Pam’s eyes snapped open, as they did every morning, five seconds before her alarm clock went off. Well, that clinched it. If she wasn’t hung over this morning, last night never happened. But if last night never happened and the other last night never happened…was this the same day again?

And assuming so, what was she supposed to do about it?

She hit the alarm and thought things through a little more in the shower. The trick to this sort of thing, she knew from her obsessive watching of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day (her all-time favorite movie; too bad Jim hadn’t let her finish listing her desert island movies that day Ryan started the fire, because she thought they could have had a fun discussion about it) was to figure out what had gone wrong in the initial cycle—or more accurately, what needed to go right in the final cycle. Unfortunately, she had no idea. But she did have something she wanted to find out, and she figured she might as well start the cycle by working on that.

She got out of the shower and confirmed her expectations. There they were sitting on the dresser: gray sweater, purple shirt, black pants. This was definitely the same day.

She tried her best to remember the sequence of events from what was, to her, two days ago but, of course, apparently hadn’t happened at all in everyone else’s reality. She’d made breakfast—so she did. She’d waited for Roy (no surprise)—so she did. This time she made the office at the same time she had that first go-round, and she bought the pencil cup again. She feigned the same surprise she remembered feeling about the booze cruise, played along with Jim’s jokes about water disaster movies, and generally tried her best to make the day go the same way it had the first time around.

Up until the booze cruise itself, that is. And even then, she let things start the same, the same bad jokes from Michael, the same discovery that Katy was a cheerleader, the same giggle in Jim’s direction when she found it out officially. Because the thought that was itching in her mind was that somewhere on this cruise lay the secret to why Roy had set a date. She knew from the last try at this that Roy hadn’t had any such plan in mind going onto the boat, or at least not a specific date (and from his body language she’d have bet serious money if she were a betting woman that the very idea had not occurred to him). So she was determined to find out what had happened, what had changed, to make him suddenly, drunkenly spew out a date so publicly. That meant keeping as much the same as possible, while finding a way to keep an eye on him as the night progressed in a much more active way than she had two nights ago.

She was really going to have to develop a new vocabulary for this. What did you call it when time passed for you but not for anyone else? Two nights ago was Tuesday; two cycles? Times? Iterations? She’d work on it. Just as she’d work on making sure she knew what it was that had made Roy change his mind.

At the same time, she found herself sitting back as an observer more than she usually did. Oh, she was definitely a wallflower most of the time, but she was so consumed by anxiety and self-consciousness in her everyday life that even though she was sitting by the wall sprouting a pistil and a stamen, she didn’t really notice any more than anyone else did. In fact, when Jim would lean over and whisper things to her she often realized that she was noticing less than him. But now that she didn’t have to worry how she came across, because of the combined power of knowing that things would probably reset overnight anyway and of having experienced the night twice before anyway, she could turn her attention outwards to the rest of the room.

Was Michael always that awkward? She knew he was annoying, and often thoughtless, and cringeworthy, but she hadn’t fully recognized before the symptoms of sheer awkwardness blaring forth from him. She began to think about how his awful personality might be a mask for a deep, dark loneliness and fear of being left out. Maybe one of these times through she’d have a talk with him. Not now though. Now she needed to focus. On Roy.

Of course, right now Roy was going on and on about cheerleading and football with Katy while Jim looked on with a dull smile on his face. How did she know it was a dull smile? Because it didn’t quite reach his eyes, and his teeth weren’t showing. When Jim got really interested or excited or happy, his eyes became the size of a Magic 8 Ball and his grin could swallow galaxies. Or at least that’s how it felt like to her. Right now everything about his face was normal-size, with a smile pasted on. He must be dying inside, she realized. Maybe it was really important to him that Katy wasn’t a cheerleader. Maybe when I teased him that time two…tries ago, he was hurting inside and I just made it worse. Maybe that’s why there were those 27 seconds of silence.

Of course, he wasn’t dying inside any more than she had been that first time, when Roy had made that gratuitous jab about her art and her turtlenecks. She looked damn good in a turtleneck, she thought. And besides, in Scranton in the winter it was cold.

Oh god, they were in Scranton. She remembered that Bill Murray had fixed everyone’s problems in the whole town in Groundhog Day, but that was in freaking Punxsutawney, population diddley-squat, not in Scranton. She took a deep breath. Focus. Maybe look at the office, not at the city. And anyway, right now, look at Roy.

Look at Roy doing a snorkel shot. This was when she’d left with Jim the first time, she realized. Was that important to whatever choice Roy had made? Would not leaving mean he didn’t make that decision? But how was she to keep track of how he made the decision if she left?

She decided to go. After all, she’d messed with the shots last time, by taking one herself, and that hadn’t led to a date. Or maybe it had—she couldn’t actually remember. But she was willing to bet it hadn’t, since even Roy was probably coherent enough not to re-propose to someone passed out. Assuming he’d even noticed…but that was unfair. Roy wasn’t the most attentive human being on the planet, or even in the office, or even in this particular booth, but he was actually really good at dealing with her when she was drunk. He could be surprisingly respectful and considerate when she wasn’t sober, probably because he had so much experience dealing with drunk people and being drunk himself. That wasn’t fair either, but it was accurate, and she wasn’t going to sit here all day deciding if she was being fair to everyone. She’d have to be eventually, if she was going by the Bill Murray method, but there was time for that later. She shoved up from the booth and headed outside. As before, Jim followed her.

“Hey, Jim.” She knew this wasn’t what she’d said the last time they’d been out here, but she couldn’t help herself. She didn’t want to run it all back, even if it ended with a date. She wanted to do better. And one way she could do better was giving her friend the support she thought he needed.

“Hi.” He looked down at her. His eyes were so piercing, she remembered folding in front of them the last time. She wasn’t going to do that now, even though she knew she had a precious opportunity now to sneak back in and watch what Roy was doing.

“You ever feel like an observer in your own life?” Where had that come from? This wasn’t soul-baring time, Pam, this was helping-Jim-and-then-going-back-in time.

He exhaled. “Yeah. Pam?”

“Yes?”

He looked down at her again and shook his head. “Nevermind.”

She reached a hand out and touched his arm. “It’s going to be OK, Jim.”

“Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. Scratch that, he was looking at her, but not at her eyes…and not at her breasts either, as she usually caught Roy and his friends doing. He was looking at her hand on his arm. She let it fall, tracing a path down his forearm as he watched.

“It is.” She forced a smile. “You want to go spy on people?”

He grinned, suddenly. There was the smile she was used to, the one that made him seem twice as large and ten times as alive as usual. “Absolutely.”

She thought quickly. If Jim was bothered by Katy being a cheerleader, he probably shouldn’t be in the cabin with the snorkel shots. Actually, that was probably why he was out here in the first place. That was perfect, because she needed to sneak back into the cabin to keep an eye on Roy. Where could she send him…

“OK. This is serious spy business, Jim, so we’re going to need to split up and compare notes later.” She could totally use him to jumpstart Operation Help Michael, as she’d just dubbed her plan to eventually improve things for their boss. “You go check out Michael, Dwight, and Captain Jack, I’ll keep an eye on the others.”

“Aye, aye, captain.” He saluted her. She shook her head. “There’s already two captains on board, Jim, keep up. We don’t need a third.” He grinned back magnetically and she had to make a physical effort to turn back towards the door to the main cabin. “Report back here in a couple hours, OK?”

“Aye, aye, Beesly.” She could feel the laughter in his voice as they went their separate ways.

She snuck back into the cabin feeling more hopeful. It was funny how a little laughter with Jim could go a long way to making her feel better. She would figure this out. It couldn’t be too hard, right?

One hypothesis that she was not really enjoying but had to entertain was that it was just alcohol that made Roy set a date. After all, he was going pretty hard on the snorkel shots (“Roy! Roy! Roy!” had replaced “Darryl! Darryl! Darryl!” again). For a moment this made her feel warm inside, because after all alcohol removed inhibitions—so maybe that meant that setting a date was what Roy had always really wanted to do deep down. But then she remembered that he had evidently had absolutely no interest in doing so before they got on the boat—and that he’d been riproaringly drunk more times than she cared to count in the past three years and never set a date. So that hypothesis was out.

Instead of warming herself with that ridiculous idea, then, she was going to have to do some subtle sleuthing. Or maybe not so subtle; one advantage to having a drunk fiancé (not that it felt like that much of an advantage) was that he probably wouldn’t really notice her paying close attention to him, and so he wouldn’t change his behavior from the first cycle. She sat down next to Katy, as she’d done then, and kept up a desultory conversation (interrupted, of course, by snorkel shots: “Katy! Katy! Katy! Woooo!”). She was in the middle of the same awkward conversational interlude that she knew was going to lead towards “how did you get engaged” when  she saw movement. Roy was headed in aft? Afore? Whatever, towards the front of the boat. Where Jim was probably still on watch. But she wanted to see for herself; Jim might not tell her exactly what she needed to know (she didn’t know what she needed to know, which would make it hard for him to tell it to her anyway) so she needed her own eyes on the situation. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, simultaneously cutting off that awful conversation with Katy (don’t think about whether she’s going to be engaged to Jim, don’t think about it at all) and keeping her attention on Roy.

He was talking to Captain Jack. Or more accurately, he was listening to Captain Jack, with a surprisingly rapturous look on his face. She didn’t know Roy could listen that well. She pushed aside her surprising frustration at the thought and listened to what the captain was saying. Something about his “first wife” and how, when he’d survived a near death experience, he’d married her.

It should have been a sweet story. No, it was a sweet story. But she couldn’t help but focus in on that “first” of “first wife.” It wasn’t a forever marriage. It wasn’t a forever kind of love. Whatever had inspired Captain Jack to propose to that woman wasn’t enough to keep them together over the long haul. He’d reached out to her in a time of intense emotion, but they hadn’t built anything lasting.

Perhaps she was being unfair. Perhaps his first wife had died tragically and he had taken years to recover. Perhaps she’d left him, and his love had still prevailed, so that it was her that shouldn’t have accepted him. But she didn’t think so—listening to Roy and the captain and Michael whooping it up about how big that first wife’s breasts had been didn’t really give that impression.

And now Roy was saying something to Michael and Jack, tears in his eyes. It was a little garbled, which wasn’t surprising given how many snorkel shots he’d done, but the sense of it was clear. “I’m gonna propose to Pammy.”

We’re already engaged, she thought, just as Michael (of all people!) said the same thing to Roy. Or at least, the same thought, in Michaelese: “she’s already your woman. You proposed to her three years ago.”

“Ah, that one didn’t count. We’re not really engaged, you know. But hell, maybe we should be. What do you think?”

Captain Jack leaned over, eyes serious in the way that only crazy people, drunks, and those drunk on power can make them. “I think you should do it.”

“Well, what the hell. Not like I’m going to do any better, right?”

She’d frozen stock still at Roy’s first words about their engagement, and in doing so failed to remember she was right outside the door to the bathroom. Now she was banged into by someone actually coming out, and saw three heads swivel in her direction. Roy spoke first.

“Aw geez, Pammy, I didn’t mean it like that!”

She couldn’t deal with this right now. She couldn’t deal with him, she couldn’t deal with the world, she couldn’t breathe. Now she knew why what had seemed like the perfect resolution to a Groundhog Day-style loop, Roy’s setting a date, was instead the start. She didn’t know what power up there had given her this series of redos, but she was simultaneously thanking and cursing it. The last three years of her life didn’t count? It took a drunken story about a serial monogamist’s first wife to convince him to set a date? He cared more about what some stupid sea, no, lake captain had to say about marriage than what she had repeatedly said in asking him to set a date over the last three years? No. She wasn’t doing this now.

She scrambled into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Roy banged on the door and begged her to come out, but she just scrambled against the far wall and cried. How could he do this to her? More to the point, how could she do this to herself?

And what was she going to do with this in the next go-round? She hoped there was one. She hoped this horrible, gut-wrenching news that confirmed the worst she’d ever expected or thought about her engagement to Roy wasn’t the revelation she was supposed to come to. She prayed to whatever God, or genie, or angry imp had imparted this fate to her that she wouldn’t have to wake up tomorrow on Friday and deal with this. Not that she was ever going to forget it. But at least let her have some more iterations to figure out what she was going to do with herself now. Don’t make her life go on from here without a little time to process it.

She stayed in the bathroom the rest of the voyage, and icily took Roy’s keys when they docked. “I’m driving, you’ll kill us both” was all she said to him as he continued to beg and plead on the way home. She wasn’t in the mood to listen to him, and he was still too drunk to have anything more coherent to say than sorry—which strongly suggested to her that he hadn’t cut himself off when she’d locked herself in the bathroom. When they got home he rushed up the stairs and collapsed into the bed. At first she was annoyed: how dare he make her sleep on the couch when it was him who had fucked up so royally? Then she realized that this was probably his strategy to get her to sleep in the same bed with him, and she just felt sorry for him. Did he really think that would work? Did he really know her so little after ten years that he’d think she’d just let this go?

But then again, she’d become an expert at letting things go, hadn’t she? She let go every booze-filled night, every refusal to set a date, every embarrassment, every disappointment. She let go “jokes” that weren’t funny and anger that wasn’t provoked and thoughtlessness that wasn’t apologized for. Of course he thought she’d just let this go too.

But she wasn’t going to.

Not after discovering that what had seemed two times ago to be the happiest moment of her life had been a booze-fueled whim. Not after finding out that apparently, in her fiancé’s mind, the last three years of their engagement didn’t count. No. She was stronger than that. And if she hadn’t been before, well, she had theoretically infinite attempts to get herself there. And she was not going to start those by sleeping with him.

She made up the couch, and brooded, and made plans for the next time around. Hoping, desperately, that she was right and there would be one.