Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. She waited for it to blare, slapped the snooze button before Roy could complain, and got up to turn the alarm off properly. Her morning routine was a constant, and almost automatic.

Today, however, was not a constant day. Today, she was Roy’s fiancée! Well, of course, she’d been that yesterday, and the day before, and for three long years. She thought about the way she’d complained about that yesterday to Katy and blushed. It wasn’t like the first time didn’t count. It was just that the last three years she’d gotten worn down from the initial excitement, and it had become routine. Now, she had a date. They were getting married on June 10. Sure, she hadn’t actually had any input into the date, but she’d gladly forgo a prolonged negotiation about dates for an actual wedding. June was far enough away, right? She thought back to Jim’s abortive toast—“a whirlwind courtship” indeed—and smiled. June was perfect. It was enough time to plan the actual wedding without pretending they needed a lot more time to get used to the idea of getting married. After all, they’d been engaged for three years. Five months was just right.

She swung her legs out and started her morning routine humming softly to herself. Very softly, because she was well aware that Roy had had a few too many drinks last night, and he positively hated noise in the morning when he was hungover.

Actually, it was kind of odd that he hadn’t woken up screaming with the alarm. Well, thank heaven for small mercies.

She puttered about after the shower (today was a not-wash-hair day, since she’d washed it yesterday—though there must have been something in the air on Lake Wallenpaupack that was bad for hair, because it didn’t feel like it usually did on a not-wash day) and then stopped short when she looked at the clothes she’d set out on the dresser last night.

Soft gray sweater. Light purple striped button-down shirt. Black slacks.

All in all, not an unusual ensemble for her, especially in the winter, when she was definitely going with pants and not a skirt given the likelihood (in Scranton, call that a certainty) of cold weather. She’d been glad to have pants on last night on the booze cruise, for instance. But that was exactly the problem. Sure, she had more than one pair of black slacks, since they were a basic staple (she could hear Kelly’s voice in the back of her head: “Ohmigod, Pam, you can’t wear the same black pants to everything. You need a wardrobe upgrade, girl!”). And she even had more than one gray sweater, though this one was definitely the softest of her three, the one she’d had the longest and refused to give up even as it got a little threadbare because it just felt like being hugged by her little sister when she wore it. But she definitely had only one purple striped button-down. And she would have sworn she wore it yesterday. Along, in fact, with that exact gray sweater and one of her interchangeable pairs of black pants.

She glanced at the clock. She did not have time for this. Maybe she was misremembering, maybe she’d forgotten another purple shirt (unlikely), maybe in her slightly tipsy, super-excited mood last night she’d somehow forgotten to put out new clothes and put the old ones in the hamper. But the shirt wasn’t wrinkled. The sweater looked fresh. The pants were still creased. So they didn’t look like yesterday’s clothing would have, especially after a night like last night. On the other hand, Kelly would definitely, 100%, both notice and have a conniption fit if she saw Pam in the same clothes on two days in a row. On the other hand...there was no other hand, since she only had two, but she really didn’t have the time. Not if they were going to get into work anything like on time, and...oh god, she could not be late to work today of all days. Not because she was so excited about work, but because everyone knew that yesterday Roy had set a date. And if they were late, everyone would assume it was because they were, ahem, celebrating. Not because she’d had to frantically find new clothes and Roy still hadn’t woken up. She blushed all over. She was not going to walk into work and have Angela and Dwight look at her that way. No. She’d deal with Kelly, but she was not going to make herself any later than she had to be because of Roy.

She dressed hurriedly and went about the rest of her morning routine, still smiling but not humming anymore. She heard Roy get up and shower, and wondered idly why there were two bags sitting by the door, but she didn’t really have time to ponder it because there he came, full speed ahead out of the shower just like yesterday, grabbed his breakfast from her, and scarfed it down. Then he scooped up the bags—apparently one was for her, though she didn’t remember either of them packing it last night—and slid into the front seat of the truck. They were running a little later than yesterday because he’d eaten his breakfast, but not too horribly so, she thought. They made it into the office park, he tossed her a “Love ya, Pammy” over his shoulder, and then he disappeared into the warehouse.

She trudged up the stairs—the elevator was at the top, she saw, so it would take longer to wait for it to make a roundtrip than just to climb—and wondered where the excitement of last night had gone. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk about plans for June 10 or anything. God, she hadn’t even called her mother to tell her. But she didn’t have time for that now, of course. She had to get into the office before people started winking and nudging her about something that hadn’t even happened.

She pushed open the door to the office and breathed out a sigh of relief. Dwight wasn’t at his desk, just as he hadn’t been yesterday, and so once again she’d (perhaps) made it through a late entrance without his derision. She slipped the bag—she still wasn’t sure what was in it, but Roy had thrust it into her hands and she’d taken it instinctively—behind her desk and frowned. Jim wasn’t at his desk either. In fact, no one was at their desks. Where was everyone?

She looked around and noticed that there was a commotion of some kind going on in the break room. The door opened a crack as Phyllis slipped out towards the bathroom and she heard shouting. Approaching the door she saw Jim holding a bag of some kind and Dwight yelling at him as the rest of their coworkers looked on.

What was going on? Had Jim pulled the same prank twice in a row? She glanced over at Dwight’s desk and noticed what she had failed to before: it wasn’t just Dwight who wasn’t at the desk, none of his things were there. She turned further and looked at her own desk, fearing what she would see. Just as she thought: the pencil cup she’d bought yesterday and ostentatiously placed on the top of her desk wasn’t there.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she thought. “I knew Dwight would grab it back as soon as my back was turned.” But of course, it wasn’t on Dwight’s desk either.

She slipped into the break room to the sound of shouting.

“I don’t need your charity, Jim,” Dwight sneered. “I’m a sheriff’s deputy. I can have officers here like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They’ll be happy to arrest you for theft, burglary, and petty larceny.”

Jim cocked an eyebrow. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dwight,” he said, raising his arms as if to calm a wild animal. “No one here thinks your possessions are petty.” Pam felt herself grin. Of course this was how Jim would deal with the situation. Jim continued on as she thought. “But aren’t you a volunteer deputy? I’m not sure that means you can call in an emergency.”

“I’ll have you know I have a genuine Lackawanna County sheriff’s radio.” Dwight preened. “I bought it from the sheriff’s department surplus sale last month.” Pam—and, more surprisingly, Jim—refrained from pointing out that if he had to buy it from a sale they probably didn’t want him using it to interfere with official business. Pam did, however, notice that Dwight was pushing himself up against Jim’s chest, a sure sign that his anger was going to boil over. She slipped behind him into the space he’d vacated and stood in front of the machine. She didn’t know why Jim had decided to do the same prank twice, but bedamned if she wasn’t going to play along like last time.

“I don’t know, Dwight.” Both Dwight and Jim turned at her voice. “Are you sure you have one?” Dwight drew in a shaky breath, preparing to turn his rage on her as she fed a dollar into the slot and pressed the K and 7 buttons. Thunk. “Because I think I do.” She picked up the radio from the bottom slot of the vending machine. “But you can borrow it if you like, if you want to come out to my desk.” She turned and made her way serenely out of the break room while Dwight sputtered behind her. As she got to her desk and settled the radio next to her mousepad, she could see Dwight grab the bag of nickels from Jim and start angrily pumping them into the machine to recover his remaining items while the rest of the office dispersed to their various desks. “Mischief managed,” she thought.

After a little while Jim strolled up to her desk and grabbed a jellybean, as was his wont. She glanced up and shook her head playfully at him. “Really, Jim? Double-dipping?”

He looked up surprised. “I’ve only had one!”

She shook her head again. “Not the candy, the prank. Didn’t you get your fill of that yesterday?” She frowned. “Actually, I thought Steve only came once a week. How did you get him to make a special trip?”

He looked at her strangely and spun the jellybean in his long, agile fingers. “What are you talking about?”

She made a face. “Come on, Jim. We did this yesterday. I bought Dwight’s pencil cup. Why again today? It’s not like you to be so unoriginal.”

He popped the jellybean into his mouth and chewed it deliberately, then shocked her by reaching across the desk to feel her forehead. She felt a bolt of electricity shoot down into her spine from her forehead. Where was this coming from? She pulled away from his hand. “What are you doing?”

He shook his head absently. “No fever.” He moved his hand over towards her mousepad, leaning across her desk. She barely noticed how he was invading her personal space, because she was distracted by looking at him. She liked the way his shoulders moved in the fabric of his shirt, which pulled taught across his back as he leaned. He tapped the radio. “You bought a radio, not a pencil cup.” He leaned back and she felt oddly bereft of his presence—which was strange, because he never leaned that far across her desk, so she shouldn’t have felt his absence. “And I didn’t do this yesterday. Just today.” He grabbed another jellybean and fiddled with it, thinking. She stared up at him. What was going on? He tapped the bean on the desk. “You feeling OK?”

“I could ask you the same question.” She put her face between her hands and leaned forward to him while whispering. “Are you running a double prank? Trying to convince Dwight he’s caught in some kind of loop? That today is just a rerun of yesterday?”

He ate the jellybean and she found herself distracted by the movement of his throat as he swallowed. “No, but thanks for the idea, Beesly.” He grinned down at her. “I just did this the once. Admit it, you were just so stoked for this prank that you dreamed about it last night.” He winked. “It’s OK, I dream about pranking Dwight too.”

“I...” She stopped. Had she just dreamed about the prank last night? Had it all been a dream? That would explain why she was wearing the clothes she’d planned to wear yesterday—and why Kelly hadn’t stopped by to ask her why she was an outfit repeater. It would also explain the bags by the door. But...it had felt so real. Oh god, was there no date? Had she dreamt that as well? She pushed back from the desk. “I have to go. Sorry.” She fled for the ladies’ room, leaving a confused-looking Jim behind her.

In the bathroom, she sat in a stall, wondering what had happened to her. Had she really hallucinated last night? Was it all wishful thinking? Did Roy not actually want to marry her at all? She took calming breaths and reminded herself that if she stayed in here too long Kelly would come in and look for her. Or worse, Angela, probably because Dwight would be sending her mental messages that Pam had overstayed her allotted bathroom break time. Or oh God Dwight himself. Anything but that.

So, she had to pull herself together, quickly, and tell if she was hallucinating or if everyone else was. She trusted Jim. He might still be putting her up to some kind of galactic megaprank on Dwight, but barring that she didn’t think he’d actually prank her herself, and that meant there was something off between her and the rest of the world. If she and Jim didn’t see eye to eye, something was wrong. So, was it wrong with her, or them?

She outlined in her head the major things that she remembered happening yesterday, besides the prank (which, to be fair, she’d known about in advance), and that. Michael’s stupid announcement of the booze cruise with Brenda from corporate, whom she’d never met before and so had no reason to make up. The actual cruise itself, with the weirdness that was Captain Jack. And Katy being on the booze cruise with them, along with the incredible awkwardness of discovering she had been a cheerleader that Roy had noticed at his football games.

If those things happened like she remembered them happening, it wasn’t her. It was the world. And if they didn’t, it was her.

Based on her recollection she had about fifteen, maybe ten more minutes before Michael’s arrival and then a little more before the big reveal. She’d just have to spend that time verifying whatever else she could before then, because there was no way she was waiting until tonight to know if she was crazy or engaged. Well, date-set-engaged. She was already engaged.

She slipped out of the bathroom and walked straight to her desk, ignoring the concerned look on Jim’s face as he turned to look at her. She pulled up the Lake Wallenpaupack cruise line website, and there was Captain Jack’s smug face staring at her on a little “Our People!” page that looked like it dated from 1997. There were even flashing lights, and she’d had to turn the volume on her computer way down when it started to autoplay some sort of stupid music (she’d had it up, of course, to hear the fwp-fwp-fwp of a victorious game of solitaire). Check one for “not crazy.”

She sat calmly through Michael’s pseudo-mysterious entrance and the hour wait after that, and was unsurprised but cooperative when Jim (once again?) suggested sending Stanley in for information. She took the opportunity to ask Jim if he was planning to bring Katy to…whatever this event was. He drew back in surprise and popped a jellybean into his mouth.

“I mean…” he said as he chewed (how was it that talking while chewing didn’t look completely disgusting in him? It was awful when Roy did it, but she didn’t mind so much with Jim. Though maybe it was just because a jellybean was so small—Roy did it even when she’d made prime rib, and he never took small bites). “I guess I might have mentioned it to her?” She wasn’t sure if that was really a question. He rubbed the back of his neck and popped another jellybean, and she decided it was time for more direct action.

“Hey, Jim, I was wondering…”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing…” she chewed her bottom lip. “It’s just…” she decided it was time to press the issue a little. “Roy was mentioning that he thought he recognized her from somewhere.” OK, this was only a lie if she’d hallucinated last night, because he had mentioned it then, even if he hadn’t before. “Like, was she a cheerleader or something in high school? Because he was on the football team, you know, and he thought maybe he recognized her from that.”

“Nah.” The instinctive reaction he’d had last night too. Interesting. She was becoming more certain by the moment that she hadn’t made it up, but at the same time there was no way he could have said no if she wasn’t—because he’d been there too. They’d even…well, not joked about it, because trying to joke about it had led to that incredibly awkward 27 seconds of silence (and how did she know it was 27 seconds?). But they’d mentioned it to each other after it happened. He’d noticed. So how could he not know about it now if, as she was beginning to suspect, it had really happened? Something made her push harder.

“You sure? Because he seemed awfully certain, and you know Roy, he doesn’t remember much, but a pretty face…” She grimaced internally. Had she really just said that?

Jim was blinking at her with a face that suggested he was thinking the same thing she was, and she ducked her head a little to avoid blushing. Finally, he shrugged. “I guess it’s possible.” He turned away, and then turned back before taking a step. “But just so you know, I’m not so sure Roy’s that good at noticing a really pretty face.”

What had he meant by that? Of course Roy could notice a pretty face. He’d practically fawned and drooled over Katy when she’d been here as the purse girl, though he hadn’t recognized her then. Maybe that’s what Jim meant. Maybe Katy had recognized him and told Jim and they’d laughed at how Roy didn’t notice and now Jim was telling her…but that made no sense, because then he’d know she was a cheerleader. Unless somehow she had just had a really accurate prophetic hallucination of a dream last night.

This was all so confusing.

She was distracted from wondering about Katy and Roy and Jim by Stanley’s gruff return with the news that it was going to be a booze cruise. Or more accurately she was distracted by the sudden surge of panic. There was no way this was just an overactive subconscious; the booze cruise (“in January?” as Stanley so aptly put it—both times) was too strange. But everyone else seemed surprised. No one else seemed to remember doing this. Which left her with three options: an odd case of divine intervention and prophecy centered on her, Pamela Morgan Beesly, for no discernible reason; she was having an extremely waking dream that simply happened to go over all of yesterday while she was actually sleeping next to Roy after the booze cruise (which seemed unlikely as she didn’t usually dream, at least not so lucidly), or an equally unlikely case of the groundhogs. Or, she supposed, secret option four, which was the most elaborate prank Jim had ever devised. She didn’t want to believe it—why would Jim prank her? Why would her best friend prank her on the day she was supposed to be celebrating having set a date for their wedding? Hers and Roys, that is—but she was rapidly running out of logical explanations.

She got through the rest of the day in a daze. Brenda was introduced to them—again—Michael went off the deep end (heh. Titanic)—again. She didn’t remember what she said, what she typed, what she did. Eventually her mind focused down on one point. Whatever else was going on, she needed to know: had Roy actually set a date? Because, she finally admitted to herself, that was the most unbelievable, the most wish-fulfilling, the most fantastic part of the entire day before that no one else seemed to know about. If that was true, she could forgive herself, if this was a hallucination; could forgive Jim, if this was a prank. If it wasn’t…she didn’t know what to do.

She was terrified of bringing it up, and even more so when she realized she’d have to ask Roy. She couldn’t ask Jim—if this was a prank, he wouldn’t let on. She wasn’t going to ask any of the other office folks—if it wasn’t a prank, she wasn’t going to give them either the satisfaction of crowing over her that she’d doubted it if it was true or pitying her for her desperate imagination if it was false. No, she’d have to ask Roy. And since she wasn’t going to draw attention to it by interrupting his workday, that meant she had the fifteen minute drive to the lake to work up the nerve to say anything to him.

In the end, it took her fourteen minutes.

“Uh, Roy?”

“Yeah, Pammy?”

She froze. How was she supposed to phrase it? She couldn’t ask if they were engaged, they’d been engaged for three years. She could ask if he had set a date…but the one thing that had bugged her about last night (if it was last night, which she was increasingly beginning to doubt) was that he hadn’t asked her privately first; that he had set a date, but they had not. She could ask if they’d set a date, of course, but then why was she asking him if she was involved? In the end she blurted out the best thing she could think of.

“Are we getting married on June 10?”

The truck swerved towards the median and he got it under control, swearing under his breath. “Uh, why do you ask?”

She knew the answer in her heart, because she could hear it in his voice, but she needed to hear the words. “Just answer me: are we getting married this June 10?”

He sputtered. There was no other word for it; actual spittle was coming out of his mouth, with the words only a secondary effect. “Uh…I guess…would that really give you enough time to plan a wedding, Pammy?”

“So we’re not getting married on June 10.”

“No.” His shoulders relaxed a bit. “What gave you that idea anyway?”

“Oh…just this random thought I had. I guess it was nothing.”

She could feel him relax further next to her, and he wrapped an arm around her. “I promise we’ll get married soon. I love you. You know that, right?” He kissed the top of her head.

“Yeah. I know, Roy.” Just not enough to actually set a date. She knew it had been too good to be true.

But for all she was now certain that it had been some kind of crazy hallucination, she couldn’t help but notice how eerily it was tracking her lived reality. By the time she and Roy were sitting across from Jim and Katy in a booth again, she was beginning to feel like she would vomit. And when Roy leaned over and asked Katy about cheerleading, and Jim flashed her an alarmed look when it turned out that, yes, Katy had been a cheerleader, she was D-O-N-E done.

“I’m gonna go get something to drink.”

Only this time it wasn’t just going to be beer. She fitted the snorkel to her mouth, Darryl poured in the liquor, and…she didn’t remember anything else.