in the face.

 

Really. She’ll live with the (metaphorical) bruises from the previous punching. She’ll heal, eventually. But it would be nice not to have any more.

 

First there’s Michael, and his stupid, insensitive bullshit about Pam 6.0. Sure, she’ll admit, Katy is well put together, and Pam had one of those mornings where she had to book it to work because Roy hit snooze and she forgot to get up in time and then they were both late, so she’s not exactly at her best. And sure, there’s maybe a tiny bit of resemblance between them: reddish hair, in the right light; a similar way of doing that hair (maybe Katy also had to run out of the house this morning with it still wet); just something generally in the aesthetic, she supposes, that means that the comparison isn’t entirely unfair.

 

From Michael and Kevin’s perspective, the idea that they both have breasts is probably relevant too, but she doesn’t think they’re all that alike beyond the basic fact of the matter.

 

So she can see where the comparison might originate from. But 6.0? 2.0 would have been mildly insulting. 6.0 is just off the charts, even for Michael. So she’s definitely hurt by that. She tries so hard not to let Michael get under her skin, but it’s already been a bad week, and she just can’t.

 

And because of that, she doesn’t try at all to stop Michael when he keeps hanging around the conference room. Not because she wants to be mean to Katy, just because she can’t deal with Michael at all right now, and dealing with him around Katy is going to be unavoidably worse, because he’ll do more comparisons. He’s never seen a joke he couldn’t flog into the ground, and this one…she just won’t.

 

But that doesn’t stop the world from punching her in the face all the same. She’s going to skip over Roy in her recollections, because when she does think about Roy she’s going to explode and she can’t afford to explode about Roy until Roy himself is with her, because she’s not wasting all that emotional energy on an empty office where she’s the last one sitting around.

 

Instead, she focuses on Jim. On Jim, who for just a moment gave her some hope that someone in the office could see what she saw: that there was nothing wrong with Katy, but there’s nothing wrong with her, Pam, either. That she’s not some junior training version of the woman who sells purses in other people’s offices, but a living breathing human being herself. He’d made that awful joke about being into moms—seriously, how could Roy not see that that was humor? Even Kevin got it, for all that his little eyes gleamed as he continued the joke—and she’d almost choked on her lunch. He’d said something about Katy not being his type, and she’d wondered for the first time: what was Jim’s type? Because if it wasn’t Katy—did that mean it wasn’t Pam, either? And why should she care about that? Why did she care about that?

 

Not that he’d been telling the truth. Because through all of it: through mocking Dwight to her at exactly the moment she’d needed a respite from Roy, through sitting there thankfully, blessedly ignoring Roy’s idiocy when he decided to tickle her in her workspace as an attempt to get into her good graces again, through…just all of a totally shitty day for her, he’d apparently just been biding his time.

 

It wasn’t that she’d intended to spy on them. Really, there was nowhere else to look: what she supposed to do, stare at Dwight? The light was on in the conference room, and Jim wasn’t at his desk to distract her, so she’d seen him walk in there and start chatting to Katy. At first it had seemed like nothing much, but then they’d started obviously talking about things other than purses, and he’d pulled out his phone and started typing—did he get her number?—and then she’d kissed him! On the cheek, to be sure, but she’d totally kissed Jim. It was totally inappropriate for the workplace, just like Roy’s tickling, and if she hadn’t thought Michael’s main reaction would be to high-five Jim and talk about manliness and the modern office salesman (or else to have a hissy fit because his own wooing had been a failure—an equally unpleasant outcome for her to deal with) she’d have reported it. She supposed she could have told Toby, but…he and Jim were close. It wouldn’t do anything, except make her feel guilty for being annoyed at her best friend for lying to her about his interest.

 

And why should she feel so bad that Jim was interested in Katy? He’d all but confirmed it when he’d said something about taking her out that night, though she still wasn’t sure exactly what their plans were: the matching tattoos were obviously a joke, but did that mean dinner and a movie was too? Where would Jim take a girl he liked on a date? Probably not a hockey rink. Maybe Italian. Definitely good food—Jim wouldn’t accept bad food in a fancy place, it just wasn’t him—probably local, since he’d lived here his whole life and had definite favorites. Maybe Cugino’s; possibly Cooper’s? Why was she worrying about this anyway, there was no point. Whether they were doing dinner and a movie or not, they were out the door, Jim holding it open for Katy as they passed through and smiling down at his phone. Had she been texting him from the conference room?

 

She wanted to puke.

 

No, she wanted to scream, because it was 5:45 and Roy still hadn’t come upstairs to pick her up. Oh, he was around all the time this afternoon with Katy selling her damn purses in the conference room, but when she was gone and it was time to go home, he was AWOL. Maybe it was dangerous to think about Jim on a first date because it was reminding her eerily of her own first date, and she was feeling the same sort of feeling she’d felt that day when Roy hadn’t come back for her.

 

She got up and walked to the window. The truck was gone.

 

He’d actually left her again.

 

She wandered back towards her desk, then past it to Jim’s and picked up his phone. She wasn’t sure why she leaned against his desk as she dialed—maybe it was to replace the memory of this afternoon when Roy had refused to see how mad she was and had insisted on tickling her right here, in front of Jim. Maybe it was just to avoid feeling trapped in the semicircular hellscape that was her normal office experience. Whatever it was, she felt calmer here than there, and so here she stayed in the empty office.

 

“Hey, mom.” Her conversation with her mother was brief—Helene had always had a knack for keeping things short when she could tell Pam was angry—and she arranged to spend the night there “just to see you and Dad.”

 

Her next phone call was not nearly as short, though fortunately Penny had a cellphone and speakers, so she could drive to pick Pam up while they talked. Pen was a good sister. Not a perfect one, just like Pam wasn’t, but the sort of sister who would give up a Friday night party at college to come pick up her stewing, angry sister and drive her home: not Roy’s house, home.

 

Penny was also the kind of sister you could tell things to, if you didn’t want to bottle them up and explode, and so Pam found herself getting increasingly irate as she finally let herself think about Roy’s behavior that morning and afternoon.

 

She told it to Penny in reverse order, because it just seemed reasonable to start with the fact that “that fucker,” as Penny called him when she finally arrived and Pam got into the car, had stranded her at work. Then she’d gone into the tickling—a subject Penny could relate to, since she’d learned at a very young age that tickling Pam just got her cold, quiet, and eventually even afterwards. Roy had apparently not learned the difference between Pam being unwilling to cause a scene at work and Pam being happy. He was going to learn. That let her move onto the point that really angered her most of all: Roy’s casual disavowal of their engagement, and more importantly his apparent desire to cheat on her even though he thought they were dating.

 

“And he said he ought to get someone else to be him while he had some ‘fun,’ Pen. Like being engaged to me—assuming he ever remembers we are engaged, not like he’s done anything to move us beyond engaged into actually married, has he?—was some kind of work. Like Jim’s brilliant prank of getting out of a day of work was a model for him to get out of a day of being my boyfriend, let alone my fiancé.” She took a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, you know—well, it would have been bad, but not that bad—well, it would have been better, if he’d just let that part out. If he’d just slipped up and forgotten to say engaged. That would be frustrating, but…yeah, that’s Roy. Or hell, if he’d said he could have had a double to date Katy—not that I think he was thinking of dating her, but again, that’s Roy. But no, apparently the double gets me and Roy gets to go bang whoever he wants. Well fuck that.”

 

“Yeah,” Penny contributed when Pam let her get a word in edgewise. “Fuck that. Now, do you want to come downstairs, or what?” Pam stretched the cord on the desk phone just far enough to peer out into the parking lot, and yep, there was Pen’s little sedan parked next to the main doors in the fire lane.

 

“Oh! I’ll be right down!” She grabbed her coat and purse—not a nice new fancy purse like she’d considered buying, but a serviceable one her mom had given her when she started working in an office—and headed down. When she got into the car Penny had a gleam in her eye Pam couldn’t quite place, and Pam decided to head it off.

 

“I’m done for tonight. I’m not talking about Roy.”

 

Penny shrugged and got the car into gear. “So don’t talk about Roy.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “It sounds like Jim had a new prank? You want to tell me about that?”

 

Pam grinned at her sister, who she knew always loved hearing the recaps of Jim’s and Pam’s pranks when she passed them along. “Oh, you’re going to just die when you hear this one, Pen.”

 

Retelling the story got them all the way to their parents’ house—a two hour drive, but Pam couldn’t have told you if it was 5 minutes. Her parents, like Penny, were willing to keep the conversation on gently neutral ground, and she almost forgot, for a few minutes, exactly how badly the world had punched her in the face starting at 9 am that morning.

It is a good thing the next morning is a weekend, because there is no way in hell Pam is making it into work from her parents’ house. Not with the two-hour drive, and especially not with the four-hour talk with her mom and Penny, while her dad grills on the back patio and tries not to eavesdrop too obviously (lunch is delicious, and far too extravagant, but hey, he was stuck out there for four hours).

 

She starts the morning afraid that her mother is going to tell her she’s being silly and make Penny drive her right back home to Roy today, and she’s not sure she can deal with it. She ends it eating a delectable brisket sandwich with one hand and practically holding her mother back from driving into Scranton to “give that boy a piece of my mind” with the other. Fortunately Penny has already finished her sandwich and is able to use both hands, so between them they restrain Helene and convince her to do justice to Bill’s enticing spread instead.

 

If there was any chance Pam was going to simply forgive and forget Roy’s behavior, her mother’s incandescent rage puts paid to it immediately. She’s seen her mom frustrated, sad, and annoyed before (she has to admit, her parents do not have a perfect marriage, nor have she and Penny been perfect children). She has never seen her this angry.

 

“He said he wanted to cheat on you, Pammy.” She hates it when Roy calls her Pammy, but she can see this is coming out of her mother’s need to protect her child, so some backsliding to childhood names is acceptable. “In front of everyone. That’s just…he can’t do that! Bill, back me up here.” She gestures to Pam’s dad, who’s calmly eating ribs. “I don’t see how you can be eating ribs so calmly right now!”

 

“I can hardly eat ribs in an agitated manner,” Bill replies, setting down a bone. “It gets sauce on my cuffs.”  He picks up another rib. “But your mother is right. That isn’t acceptable.” He continues in a placid voice that belies the angry content of his words. “Do you want me to kill him for you?”

 

This has been an ongoing joke in the Beesly family for years: Roy, or one of Penny’s rotating cast of boyfriends, will do something wrong, and Bill will offer to “kill that guy for you.” Pam usually laughs it off, but right now her dad sounds serious. “No, I think I can handle it, Dad. Thanks anyway.”

 

“My pleasure.” He takes another rib, and his wife rolls her eyes.

 

“So what do you want to do, Pam?” Now that her spouse has acknowledged the justice of her indignation, apparently, Helene is calm enough to return to using Pam’s preferred name.

 

“Yeah, Pam.” Penny chimes in for the first time in a while. “I mean, you seemed pretty pissed last night…” she holds up a hand as Helene opens her mouth. “I’m not saying she shouldn’t be, mom, hold your horses. You seemed pretty pissed last night…how pissed are you today?”

 

Pam takes a deep breath and looks inside herself. How pissed is she at Roy, and how much has having her mother take her side so vehemently assuaged whatever anger she was feeling? Often, she knows, just like her mother, she really only wants validation that her feelings are reasonable, and then they dissipate. Is this one of those times?

 

Maybe it is, she decides, but it’s not validation from her loving family that she needs. If Roy were to come to her and tell her he screwed up…maybe that would fix it. But oddly, it’s not the stupid shit he said in the break room that she can’t get past. Roy is…well, a decade with him, give or take, has taught her that Roy will say stupid things, a lot, and she doesn’t quite feel fair blaming him the way her mom is for saying one more stupid thing. Why should this be the straw that broke the camel’s back, even if it was the worst thing he’d said in a long time? Maybe that’s enough of a reason, but she’d probably still be wobbling if it weren’t for the twin whammies of the tickling and the abandonment. Those are where she’s stuck. She could forgive words, but actions? He knows she hates being tickled. He knows she hates it even more when tickling substitutes for a real conversation. And he clearly wasn’t thinking about her—wasn’t thinking about making anything up to her, or about what he owed her, or any of it—because he didn’t even bother to stick around and drive her home. Those two incidents, the ignoring her feelings and the ignoring her—those are what go to her real worries about this relationship. Not that Roy will choose someone else over her, though the stupid cheating thing is, she admits, just as bad as her mom says. But that Roy won’t choose her even when there isn’t someone else: that he’s not actually paying attention to her at all. That’s the worry that keeps her up at night, as her engagement ticks on from two years to three without a date set and her fiancé forgets they’re even engaged at all.

 

OK, she’s also still pretty annoyed that his little fantasy of dating the purse girl (Katy, her mind insists: don’t be like Roy, don’t reduce her to a symbol) involved having someone else do the “work” of dating her, as if she wouldn’t fucking notice. Actually, now that she thinks about it, that’s all of a piece with the rest of it, isn’t it? He thinks she’d somehow not notice if someone replaced him with Steve: does that imply she could just duck out and have someone else hand him beer and not talk about their day, and he wouldn’t care?

 

She’s about to respond to Penny’s question when her phone buzzes in the kitchen. She had to plug it in there, in the little nest of cords her parents keep next to the toaster oven, because of course she hadn’t planned to be visiting today, and since she dragged Penny out here too it was only fair that she had to let Pen use the one spare phone charger you could actually take up to one of their childhood rooms, leaving her phone downstairs. Because it wasn’t with her, she’d forgotten it this morning when her mom and Penny descended on her for The Conversation, as she thinks of it already, and now she’s wondering how many missed calls she has from Roy. She never told him she wasn’t coming home, because she was too annoyed at him, and so he has to have been going crazy wondering where she is.

 

Or not. This buzz is, she notices, her only missed notification, and while it is from Roy it’s not exactly anguished.

 

Can you pick me up @darryls thx

 

She folds into one of the stools by the kitchen island her parents put in last year when they remodeled and stares at the phone. He’s not wondering where she is. He’s not worried. He’s not even aware that she didn’t come home tonight because he’s at fucking Darryl’s after what has to have been an epic night out, given that it’s 12:30 and he’s only texting her now.

 

She tosses the phone to Penny.

 

“Pretty pissed,” she says, and goes to refill her coffee.

After leavin’ Stephen (as he makes sure to call it, as often as he can, because it annoys Steve but not actually too much) with Katy, and absolutely destroying Mark at Mario Kart, Jim doesn’t actually have much to do that weekend. He’d gotten kind of used to having the evenings and weekend afternoons filled with spot op duties for Steve’s show (it had gone without a hitch, mostly because his helping Alicia had apparently made him another friend for life and she’d been very patient with him during tech rehearsals. Once he realized he couldn’t actually watch the play and run the spot, and had chosen to just run spot, things had been easy). Now that he doesn’t have that, and after basketball at the Y (which Steve was weirdly absent from) he’s at loose ends.

 

Saturday he mostly lazes around the house, but on Sunday he hits up Steamtown Mall: he’d planned to do this last weekend, but then Michael had been weird about people working Saturday and he’d been in a shitty mood because of the whole injured nose thing (as he told people)/Pam-and-Roy-in-a-tub thing (as he admitted to Mark and Steve) so he hadn’t actually gone. He hangs out in the Barnes and Noble browsing vaguely. As usual, he gravitates towards the sale material they’ve got laid out on temporary tables towards the back of the store (or, he supposes, the front, if you came in through the exterior doors, but since he’s a sucker for a food court he came in through the main mall entrance).

 

It’s a sign of how far gone he is that every item on the tables seems to remind him of Pam. He hadn’t thought he was this bad, but there you go. A set of Moleskine notebooks? Sketchbooks for her art, too easy. The complete works of Jane Austen, in the faux-fancy binding that marks it as a Barnes and Noble custom edition that just didn’t sell, maybe because those works have been out of copyright for decades? Might as well have been put there just to tug at his heartstrings. A Funko Pop of Batman? Reminds him of Dwight, which reminds him of Pam, wham bam thank you ma’am for the heartbreak. A box set of a board game he’s never heard of, Dominion? Well, Pam has dominion over his heart, so there you go.

 

OK, that last one might be a stretch, but it’s also reminding him of just how pathetic he’s gotten in the last few weeks. Ever since Steve told him Pam seemed a little bit down when he’d been gone for the day, he’s been straining to see whether his friend was right. As far as he can tell, though, things are their usual selves in Pamland and its adjoining neighbor Royitania. Roy is still an ass, Pam is still weirdly OK with that, and Jim is probably going to need dental work from all the jellybeans he’s eating for no real purpose other than to get his heart broken. The imperial marriage that will join the two countries still doesn’t have a date, but it doesn’t look from the outside (and oh how he hates admitting to himself he is on the outside) like there’s anything likely to break them up even if the fabled wedding day never arrives. He briefly entertains the idea of what he’d do if they ever did set a date, and decides he’ll probably run away to Australia. It’s the farthest place he knows you can get flights to: he’s pretty sure there are obscure islands in the Indian Ocean that are further away, but while he’s willing to imagine escape he’s not prepared to be somewhere his family can’t visit easily—and Larissa gets seasick, so boats are out.

 

It’s probably pathetic that he’s planning his future exile for a wedding that was agreed to before he knew the couple, but then again, he’s Jim Halpert. He knows he’s pathetic. He just can’t do anything about it, and he’s still not sure he wants to, because even the idea of the opposite—of a world where instead of him fleeing to Australia Pam is breaking up with Roy and dating him, Jim—is so exhilarating he can only take sidelong glances at the idea even in his own head.

 

He ends up buying a Moleskine—they’re 60% off, with his membership, so it’s practically bad business not too, and they’re one of the few paper products Dunder Mifflin has never sold so even Dwight can’t accuse him of disloyalty—and justifying it to himself as something he can use for a journal or a planner or something. His mom is always saying he’s too disorganized for his own good (this is the one thing his mother has in common with Dwight Schrute, a fact he’s used to disarm her attempts to get him to organize himself on more than one occasion. His mother has met Dwight, and was properly appalled at the suggestion of a connection between herself and him). Maybe this will help him get things in gear. Maybe an organized Jim can be a happy Jim, or at least a more productive, upwardly mobile Jim, which may be his only option if this one-sided Pam thing doesn’t work out, as he’s beginning to worry it won’t.

 

He’s torn out of this melancholy mood by a shout and a wave from someone who, to his lovesick eyes, looks a lot like Pam, but turns out to be Katy, selling purses from her kiosk at the mall. He grins at her and walks over, and they have an animated conversation about Steve and Fiddler that keeps getting interrupted by her purse sales. At one point he thinks he actually hallucinates real Pam in the distance, but he’s answering questions about the set design of Tevye’s house (which flew in from the rafters in pieces, but was sturdy enough for the fiddler to actually climb onto, a really cool approach) and he doesn’t get a chance to follow her. He learns that yes, as he’d suspected, Katy is definitely into Steve, and from the blushing confirmation she makes that he didn’t make basketball yesterday because they were having brunch at the aptly named Posh, he’s pretty sure that Steve’s crush hasn’t faded any with time.

 

He’s happy for them. He really is. He pulls out his phone and texts Steve a selfie of him and Katy making weird faces at the camera (caption, which he doesn’t share with her: guess I’ll be seeing a lot of her in the future, thought I’d get a head start) and immediately gets back a reply (turn around). Steve slips into the picture with two ice cream cones, and Jim pretends to take one before laughingly leaving his friends to take a snack break together, not sure he can actually handle two people who are in love actually getting to hang out together but not willing to be a wet blanket on their clear excitement. As he leaves, he does get them both to blush by suggesting slyly that maybe next time Katy could let Steve make it to basketball so Mark doesn’t sent out a search party.

 

When he gets home, he’s feeling pretty good, all things considered. He’s not the sort of person to begrudge anyone else their happiness, Roy excepted, and even then he’d prefer Pam and Roy to break up in a way that doesn’t make Roy unhappy, just single. But while it’s been a good weekend, he’s still pining; it’s just that he feels like he’s maybe got a handle on it now, if only because he has his completely ridiculous plan for what he’ll do when the wedding actually happens. He and Mark grill hot dogs in the backyard and he stares up at the stars, wondering just how different they are in Australia—and whether he’ll end up having to find out.

Pam has had weekend from hell—not because of her family, but because, as always, of Roy. He tries to apologize for “whatever’s bothering her,” but when she taps her foot and looks at him for more details he fumbles to a halt and just asks her if “they can start again” and “she’ll forgive him,” and she can hear Marlene Anderson’s voice echoing inside his, and that’s when she knows he has no idea what he’s apologizing for. She loves Marlene, she really does—sometimes, when she’s being entirely honest with herself, as she has been for the last two nights sleeping alone in her old room at her parents’, she wonders whether she’s more interested in marrying Roy or in having Marlene as a mother-in-law—but she needs an apology from Roy, not one from his mother. She needs him to understand that he was wrong, what was wrong, and she definitely does not need to start over again.

 

If she’s going to start over again, she’s not doing it with Roy.

 

That thought shocks her out of her anger and into a kind of calm that she thinks might be what they mean by zen. She’s suddenly above the whole thing; it’s not that it’s become unimportant, it’s that she no longer thinks of this particular disagreement as the most important piece of anything. Roy has been letting her down for a long time, but more than that, she’s been letting herself down. She’s let Roy become this—and she’s not taking responsibility for what is his own job to work on himself, but she’s let her and Roy become this. Somewhere along the line he stopped doing the work, but somewhere along the line she stopped caring that he had stopped doing the work. He’s putting in minimal or subminimal effort, but while she’s putting effort into making their day to day lives work, she’s not putting effort into their relationship anymore either. She’s been letting Roy coast, and she’s been telling herself that being the only one who pays the bills, who cooks dinner, who remembers either of their family’s important days and dates, is enough work, that she doesn’t need to connect with Roy if she’s being the good fiancée in the abstract.

 

She’s going to stop that.

 

Saturday is a bad day, because it leads her to this conclusion, and that hurts. It hurts to realize things haven’t been working for longer than she’d realized, that this thing with Roy and Jim’s prank and Katy and not remembering her at work and all of it is just a symptom of a much larger abscess in their relationship. Saturday also features an epic screaming match between her and Roy, one which her father’s presence (he drove with her and Penny back to Scranton for this) probably saves from being worse than it is. He meets her eyes behind Roy’s back and the question is still there in his eyes—do you want me to kill him for you?—but now the answer in hers isn’t “no, I love him,” but “no, it’s over anyway.” It’s a deflating feeling, but it lets her get through the fight and into the aftermath without backing down.

 

Sunday is worse, because it involves actually moving out. She’s going to have to look for a place, she realizes, but they’ve agreed (in the most amicable discussion about their relationship she’s ever had with Roy—somehow all the yelling from Saturday must have exhausted his reserves, because now he’s just as calm as she is) that he’ll keep the house and the big stuff, like the couch and the bed, and she can take all the smaller things she wants and most of the money they had saved up for the wedding that isn’t happening. It’s less money than she thinks Roy thinks it is, but she also has no interest in the bed his mom bought him for college or the stupid couch he watches sports from, so it’s a wash anyway.

 

She can’t really commute from her parents’ place, and neither Penny nor her best friend Izzy have a couch you can really crash on, so her dad checks her into an extended stay hotel. She decides she needs one thing that’s definitively hers, not hers-and-Roys, so a trip to the Steamtown Mall produces a waffle iron that she cradles to her chest as she walks into the little hotel room and reverently plugs into the socket by the tiny little burner and microwave that mark the suite as “extended stay.” She thinks she saw Jim and his new girlfriend at the mall, but she didn’t stay to chat, and anyway this isn’t about Jim, even if Roy did try to suggest it was when he was yelling at her on Saturday. Her thoughts are interrupted when her father pulls out a box of Bisquick that she’s not sure where he got it from and kisses her on the head.

 

“It’s going to be OK.” He walks to the door and opens it, then turns to her again. “Really, it is. But I have to go calm your mother down or I may find your ex’s dead body on our front porch come morning.”

 

She smiles weakly at his joke. “Thanks, Dad. Love you.”

 

“Love you too, Pam.” And he’s gone.

 

She mixes up the waffles as her mind wanders back to the question of whether Jim had anything to do with this. Not really, she thinks at first. It’s about her and Roy and their failures as a couple, and to be fair (not that she’s super interested in being fair the first day after her first real breakup, but this is fair to her not Roy so she’ll allow it) a lot of it is about his failures, and her reactions to them—which are also failures, but still. It’s about them, not about Jim.

 

But then she thinks about the failures some more, as the waffle timer dings and she flips it out onto a plate, only realizing then that while her father brought her Bisquick he neglected butter, or syrup, or anything to put on the waffle. As she digs into hot unadulterated waffle content, she realizes that her failures in her relationship were all about not putting emotional weight on Roy, letting him skate by, never worrying that she ought to turn to him or look to him for support, and never noticing as they slipped farther and farther apart. And while that’s on her—it’s her who did it, after all—it’s not entirely divorced from Jim, either. Because while she wasn’t leaning on Roy, she has a damn good idea who she was leaning on, and he has tousled hair, shining eyes, and disgusting sweet tooth.

 

He’s also definitively not Steve, and even Dwight knows it.

 

But he also has a girlfriend now. Suddenly the waffle without anything on it is just too much for her, and she scrapes her plate into the trash. He has a girlfriend now, and she’s going to have to figure out how to shoulder that weight not only without Roy (who wasn’t helping) but probably without Jim (who was)—because in all the time she’s known him he hasn’t really had a girlfriend, and she can’t help but think that even though he clearly doesn’t think of her that way, he’ll probably have less time for her now that he has one. Not that they saw each other outside of work, much, but still. Something is going to change, and she’s suddenly alarmingly sure of one terrifying fact she hadn’t let herself realize before:

 

She’s more afraid of losing her friend Jim than she ever was of losing her fiancé Roy.

Jim drags himself into work on Monday—not that anything strenuous happened over the weekend, just that it’s a drag to go into work and sell paper all day. Dwight is his usual self, Michael is especially Michael, and even Kelly emerges from the annex to somehow be a more distilled, more distracting version of herself—something to do with Ryan and cheese puffs and a broken promise, apparently, but since the two of them aren’t dating, he’s not sure what Ryan is supposed to owe her. All of it is distracting and none of it is energizing, and he can see Pam is having the same kind of morning: her eyelids are drooping and he thinks she’s playing solitaire at the slowest rate he’s ever seen.

 

He heads up to her desk for a little bit of a sugar rush and a chance to talk to her, and idly points out a potential move:

 

“4 on the 5. No, the other 5.” She moves the card, clicks the back of the new one, moves the 3 onto the 4 she just moved, clicks again, and…

 

FWIPFWIPFWIPFWIPFWIP.

 

Apparently the rest of the cards were all lined up, ready to go.

 

“Hey.” She smiles, but it’s a tired smile. “Thanks, I don’t know why I didn’t see that.”

 

“Sometimes you just need a new perspective on things.” He grins. “For instance, I’ve found that being a foot up and at a forty-five degree angle is ideal for playing solitaire.”

 

“Oh, do you hover above your laptop at home?”

 

“No, I stand and make the laptop float with antigrav skids. That’s also how I keep my weight down.” He winks and she giggles.

 

“Thanks, I needed that.” He settles in, forearms on the desk, and gives her space if she wants to talk.

 

Apparently she doesn’t, because she just smiles tiredly at him and starts a new game. But if she doesn’t want to talk he’s perfectly happy standing up here, kibitzing her moves and eating her jellybeans, until someone makes him move.

 

That someone, as it turns out, is Roy. Not violently, like he had on the day Jim and Pam had been laughing about his alliance with Dwight, but just by coming through the doors with heavy tread. Jim slips back to his desk, well aware that he needs to keep his boundaries in Roy’s presence, but he can’t help but notice Roy is carrying a paper box. This in itself is not unusual—they work at a paper company—but the box lid is off, and there’s non-paper things inside. Roy sets it down on the desk in front of Pam and there’s less thump than there would normally be in a full box of paper too. It almost sounds like things inside are jangling against each other.

 

“I went through the kitchen cabinets, and this is all the stuff you use that I don’t.” Roy sounds as tired as Pam looks. “I figured, you might want it, and it’s just going to go to waste if I let it sit there.” He smiles at Pam, and it’s not the cocky smile Jim is used to seeing on Roy’s face, the one that says “let’s get me into a tub.” It’s almost the same as one he recognizes in the mirror: a tired smile that says “I’m doing my best to keep my emotions in check.” What the hell is going on?

 

Pam’s eyes flicker around the office, lingering for a moment on Jim’s face, and he quickly turns away and tries to pretend he was working on something. His ears perk up though as he hears the box make its way to what is clearly the ground behind Pam’s desk, and then something else is being deposited on the desk—it’s a little sad how attuned he is to the sounds of Pam, he thinks, but then again, he’s not going to change anything about that anytime soon—and there’s some whispering and then the doors are swinging closed on Roy’s heavy footsteps again. He glances up in time to see Roy walking down the stairs with a heavy saucepan in his hand.

 

He doesn’t get up, but he looks a question at Pam, who sighs and beckons him over, shoving the jellybeans at him as he approaches. She looks a little hesitant so he decides to break the ice for her.

 

“So are you telling me this is a multiple jellybean conversation?” He grabs three: green, yellow, red, and lines them up on the counter. “How about this: I’ll eat Mr. Green here, and you can tell me what’s going on; then I’ll eat Mr. Yellow and you can tell me how I can help; then I can give you Mr. Red while I tell you everything’s going to be OK.”

 

“Are you offering me my own jellybeans, Halpert?” But she’s smiling, and she already looks less tired, and he thinks everything might actually be OK if she just keeps smiling at him like that. He nods, and she rolls her eyes, and then she nods at him and he realizes she’s just waiting for him to pick up the green jellybean. He pops it in his mouth with a wink, and she rolls her eyes again but starts talking.

 

It takes him a moment to realize what she’s talking about, because she starts in what is, to him, the middle of the story. He wants to ask her to go back and explain why Roy was giving her her kitchen spices and she was giving him the pan his mother used to make her famous chili (not, like, Kevin-level famous, Pam specifies—just, county-fair-winning). But he figures he has to let her tell the story her own way, and when she clarifies that she’d taken the pots and pans when she moved out, but forgotten to leave Roy his heirloom, he’s pretty sure his brain stops working altogether. By the time he comes to she’s staring at the yellow jellybean and he realizes it’s time for the “what can Jim do” portion of the event. He chews on extremely fake lemon as she rattles on about carpooling and “just being there” and “advice on finding a roommate” and he just nods at each because of course. Of course if she needs to save gas money he’ll drive with her from her hotel (Pam is staying at a hotel, and not living with Roy). Of course he’s there for her, he’s her best friend (she’s single). Of course he’ll help her with apartment hunting (maybe she could live near me).

 

At the end she grimaces and says something about knowing it’s a terrible imposition and a bad time for her to be asking things of him (he’s not sure why that would be, but he lets it go). He hurries to hand her the red jellybean and her face visibly relaxes as he says what he already told her he was going to say: “everything will be OK.” He pops one last random jellybean as he walks away, and later in the day he emails her a dozen or so apartments.com listings that look like they might be in her price range (or what he imagines her price range is from knowing how much Dunder Mifflin pays its employees).

 

He tries to tell himself it’s a coincidence that despite her talk of a roommate, all of them are studios or one-bedrooms. Because he doesn’t want to get out over his skiis now: just because she’s single doesn’t mean she’s going to decide to date him. But if she did…he’d rather not have to deal with an annoying roommate. After all, he already has one of his own.

 

But that’s for the future. Right now, he’s just flying high on the idea that Pam Beesly is single, and is never, ever going to become Pam Anderson.

 

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

Pam’s life refuses to acknowledge how much it has been turned on its axis, and insists on plodding along as if it’s normal. She’s not so much frustrated by this as baffled: how is it that she can break up with her fiancé, the boyfriend she’d been planning her life around for a decade, move out of the house she’s lived in with him for years, and have everything seem totally OK? There should be thunder and lightning and panic, but instead it’s just…nice? She likes her new life. She carpools with Jim, because she’s still not sure how much her salary covers and how much Roy’s covered, and Jim is nice about it and cracks jokes about how she should be glad she taught him how to drive stick. How did she never know he had a stickshift car? Doubts begin to circle about just how bad he could have been at driving stick if he owns a stickshift, but she doesn’t exactly remember if he had this same car when she was teaching him—it’s an older car, but he could have gotten it used, probably did given that Jim doesn’t spend money on anything as far as she can tell—so she doesn’t say anything except to thrust her nose in the air and pretend to be extremely smug about his driving. She’s booked into the hotel for two weeks (extended stay indeed) but two weeks is really not that much time so she’s researching places (Jim’s list is invaluable) when it hits her that she can’t arrange to visit any of them after work because Jim is driving her in.

 

When she tries to raise this objection he merely waggles his eyebrows at her and suggests that he can drive her to her showings, and while she tries to put up a defense (doesn’t he have better things to do with his evenings—like date his hot new girlfriend?—not that she says that second part, because she’s not that nosy even if she secretly is) she lets him win with a degree of ease that makes her feel a little guilty inside. Because she’s realizing right now that Jim is her rock; Jim is why there isn’t thunder or lightning or even any panic, because every time she has a problem he coaxes it out of her and together they find a solution. The extended stay place doesn’t have an oven, but they’ll let you use your own electronics and Jim’s mom just happens to be getting rid of the old toaster oven they’d had since he was a kid, and “I couldn’t bear to send Old Toastie to a farm upstate, do you think you could take him, Pam?” She absolutely hates going to the bank, and Roy is too lazy, so when they split their joint accounts somehow it’s Jim who talks her through the online process to set up her new account and then waits outside in the car cheerleading while she dashes in for the part that absolutely has to be done in person.

 

She jokes to her sister that she thinks she loves Jim and receives a raised eyebrow that both reminds her of him and sends her scuttling away into her pillow cushions in embarrassment, reiterating over and over to herself that he has a girlfriend. And anyway, she shouldn’t be getting into anything right now, not just after breaking up with Roy, she assures herself and a skeptical Penny. She doesn’t say but her sister somehow seems to intuit that this principled stand might not be as easy to uphold if Jim weren’t dating “Pam 6.0.” But he is, and there’s no reason to think he’ll stop anytime soon, so she just basks guiltily in all the attention he’s spending on her and not Katy. If it doesn’t bother him, she’s sure as hell not going to let it bother her.

 

She finds the perfect apartment (well, perfect for her price range and distance from work anyway) and it just feels right that Jim is the one standing beside her and checking the tops of the cabinets and refrigerator for dust and mold while she chatters on about natural light and a spare closet for her art supplies (though now that she thinks about it, it was Jim who pointed out that she could use the extra storage space for paints and canvas). She signs a lease solo for the first time in her life, and it only seems right that they go out for drinks afterwards at this little bar that Jim knows, and she just stares at him two drinks in while he talks about…nothing and everything…and she wishes this were really her life.

 

Wishes he were really hers.

 

And that’s the real change that she thinks should have been introduced, not with thunder and lightning, but with trumpets and coronets. She wishes again, not dull compensatory wishes like “I wish Roy would do the dishes for once” or “I wish we had set a date for the wedding,” but big bold ones like “I wish I were an artist” and “I wish Jim were mine.” The kind of wishes that ask you to take a strong step off a steep cliff and trust that your wings have fledged enough to fly.

 

She’s taking a step off one of those cliffs—applying for an art class at the community college over the summer—when the phone rings and the person on the other end asks to be connected to Jim Halpert.

 

“Of course. May I ask who’s calling?”

 

“Oh! Yes, it’s Katy. Katy Moore.”

 

And just like that she can feel the rocks at the bottom of the cliff rising up to meet her. She doesn’t X out of the window with the application yet, but she does get a little punchy as she transfers Jim, and tries not to glare in unearned jealousy when he grins as soon as he figures out who’s on the phone. She finds herself typing really loudly as she fills in the rest of the application—she may not have Jim, but she can learn about Watercolors all by herself, thank you—and when he sets down the phone with a smile on his face she all but snaps at him.

 

“You can give her your direct extension, you know.”

 

His eyebrows fly up and she’s surprised as he moves quickly towards her desk. Jim only moves quickly when he cares about something, she knows—he usually glides, she’s admired his movements even before she was single—and so she starts to worry she’s upset him with her little jealous spat, and tries to apologize.

 

“Oh, I’m sorry, I…”

 

For once Jim interrupts her.

 

“Hey, what’s going on?” His voice is surprisingly soft.

 

“I just…” she can’t not answer his question, but she’s not going to answer the real question, she’s too embarrassed, so she takes refuge in rephrasing what she’d already said. “Katy. You can give her your direct line. If she’s going to be calling you here. A lot.”

 

“Why would I need to do that?” He looks at her quizzically. “Steve only has one birthday a year.”

 

“Huh? Steve?” Her brain is blank, trying to process what he’s saying and why it’s relevant that Steve has one birthday.

 

He takes in her glazed look and settles down on his elbows across her desk. “That was Steve’s girlfriend, Katy. You might remember her from the day she came to sell purses?” She must have made some kind of sign because he nods, as if satisfied. “Steve’s birthday is Tuesday, and she wanted to know if I could come hang out. Apparently Steve has been saying things about how I’m ‘too busy for my old friends’ and ‘he doesn’t even recognize my face anymore.’” He makes air quotes around the words. “Which is bullshit because I wiped the floor with him at the Y on Saturday, but maybe he’s too embarrassed to tell her that.” He grins and she smiles back reflexively because all interaction with the outside world is suspended right now, thank you very much, please come back later after we’ve finished processing the casual delivery of the news that Jim and Katy are not dating. That Jim is, to her knowledge, single. That he’s been spending all his time with her. OK, to be fair, she kind of knew that last one, but the mention of Steve’s complaining drives it home.

 

Oh.

 

Oh.

 

Jim ducks his head a little and she’s intrigued, because he looks suddenly, achingly shy, and she’s not sure what’s going on, but then he continues and her confusion drifts away like clouds in the sun. “So, uh, Katy’s organizing a birthday party for him at Poor Richard’s, and apparently I’m supposed to, and I quote,” here again he deployed the finger quotes, “‘bring along whomever it is I’ve been spending my time with instead of my old friends.’ Which, honestly, I’ve known you longer than I’ve known Steve.” He huffs in what she suspects is mock-exasperation and then meets her eyes hesitantly. “So, uh, will you come?”

 

Apparently interaction with the outside world has been restored, because she’s smiling, and he’s grinning back, and she realizes she really really needs to answer his question.

 

“Yes.”

 

If she thought he was grinning before, now he’s the Cheshire Cat, all grin and nothing else.

 

“Then it’s a date.”

Jim gets three steps away from Pam’s desk before he doubles back.

 

“Uh…when I said a date…”

 

He sees Pam’s face, which had been lit up like the Scranton Times Building for Christmas, start to fall, and an incredible hope starts to rise within his chest. He realizes he hasn’t completed the sentence and she’s starting to reply, but as soon as he hears the tone of her “oh, yeah” he knows he has to cut her off before she can say something horribly devastating like “just as friends” or “we’re just friends” or “we’ll always be friends.”

 

“Do you want to get dinner before Poor Richards? Just the two of us? Like, a real date?” Well, that’s what he was trying to say. He thinks it came out more like Dyawannag’dinrbfPrichardsjutwouslkerldt (this probably means something in German, but he’s not going to ask Dwight what) because he’s talking so fast he knows he didn’t get most of those vowel sounds out. But apparently he got enough of them out, and it is, for once, the exact right thing to say, because she’s nodding and suggesting Cugino’s and he’s agreeing and suddenly “carpooling from work” has turned into “going out together” and he’s pretty sure he just floats back to his desk.

 

If he’s going to keep working here while dating Pam, this will probably be a regular occurrence, he thinks. Maybe he should just get a standing desk, so when he’s six inches off the ground he can still do work. That’s getting ahead of himself, but he almost screwed this thing up by trying not to get ahead of himself so he’s just going to let his mind do what it wants to do for the moment.

 

The rest of the day is somehow both the longest afternoon of his entire work life and over in a flash, and before he’s really ready for it (and yet somehow long after he’s been ready for it) he’s opening the car door for Pam the way he now does every day except it’s totally different because now they’re going on a date. So it’s not friendly, it’s chivalrous. Or really, it was chivalrous the whole time but now he can admit it to himself. He thinks maybe Pam can now admit it to herself too, because she’s blushing as he closes the door behind her and again, he’s done this every day since she broke up with Roy.

 

They drive to Cugino’s, and he tries to be chivalrous again and order for her and she quirks an eyebrow at him and orders for him and when the waiter leaves they both break out into laughter because of course they can order for each other, they’ve somehow shared enough meals here even without dating that they each know exactly what the other one likes. Not that that’s hard—he’s not sure he’s ever seen Pam order anything but the spaghetti carbonara and he knows she’s never seen him order anything but the pepperoni and beef calzone, because that’s what he ordered the time they came here on his first day when he thought it was a date and it wasn’t because the girl was engaged.

 

He leans over towards her as they nurse their waters and wait for the food. “Pam.”

 

“Yes?” She’s smiling at him and he almost forgets what he was going to say.

 

“I just wanted to check…you don’t have another fiancé you’re going to mention at the end of this meal and make me discover this wasn’t the date I thought it was, do you?”

 

She chews on the end of the straw in her glass and looks thoughtful. “Hmmmm…now that you mention it…no.” She grins evilly at him, then suddenly her face changes and she looks almost teary. “Wait, are you saying you thought that was…all this time Jim?”

 

“You really didn’t notice?” He smiles sadly at her. “And here I thought I was being incredibly obvious about my crush on my hot new coworker.”

 

She blushes and waves a hand in his direction as if to swat him, but without any heat. “Shut up. You were so not obvious.” She sucks on the straw again and it’s all he can do to not stare. “OK, maybe the first day…but then you…wait, that’s when I told you about Roy?” It’s like she’s replaying a video in her head and discovering new Easter eggs as she goes. “That makes a lot of sense.” She puts a hand out and he covers it with his. “Well, I’m happy to tell you that yes, this is a date. Assuming you want it to be.”

 

“I did ask,” he points out.

 

“And I said yes.” She squeezes his hand, but then they’re interrupted by the arrival of their food (the first time he’s ever been annoyed at getting fast service at Cugino’s) and whatever she was about to say is lost.

 

But not forever. He’s pretty sure he finds out what it was she wanted to say when they roll into Poor Richard’s and Steve greets him at the table with a hug.

 

“Do I know you?” Steve asks as they pull apart. “I seem to remember I had a friend named Jim who looked a little bit like you.”

 

“Yeah, yeah.” He slaps Steve on the back and exchanges nods with Mark, Katy, and Alicia. “Happy birthday, Steve.”

                                                                                                

Pam is lingering next to him and he starts to introduce her, but she interrupts him before he can get past “I think you’ve met,” squeezing past to give Steve a hug of her own.

 

“Jim!” She grins up at Steve. “We’ve missed you at work! Dwight says the catalogs are never as well-organized since you left.”

 

Steve bursts out laughing and it turns out that somehow they’ve never told Katy this story, and they proceed to tell it in turns, him, Steve, and Pam, each chiming in at a key moment to explain what happened, with Mark providing color commentary. He and Pam order drinks and slide in next to Mark, and by the time the conversation turns to other topics he almost forgets he hasn’t actually introduced Pam to anyone else. Alicia solves this for him by leaning over the table at sticking out her hand.

 

“Hey, I’m Alicia. I do theater with Steve. And you are…?”

 

“Pam. I’m Jim’s…” and she trails off, glancing at Jim. He catches her eye and they have one of those nonverbal conversations that he really hopes only takes a moment because otherwise they’re really leaving Alicia hanging before he completes the sentence for her.

 

“Girlfriend. We also work together, as you may have gathered.” He looks at Pam as if to say is that OK? and the wide smile on her face is evidence enough that he said the right thing. He gestures at Alicia. “I helped Alicia with lights on one of their shows, as a thank-you to Steve for taking part in the prank.”

 

“Oh, cool! So, you do lights?” The conversation goes on from there—apparently Pam did some scene painting in college, “because that’s how you get other people to pay for the paint and brushes,” and she and Alicia hit it off, and he just sits back and enjoys the evening.

 

He’d have enjoyed it anyway, because hell, Steve’s a good friend. But hanging out with his friends and his girlfriend? And having that girlfriend be Pam? He doesn’t think it can get better than this.

 

He discovers he’s wrong afterwards, when he drives Pam home and she doesn’t hesitate before inviting him up.

 

The next day they go into the annex and sign some papers in front of a somewhat morose-looking Toby, and it’s official.

 

Pam Beesly is his girlfriend.

 

And that summer, when he goes to see Steve and Katy in Romeo and Juliet (thankfully Michael-free), he doesn’t have to watch her from across the park. They’re sitting on the same blanket, and after they’ve congratulated their friends on a really gory and exciting version of the classic, they don’t end up going to Poor Richard’s with the cast—because they can go home together, and that’s an even better way to end an evening.