Five o’clock, and Pam’s finally heading out to the parking lot from an afternoon of stapling and addressing envelopes for the company’s annual mailing campaign. There’s watermelon rinds on Stanley’s car and half of the trampoline poles have been taken apart, but nobody seems to be working on cleaning up the mess of the day. She can even see the pink peaks of the bouncy castle just beyond the hedge.

The megaphone is lying on the ground just beside her car, and she thinks briefly about picking it up but decides not to. There’s an Ugly Betty marathon starting soon, and she wants to make a stop at Taco Bell before going home. Her car seems darker in the overcast sky, the scuff mark from two weeks ago resting just under the driver door handle. Her keys are at the bottom of her purse.

Then she hears it, just barely, in between the noises of cars passing on the street. Murmurs and whispers, maybe a bit of a giggle, just beyond the hedge. Dwight and Angela? Pam turns and smiles a bit, tucks her purse back under her arm and tiptoes over to the hedge. She clings to the side of the castle as she slowly makes her way to the back; the inflated polyester feels a bit like snake skin under her fingertips. It’s got to be Dwight and Angela – a bit of a thrill – car wreck sensations and the like, see – and then she gently peeks over the edge of the castle, and feels her stomach drop as her eyes widen.

Karen and Jim. Jim’s standing with his back to the castle wall, hands stuffed in his pockets. Karen’s standing in front of him, biting her lip and holding her purse nervously in her hands.

“I’m sorry if that upsets you,” Karen says, and Pam stands as still as she can.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Jim answers. “You should probably get to know them better, though, since you’re, uh,” he coughs. “Since you’re gonna be staying here for a while.”

“You want me to?”

Pam’s breath catches in her throat when she sees the way Jim looks at Karen, the same look he gave her almost a year ago in another time, another place – what feels like a whole other world.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I do.”

Karen reaches forward on her tiptoes and catches Jim in a kiss, one hand on his chest and one on his cheek, and Pam can feel the world tilting beneath her feet. Something in her chest splinters and cracks, and the pieces fall somewhere in the pit of her stomach.

Her purse slips from her shoulder and falls to the floor with a gentle thud. The noise startles them, and Karen breaks off of Jim with a jolt. They look at her at the same time, eyes open, one pair daring and one pair scared.

Pam turns just as the sky spins and turns orange for her, runs blindly back along the castle wall and falls, catches herself on the edge of the door. She can hear footsteps – maybe her name, somewhere – and she panics, climbs into the inflatable castle, and closes the blue tarp door, securing it with Velcro straps. Her world is pink and bouncy and cushiony, and the wall gives a little bit under her weight when she crawls into a corner and draws up her knees.

“Pam!” Jim’s voice is faint. “Pam?”

Karen’s voice is fainter, less desperate, an indistinguishable mumble. Pam presses her forehead into her knees and swallows the cracked glass in her throat.

She nearly screams when something presses up against the back of her head from the other side of the thin polyester wall. She can’t help but flail a little bit, and she knows that she’s caught.

“Pam,” Jim says in a low rumble, the same kind of voice that plays in her head when she’s lying awake at night, staring at her ceiling. “I, uh…”

Pam can’t breathe, and she knows it’s nearly impossible through the walls, but she could swear that she can feel his heat on the back of her head.

“You forgot your purse,” Jim says quietly, and the wall gives back in as he steps away. Karen mumbles something again, and the voices grow fainter as they walk away.

Pam sits there in the corner for a while; five more minutes is her best guess. Then she opens up the Velcro-tarp door and crawls back out, straightens her skirt and lifts her purse back onto her shoulder from where it’s been placed right at the door. A quick check, left and right, for the camera crew, and then she walks back to her car and sits in the front seat for a while. Checks her mascara in the rearview mirror and pulls the car into gear, drives out of the parking lot and goes straight home, and it’s only during the opening credits of Ugly Betty as the mixed faces flash across the screen that she realizes that she’s forgotten to go to Taco Bell.

“Fuck,” she whispers, crumpling the newspaper on her couch and throwing it at the TV screen. “Fuck.”