Pam blushed and stuttered. What do I say to that? What has Jim told her? Oh my god, how much has Jim told her? “Um…so, I…” Did her tell her about Casino Night? He obviously told her I was getting married. Did he…did he say how he felt when I said “I can’t?” “I was supposed to be getting married today.” Where did that come from? Why is that what I started with? Stupid, stupid. “And, well, I didn’t.” Obviously. You already told her this. Come on, Beesly, suck it up. “And..”

Larissa took pity on her, or at least it seemed like it to Pam. She poked her in the forearm and said “Hey, Pam? I know you didn’t. You’re here, right now, because you didn’t. But I didn’t ask you about Pam and Roy. I didn’t even ask you about Pam and Jim, even though you’re sitting here with me and him. I asked about Pam Beesly. I wanna hear about her.”

Pam’s mind reeled at a question she had been tiptoeing around for the past month. Who am I? Who am I when I’m not tied up in these relationships, these Pam-ands? I like who I am with Jim. I didn’t like who I am with Roy. But who am I when I’m just…me? She glanced sharply up at Larissa, who was looking at her with a tentative smile on her face, and suddenly felt mischievous—a feeling she hadn’t really had since about 2 seconds before the man now next to her in the hospital bed had said “I’m in love with you.” She met Larissa’s smile with one of her own. “Only if you tell me about Larissa Halpert.”

“Deal.”

“Okay then.”

“I asked first.”

“Fair enough.” Pam smiled again, wondering what she was going to say. “I…you know what, this is going to sound weird, but I’m not doing this.”

Larissa looked shocked. “But we had a deal!”

Pam nodded. “We did. And I’m going to keep my end of it. But I just…can’t” she winced at the word “in the first person. So, um, this is going to sound weird, but…I’ll tell you about Pam Beesly, but I won’t tell you about me. Does that make sense? Like, it’s me, I’m the only Pam Beesly I know other than my great-aunt on my dad’s side who I’m named after, and she’s been dead for like twenty years—lovely lady, I think you guys would have liked her—but I’m going to tell you about it like it’s not me. Okay?”

Larissa grinned. “If it gets you talking, I’m all for it. So tell me about this mythical Pam Beesly. I can’t wait.”

Pam gave Jim’s hand a squeeze to steady herself—and can you believe I’m here, with him and his sister—his really cool sister who wants to hear about me, just me—right now?—and began.

“So, this Pam Beesly. She’s an artist. Like, not a great one, not Picasso or Dalí or Monet, but an artist. She sees the world around her in colors and shapes: blue,” she indicated Larissa’s necklace, a lapis lazuli pendant, “brown,” she pointed at the cabinets behind her, “white,” she gestured at the walls, “thin,” she touched the IV pole, “boxy,” she pointed at the TV in the room, “round,” she indicated the pendant again. “Only she sees it in a lot more detail than I just gave—for instance, she knows that that” pointing at the TV again “is about 15x20 black rectangle, but that she’d need to shade the bottom corner with white because of the glare coming through the door, and that a really careful job would involve a little bit of brown and a little bit of green and a little bit of blue for our reflections just above that. She sees the world that way, most of the time, except when there are people involved. They…pop. Like, you, you’re wearing a green Marywood shirt and blue jeans, but you radiate, like, yellow and orange. And Jim…Jim’s all grey and white right now,” she paused, but pushed through the tears that threatened to fall “but she always sees him in earth tones. Calming greens and browns.” She went on rapidly. “She’s not just an artist, though, even though that’s how she thinks most of the time. She’s…reactive. She soaks up the energy she feels around her and she returns it back. So when she’s around people who tear her down it takes her really far down.” She was crying now. “But when she’s with people who build her up…it’s like she could fly. And when she’s alone she just sits and thinks…and it can be hard sometimes, but she really needs it.”

She didn’t look up to meet Larissa’s eyes as she ran out of gas. She wasn’t sure exactly where that all had come from. She was really sure she needed to say all of that—needed to think all of that—but she wasn’t sure how to react now that she had. She felt like…was it a cow that had multiple stomachs and had to move food around from one to the other? Because she’d just vomited up a lot of emotions and thoughts and self-analysis and now she needed to chew it over and redigest it all. Yeah, a cow—and this self-evaluation was her…cud? She probably needed to stop thinking in biological metaphors, because this one was getting really icky and sort of sliding away from her, but she definitely needed to say all of that and think it through. Because she still was that kind of artist—she really did see things that way—but she hadn’t let herself be it for years now, because whenever she’d stop and stare at a particularly weird shape or a fascinating color she’d hear Roy’s voice—whether literal or just in her head—saying “C’mon, Pammy, you’ll make us late.” So she’d pushed that part of her down outside of the office, where she’d had the luxury of studying the weird colors of Dwight’s shirt, or the strange angles of Michael’s face…or the shape of Jim’s eyebrows as they played a prank. It was so good to realize that she could be that Pam again, the one who saw beauty in the everyday and itched to get it down on paper. She wondered if she could find some of those art supplies her mom had given her for Christmas—she was pretty sure she’d grabbed those when she was moving out, but she wasn’t exactly sure which box they were in.

Larissa’s voice broke her out of her own head. “Wow. Um. Thank you, Pam, for sharing with the class.” It was pitched as a joke but Pam could hear the notes of sincerity underneath, just like she always could with Jim. “I’m not sure how to follow that, honestly. How about I go get you something from the vending machine, and then I’ll tell you as much as I can about Larissa Halpert. Though I think I might just have to keep calling her ‘me.’” Pam looked up and saw her wink. “I think there’s a Wegmans machine out front, and I’m pretty sure I saw yogurt in it. You like that, right?” Pam mumbled something affirmative, and she was gone.

All Pam could think was seriously? How much did Jim tell her about me?

She smiled. There were worse things in the world than to discover Jim had been talking about her to his sister. Like finding out he was in the hospital. The smile faded. She tightened her fingers around his, realizing she hadn’t let him go the whole time she was talking.