Story Notes:
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Spoilers through "Chair Model"
Asking Pam to marry him had been easy. Jim had no fear about spending the rest of his life with Pam. He’d bought her engagement ring a week after they started dating; and Pam’s Michael Scott influenced need to move gave Jim the final kick in the ass he needed to propose.
Now Pam was wearing his ring, and looking at Bridal magazines again. They hadn’t set a date yet, but Jim was damn certain that Pam would not win any Dundies for longest engagement this time around.
The process of moving Pam into Jim’s apartment did not go smoothly. They had underestimated the size of the U-Haul they’d need for all of Pam’s stuff. And then they couldn’t any trailers of an appropriate size without driving for quite awhile- and with gas prices as high as they were, they really couldn’t afford a multi-state trip to pick up a gas guzzling trailer. Jim had started to panic, but Pam whipped out her cell phone and got to work. Eventually, she talked Dwight into letting them borrow a trailer from Schrute Farms, for a reasonable fee (though personally, Jim found the price way too high for something that smelled entirely of beets.).
After several trips and most of the weekend, Pam’s apartment was empty. On Sunday afternoon, she turned in the key. They went back to their apartment, full with the brim with boxes in or on every surface imaginable. They didn’t attempt to unpack anything, and instead ordered in Chinese. They fell asleep on the couch while watching The Simpsons, causing them to be late for work the next morning. Michael made a crude joke about it. It was a normal Monday at Dunder-Mifflin.
The week at work was busy, and they never quite seemed to get around to unpacking any of Pam’s boxes. Not only were most of Pam’s belongings still in cardboard, the stacks of boxes kept Jim from getting into his closet. Thank goodness his apartment had a washer and dryer- with them each only able to locate a couple of outfits, they were washing and wearing over and over again.
Pam had an art class on Saturday morning. After tripping over a box and almost hurting himself (just like Dick Van Dyke tripping over an ottoman); Jim decided to take matters into his own hands. He plugged his I-pod in the speaker setup and went to work.
It wasn’t perfect, but by lunchtime, Jim had made a lot of headway. He could walk around the apartment without risking bodily injury, and he could actually use his dresser and closet. He tried to add a bit of Pam to his space, adding her knick knacks to the shelves, even hanging a few of her pictures on the wall.
He thought Pam would be thrilled.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Jim got a little sidetracked when he opened a box of Pam’s books. These books were like none he’d ever seen Pam read- instead of books by Jane Austen, Meg Cabot, or Oprah’s book club, these books featured identical twins and a Baby-Sitting Club. Sweet Valley High? The Baby-Sitters Club? What in the world were these books? He found himself laughing at the books, at the 1980’s outfits and the outdated dialogue, even reading bits of them to himself and laughing out loud. He was reading about Mary Anne Spier when Pam walked through the door.
“Jim?” Pam said, seeing him sitting on the floor, surrounded by a chunk of her childhood library. “What are you doing?”
“Learning how many kids are in the Pike family? Seriously, Pam, you liked these?”
“I was a kid.” Pam’s face flushed, and she bent down and picked up the books hastily stuffing the books back into the box. “I didn’t ask you to do this, Jim. This is my stuff.”
“We couldn’t go on living in a cardboard jungle. Now we can actually reach the closet.”
Pam looked around the room. “My tea set? And my pictures? You put it all out?”
“Isn’t it great?”
Pam’s mouth was stretched into a tight line. “Not really.”
“If you don’t like where I have stuff, I’ll move it.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“This is nice, Jim, but I thought that decorating the apartment is something that we’d do together.”
“But this way, you didn’t have to do the work. I did all this for you.” He’d really thought that Pam would appreciate all the effort he’d put into the apartment this morning. And here she was, throwing all this back in his face. The frustration and anger he felt crept into Jim’s voice.
“No, you didn’t. There’s hardly anything of me here. We moved to your apartment, Jim, with your bed and your dishes and your stuff, and none of this is me. None of it. And you don’t get it. You just don’t get it.”
Jim didn’t know what to say.
Pam ran off to the bedroom in tears.
He slept on the couch that night. Pam went to visit her mother on Sunday, and he didn’t see her again until Monday, at work.
***
“No offense, Jim, but you really look like crap.” Kelly Kapoor said, sitting down beside him in the break room. “Have you tried any of the bottled Starbucks Frappuccinos? They really aren’t as cold or as good as the ones that they have at the actual Starbucks stores, but they really are pretty good. And Mondays like totally suck, and caffeine is like, the only way I can ever, ever survive a Monday. Kind of like Garfield. But he liked lasagna!”
Jim hadn’t slept well for the last couple of nights. And he was really too tired and too upset about his fight with Pam to deal with Kelly. “Whatever.” He mumbled.
“Is everything okay? You don’t look okay.” She racked her brain to think of what might be bothering Jim. “Did you have a fight with Pam?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Like, duh. So what went wrong?”
“We fought. It started with Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club, and went downhill from there.”
“Oh, I loved those!” Kelly gushed. “I always wanted to have cool clothes like Claudia or Stacey, or be a Unicorn and be like, BFF with Lila Fowler, who is like totally like a million times cooler than any of those girls on Gossip Girl will ever be! And Stacey with her diabetes was oh so sad, and when Mimi died, and when Dawn moved back to California! Those books are totally like, legendary!”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“Well, duh. They were totally girl books. Guys just don’t get them. Not even boy baby sitters like Logan Bruno.” Kelly shrugged. “It’s not like you did anything stupid like make fun of them, right? Those books are a sacred part of any girl’s childhood. Even more so than Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, which my parents totally didn’t want me to read, but I had to know the, “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” chant. I needed it!” Kelly did a little flex of her arms, almost like a chicken dance, as she chanted.
Angela picked that moment to walk into the break room. On hearing Kelly’s cheer, her mouth turned downwards into a frown. “You. Are. Disgusting.”
***
Pam was a little nervous going back to Jim’s apartment- no, their apartment. She’d been living there for a week, but it still didn’t feel like home. Pam spent Sunday having a long talk with her mother about it. Things wouldn’t get better with Jim if she didn’t work for it; and she was willing, if not nervous.
Jim had left work early today. She hadn’t had a chance to say more than a couple of words to him. So Pam steeled her nerves put her key in the lock to the apartment and turned. It almost seemed like walking over burning coals like she had during the beach games would be easier than facing Jim today.
The apartment was filled with boxes, even more boxes than before. The walls were bare, and Jim’s shelves were empty.
“Jim?” Pam called. “Jim, what’s going on?”
He appeared from the bedroom, a small box in his hand. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last couple of days. I was really trying to do something nice by unpacking your stuff, but instead I kind of took away your chance to move into the apartment. You had to give up your apartment and your own space to join me here, and I can only imagine how embarrassing it might have felt to have me laughing and making fun of your books. And I want you to like it here.”
“I will like it here. You’re here. I love you, Jim.”
“And I love you. But this isn’t my home, anymore. This is ours. So in the effort of being fair, I told Michael I was going on a sales call and instead came here and packed up all of my stuff. It’s going to be an incredible mess getting this all figured out and in some of order, but I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather turn my world upside down for.”
Pam closed the space between them and kissed Jim on the lips.
“Me too.”
“And in the spirit of absolute and total fairness, I got you this. He handed her the cardboard box.”
“What’s this?”
“Open it and see.”
Pam pulled the masking tape off of the box and tore it open. She laughed as she pulled out the different items from the box. She pulled out a few R.L. Stine “Goosebumps” books, including “Monster Blood”, which Jim defined as “absolutely essential”, a few Spider-Man comics, a DVD of the 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and a copy of the High School Musical soundtrack .
“It’s the Jim Halpert childhood starter pack.” He explained. “A collector’s item, for sure.”
“It’s wonderful.” Pam laughed. “But High School Musical?”
Jim laughed. “My brother’s kids made me watch it when I was visiting once, and what I can I say? It’s catchy.”
“I think,” Pam said between giggles, “That this totally makes up for the Baby-Sitters Club.”
“And in case that didn’t work,” Jim walked over to a box on the side of the room, and pulled out a bouquet of daisies, with a book stuck in the middle.
“Sweet Valley High”? Pam read the book title aloud. “I didn’t think they wrote these any more?”
“It’s the new, updated version for the new millennium. The same shallowness and ridiculous adventures that we’ve come to adore, with updated references for a world with the Internet and TIVO. They just started publishing them again.”
“You’re something else, Jim Halpert.”
“Yeah, but I’m your something else.”
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