1.
On the second night in her new apartment, Pam takes a long shower. She wraps the towel around her and walks into the bedroom to get her pajamas. As she is bending down over a duffel bag, she sees something black move in the corner of her peripheral vision. It may have been alive, and it might not have, but she's not taking any chances. She quickly puts on clothing and finds the can of Raid that she picked up at the grocery store on a whim while stocking up on the essentials. She goes back into her bedroom with the can, armed and ready to spray the hell out of anything that moves. She creeps towards a stack of boxes in the corner and does a pre-emptive spray to see if she can smoke it out. When the droplets settle, something moves behind the boxes, and she sends a jet of country scented death under a table that is serving as a flat dresser until she gets furniture. The roach (because now she can see that it is a roach the size of her thumb) is still moving, even though she can see that it is shining with a fine coat of roach killer. She squeaks out a couple of panicked noises and then sprays until it stops moving. She scoops up the body with a piece of packing paper and flings it out an open window.
The next night, she is cooking dinner and listening to the radio when she looks up. And screams. A roach crawls across the ceiling in her kitchen, and she drops the spoon with rice on it onto the floor. She finds the can of Raid and runs timidly back into the kitchen. Pam hovers near the counter as far away as possible from the roach, and is about to send a blast of insecticide towards the ceiling when she notices that in addition to the wooden spoon on the floor, the pot of rice is uncovered on her stove, and as much as she would love to get rid of the roach now, she would rather not have to start over with her dinner. She spots the lid and edges along the counter on the other side in order to cover the pot and turn down the burner. As soon as all the food is under wraps, she points the nozzle towards the ceiling and squeals a little bit as the bug falls to the floor and starts to crawl under the stove. She points the stream under the stove, and when the roach crawls out, and she sprays a little more as it stops moving. She leaves it on the floor in the kitchen and grabs a box of cookies as she goes to the living room and sits in a corner. She feels numb, and a little scared, but eating the cookies helps, even if they are stale. When her breathing is normal again, Pam cleans up the Raid residue and throws out the roach body. Since it is nearly 8, her landlord isn't in, so she leaves a message telling him about the infestation. He does not call her back.
It is the fourth night in the apartment, a Friday, and the cable guy finally came. The new TV she bought is smaller than she thought it would be, but now she has 70 channels, and she doesn't have to watch sports again if she doesn't want to. Her parents are coming tomorrow with an old couch, but for now she has piled some old pillows against the other wall in her living room area and sits down for a marathon of "What Not to Wear". They are about to do her favorite part of the show - where the participants show off three of their new outfits to the hosts - when she sees something out of the corner of her eye. She jumps up, deciding not to take any chances and sees that there is ANOTHER ROACH. Pam finds the Raid and sprays gingerly because the thing is still on one of her pillows, and even though she went out and bought a new can (Spring Fresh!), she isn't thrilled about having her skin next to that much insecticide. Luckily, the roach crawls onto the carpet where she sprays it thoroughly and then throws a heavy shoe on it for good measure. When she finishes killing it, Pam calls her mother and hyperventilates on the phone about how she never had to deal with roaches or any kind of bug in her old place, and how she hates them, and why are they in her apartment because she just moved in, and she's not a dirty person. Her mother assures Pam that her father will kill anything that moves, and that if she wants, they can fumigate the apartment. Pam isn't sure her mother believes her, but she is glad for the sympathy nonetheless.
It is Sunday morning before Pam sees another one. She was afraid that none would show up while her parents were here and that they wouldn't believe what had happened. This one is moving slower, which she chalks that up to the fogging that her dad had done early on Saturday that had forced her to re-pack all her stuff, and had driven the three of them out of the house for four hours. They had used that time to browse at Target, where her parents bought her some basic flatware (she had left most of it with Roy), and new sheets. When they show up for breakfast after checking out of their hotel, she triumphantly shows her father the small body of the dead roach that she had hit with a rolled up newspaper. He gives her a hug and tells her that he's proud of her for being able to do that.
On Monday, her landlord sends an exterminator, and Pam never sees another roach.
2.
Pam has just poured herself a glass of wine when there's a knock at the door. She looks through the peephole and sees a good looking young man standing nervously at the door. She's nervous - when she moved into the place by herself, her father told her not to open the door to strange men. But this guy looks nice; what could possibly go wrong?
Their conversation starts out harmlessly enough. The guy says his name is Derek and that he's doing this competition thing for his community college - that he was in the marines in Iraq, and just shipped back a month ago, and now he's in school. Whoever gets the most subscriptions for magazines wins some fabulous prize, and Pam begins to think about it. When he mentions his hometown, she is surprised, because that's where she's from too, and so they chat vaguely about school, and growing up there. The guy seems cuter by the minute, and even though she's just wearing old sweats, Pam thinks he might be flirting with her.
And then he asks if she wants to buy a subscription to help him with this competition. She asks if "Real Simple" is on the list of magazines available, and it is, and then she hears the price. It's about 3 times what you would pay using the cards from the magazines that she buys on occasion to cheer herself up, and she hems for a moment because really...can she justify that kind of expense when all it would be is another five minutes talking with a guy who may or may not be interested in her as well? She decides no, and in her politest receptionist voice, tells him so.
And then, he starts to yell. Something about "Twenty fucking minutes wasted and you don't even buy a fucking magazine!" Pam quickly closes her door and locks it tightly. She can still hear him outside as she puts her back to the wall near her door. She looks through the peephole and sees that he has gone to give the same spiel to one of her neighbors, and if she were brave, she might tell them not to open the door. But the fact is that, now, she is a little afraid, and she misses having Roy around, because Roy was big and would have beaten that guy to a pulp for the things he said to Pam. She notices the can of Raid sitting on the counter and considers retaliation. Instead, so goes and finds her glass of wine, takes two long sips, and huddles on floor behind her couch.
3.
It's not a big deal, really. It's midnight and it's raining, and Pam is in bed trying to fall asleep. But the branches of the tree outside her window keep scratching on the glass, and occasionally there is a crack of lightening, or the low rumble of thunder, and Pam knows she shouldn't be scared, but she is. Her new bed feels really big, and there is no one there to hold her close, or distract her from the noise. No one is there, so she turns on the lamp next to her bed and grabs a book. It's a fluffy chick-lit book that Phyllis lent her - the writing isn't very good, the plot is predictable, and Pam isn't even sure she likes the main character a whole lot. But she can't put it down. It also does not help that she jumps out of her skin every time the lightening strikes. These were the times that Roy used to hold her closer and laugh at her under his breath. She was Pam, who could watch 3 horror movies in a single evening, and then fall asleep the moment her head hits the pillow. It has been her only weakness and fear in her life, and it's difficult to lie in bed alone and scared for the first time since college.
Finally, the storm dies away, and Pam looks at her alarm clock. It is 3:30 in the morning, and she has to work the next day. Pam considers calling in sick the next so she can sleep, but she remembers that she already used up nearly all her time for the year, so what happens if and when she gets sick for real? Plus, sleeping late would just mess up her REM cycle, and she's not excited about staying up way too late tomorrow night. She decides to suck it up and just wake up at the regular time.
The next morning, Pam is groggy and when Michael begins to make inappropriate comments, she doesn't even have enough energy to dismiss him like she normally does. But she does thank Phyllis during their lunch hour for lending her the book.
4.
Pam is not exactly sure why she decided to bake in the August heat. She had bought bananas at the grocery store a few weeks ago and didn't eat them right away. When they started to go brown, she decided that baking banana bread was in order, so she tucked them in the freezer. When she finally pulled all the ingredients out on this bright Sunday morning, she was excited. Roy had never wanted her to make anything "girly," (that is, anything with fruit in it). Roy liked his cakes, muffins, pancakes and biscuits to come from boxed mixes, so Pam had never really gotten the chance to try baking from scratch. And this week she had mentioned the plan to make banana bread to her mother - who kept going on about how proud she was of "her little girl for being brave enough to make a go of it on her own." As soon as her mom heard about the baking plan, she wanted to send her favorite recipe to Pam. Unfortunately, her didn't use email that often, so Pam had to talk her through it on the phone during work, which was a little awkward when Michael came over and started showboating for the camera. But eventually Pam got the recipe, and today she was going to put it to use.
The first problem came when her oven took forever to heat up to the correct temperature. A few weeks ago, she had thought that there was some sort of pop and small flame that quickly disappeared from the heating coils at the bottom of the oven. So it took about 45 minutes to get the oven to 350 degrees, which seemed a little extreme. And then was the biggest mistake. Pam filled the loaf pan, and 10 minutes after she put it in the oven, figured out that she had over-filled it. She figured this out because smoke started to issue from the oven, and when she opened the door to look inside, giant globs of batter were spilling over the edges of the pan onto the racks, dripping on to the heating coils. Pam thought about scooping out the burned remnants, but the oven was still hot, and she thought that maybe she should just let it bake, and no more batter would spill out. She was wrong. More fell on to the coils, and this time when they did, they caught fire. And then the smoke detector went off. Pam was running back and forth, waving a dish rag to clear the air around the smoke detector, digging a fan out of her storage closet and setting it up near the opened window so it could circulate the air, and hovering near the oven watching batter spill out and creating more small fires that would flame and die out in turns. She called her mother twice and cried three times, wishing that there was someone else there to help her.
Things calmed down when she finally turned the heat off like her mother had told her and took the half-cooked loaf of bread out of the oven. What really made her sad as she scraped charred batter out of the bottom of the oven was that she actually really wanted to eat the banana bread. And now she was out of all the ingredients she had bought and didn't have breakfast for the next week like she had planned. She thought about trying to bake the batter that was still not burned, but she knew it only would be more trouble. She wasn't even hungry when she went to bed early that evening.
5.
The first time she sat around in her underwear in her apartment was an accident. She had gotten a really good idea for a sketch while she was in the shower and decided that she couldn't bother putting on more clothes before committing the idea to paper. The next few times were similar, but she found herself going for longer and longer before putting on her clothes. Maybe it was mostly because it was summer and it was hot, and maybe it was because it was comfortable. Part of it may have even been that she felt a little dirty walking around in her underwear. But this was really the first time she had ever been able to do this. Not when she lived with her parents, and not in the dorm room for those few years. Any time that she wore anything less than pajamas around Roy, he had assumed she was trying to initiate something. And sometimes that was what she was doing, but there were a few times when that had not been her intention and she ended up having sex with him just because it would make him feel good.
But now - this was freeing. She didn't think she was quite ready to walk around completely naked yet, but even just wearing her panties and a pretty bra was beginning to feel normal and comfortable. And it made her feel happy in a completely silly way. And really - that was what was important, right?
Story Notes:
aka Five Things Pam Learns When She Moves in to Her New Apartment
Author's Chapter Notes:
I don't own the characters or anything. Well, I do own <i>some</i> things, but anything about the intellectual property related to The Office is not mine.
Chapter End Notes:
many thanks to my rocking betas: min, who encourages my writing, and jon who encourages my addiction to this awesome show.
Darastar is the author of 2 other stories.
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