Pam spent the next seven days—the next week, she would have said, if only time went forward like it usually did—perfecting the order of events as best she could. She figured out the perfect phrasing to use to get Brenda and Toby to miss the cruise; the right nudge to get Ryan to admit he was attracted to Kelly and the right admonition to help Kelly realize that she was being overaggressive with Ryan; the right way to tell Jim what was going on. She was gratified to find that no matter how she did it, his acceptance was instantaneous. She told him she was repeating the same day; he believed it. There were none of the arguments, the accusations, the speculations as to her mental health that she knew would have accompanied telling Roy—had she ever had any inclination to tell Roy. Strangely—or, given her revelations during this whole period, not so strangely—she had never felt any such pull, not even the first night when she woke up and found the same clothes laid out for her. Occasionally she told Larissa—who now accompanied them every time—and as she started to find the right places to bond with Jim’s sister she also became more and more aware that she wanted, desperately wanted, to be part of that family. She had already known how she felt about Jim, but she hadn’t been quite as prepared for the warm feeling that washed over her watching the two of them tease each other, or making a joke at Jim’s expense and seeing Larissa crack up. She felt as she never had with her own family: free, funny, open. Oh, she loved her mother and her father and her sister—Penny was awesome, especially—but the Beesly clan was a much more reserved group when they were together, doubly so if there was anyone else present. These Halperts seemed to revel in the chance to make fun of each other, and Pam couldn’t get enough of it.
She also practiced ways of getting rid of Roy: tasking Darryl with him, convincing Michael to put together an arm-wrestling competition as a “team-building exercise,” getting Captain Jack to give him (instead of Dwight) the wheel. But she was well aware that this was just busywork; the real hard labor of actually breaking up with him for good, not just avoiding him, was yet to be done. If she hadn’t realized that for herself, the simple fact that she kept waking up in his bed every morning would have done so on its own.
But she didn’t know what to do about that, so she busied herself with other tasks. She bought every remaining item in Dwight’s previous possession out of the vending machine, first one by one and then all at once. In the latter case, she went to the extraordinary length of commandeering (with Jim’s enthusiastic help) a spare folding table from the annex and setting it up as a mockery of Dwight’s desk, complete with a used computer monitor and keyboard that had once been Phyllis’s until Toby had accidentally knocked them off her desk and broken them when Michael startled him by yelling at him. Pam thought privately that the only reason Phyllis had gotten replacements at all was that Michael was able to yell at Toby more for having broken them and then charge the costs to Corporate via HR. That had been years ago, when Toby was first going through his divorce and still reacted to Michael’s taunts, of course—now the same yelling would only have received a bored “Michael, are you through yet?” But this being Dunder Mifflin, they’d sat in the supply closet the whole time, and now she and Jim hauled them out and she pretended to be Dwight for an afternoon.
“Identity theft is not a joke, Pam,” he warned. “Millions of families suffer every year!”
“MICHAEL!” she yelled.
“Oh, that’s funny. MICHAEL!” he counter-yelled.
“What?” Michael stuck his head out of his office. “Pam? Dwight? Is this one of those sexual harassment things? Because I have Orporate-Cay in the office-may so keep it down.” Brenda’s head stuck out from behind him and he awkwardly moved to try to block her view.
“No. Michael, Pam is stealing my identity.” Dwight looked self-righteous, a look he had clearly practiced in the mirror, Pam thought.
“Pam. Pam Pam Pam. Pamalamalam. Is this true?” Michael sauntered over to stand in front of Pam’s new desk space. “Jim, is…where’s Jim?” Michael being Michael, he had turned as if Pam’s desk were where Dwight’s was, which left him looking at the exit doors to the hallway since Pam’s desk was not, in point of fact, Dwight’s, despite the presence of pencil cup, bobbleheads, pictures, stapler, &c.
“Behind you, Big Mike.” Jim raised his hand.
“Yes, yes, well, Jim, that’s not the point.”
“What is the point, then, Michael?” Jim looked perplexed, as if he had no idea what was going on.
“The point is…is…is…” Michael flailed.
“Pam is stealing my identity, Michael, and thus interfering with the smooth running of the office,” Dwight said in the tone of a man used to repeating himself to get his way.
“Right. Jim, is Pam stealing Dwight’s identity?”
Jim cocked an eyebrow. “Why would she do that?”
“That’s a good point. A good point.” Michael turned, once again getting confused between the desks, then decisively pointed at Pam. “Why would you do that? You’re much hotter than Dwi…that is to say, you’re both valued employees.” He gave a nod at Brenda that he seemed to think meant something like I am not guilty of any kind of sexual discrimination at all, although Pam suspected Brenda was reading it as something more like I am a first-class dimwit.
“I’m not doing anything of the kind, Michael,” Pam answered with her hands crossed demurely in her lap and her eyes lowered, a posture she’d often found useful in deflecting Michael’s confused ire.
“Then what are you doing?” Michael seemed genuinely confused.
“Yeah, Pam, what are you doing?” Dwight sneered.
“Well, you know…” Pam batted her eyelashes at Dwight and Michael, then winked at Jim and, behind him, Brenda. “Dwight’s just so organized and efficient, so I thought if I modeled my desk on his my work would get done faster.” She dropped her eyes to her desk. “I think it was working until he started accusing me of identity theft.”
Michael turned on Dwight, only to find himself once again confused by the desks and staring at Jim. He blinked for a moment then continued his motion to face Dwight, making about a 270 degree turn instead of the 90 degrees he’d intended. “What do you have to say for yourself, Dwight?”
“Yeah,” Jim chimed in. “It seems to me that Dwight is interfering with the smooth running of the office.” He smirked as Dwight’s face started to turn purple.
“I…I…” Dwight struggled between his innate desire to be correct, his urge to defer to Michael, and the ego that told him to accept Pam’s compliment. The latter two won out, though the victory was not easily obtained. “I apologize, Pamela. You were doing what you thought best by modeling yourself after the superior salesman in the office.” He sniffed at Jim. “I commend your good sense.”
“Thank you, Dwight.” Pam knew when to let a prank go.
But knowing when to let a prank go did not mean passing up the opportunity for a second prank, and she spent several of the days in the pseudo-week perfecting her future-Dwight plans. Among the possessions of Dwight’s that were in the machine, stuffed in the bottom left of the vending machine, were copies of his own personal stationary (bought, as she had expected, with the 20% discount for Dunder Mifflin employees on individually watermarked and decorated stock). There were more in his desk, according to Jim, and they used the time in while Dwight was focused on what else she had bought to steal those. That way, when Dwight noticed the first fax come in from his “future self” and ran to make sure they hadn’t bought the copies in the vending machine, they hadn’t—which only confirmed his belief in the reality of the fax.
She and Jim spent several cycles (though of course, he only knew of one at a time) planning the perfect message, which she insisted, for reasons he could not decipher but never questioned, include the idea that he should definitively take a break from steering vehicles tonight and check your accounts. She didn’t know any other way to get Dwight to pay proper attention to Angela without giving away that she knew about their relationship, but she also avoided telling Jim they were together—after all, she thought, her escape was probably going to happen by making everything as it ought to be, not by making fun of Dwight as much as possible. That didn’t mean these were the only letters they sent: someone poisons the coffee was a favorite, as was don’t trust anyone wearing green and, in a stroke of genius, Jim Halpert is the only one who can save us. That last message led to Dwight following Jim around like a puppydog, to Pam’s poorly concealed delight.
Every night, she checked the effect of the letters on Dwight’s behavior towards Angela on the cruise, and she slowly crafted them to make them both appear as happy as they were capable of appearing. When Angela started sniping at her and Jim and Larissa one evening for being “too loud and obnoxiously cheerful,” she was sure she had accomplished her goal. It had been suspicious, not that she’d really noticed it the first time, that Angela hadn’t been more put out by an office cruise, much less a boozy one. Now Pam knew that it was concern over Dwight that had made her too focused on her own discontent to take shots at other people. As soon as Angela turned up nasty again, Pam was satisfied that her goal was met. After all, she only wanted Angela happy enough; too much Angela might make everyone else’s experience worse. It certainly did hers.
Now she just had to deal with the single biggest issue, the one she’d been putting off and dreading: how to get a breakup with Roy that would actually stick. If she could just ghost him, by now, she thought she would. But waking up in bed with him every morning no matter what she did, not to mention sharing a car and working together and going to the same office camaraderie event, made that impossible. She’d just have to find a way—the earlier, she thought, the better, because honestly? She had shit to do during this day, and Roy did not fit in.
