Sitting at her desk at the end of the day, Pam reflects that she would like it very much if life would stop punching her in the face.

Really. She’ll live with the (metaphorical) bruises from the previous punching. She’ll heal, eventually. But it would be nice not to have any more.

First there’s Michael, and his stupid, insensitive bullshit about Pam 6.0. Sure, she’ll admit, Katy is well put together, and Pam had one of those mornings where she had to book it to work because Roy hit snooze and she forgot to get up in time and then they were both late, so she’s not exactly at her best. And sure, there’s maybe a tiny bit of resemblance between them: reddish hair, in the right light; a similar way of doing that hair (maybe Katy also had to run out of the house this morning with it still wet); just something generally in the aesthetic, she supposes, that means that the comparison isn’t entirely unfair.

From Michael and Kevin’s perspective, the idea that they both have breasts is probably relevant too, but she doesn’t think they’re all that alike beyond the basic fact of the matter.

So she can see where the comparison might originate from. But 6.0? 2.0 would have been mildly insulting. 6.0 is just off the charts, even for Michael. So she’s definitely hurt by that. She tries so hard not to let Michael get under her skin, but it’s already been a bad week, and she just can’t.

And because of that, she doesn’t try at all to stop Michael when he keeps hanging around the conference room. Not because she wants to be mean to Katy, just because she can’t deal with Michael at all right now, and dealing with him around Katy is going to be unavoidably worse, because he’ll do more comparisons. He’s never seen a joke he couldn’t flog into the ground, and this one…she just won’t.

But that doesn’t stop the world from punching her in the face all the same. She’s going to skip over Roy in her recollections, because when she does think about Roy she’s going to explode and she can’t afford to explode about Roy until Roy himself is with her, because she’s not wasting all that emotional energy on an empty office where she’s the last one sitting around.

Instead, she focuses on Jim. On Jim, who for just a moment gave her some hope that someone in the office could see what she saw: that there was nothing wrong with Katy, but there’s nothing wrong with her, Pam, either. That she’s not some junior training version of the woman who sells purses in other people’s offices, but a living breathing human being herself. He’d made that awful joke about being into moms—seriously, how could Roy not see that that was humor? Even Kevin got it, for all that his little eyes gleamed as he continued the joke—and she’d almost choked on her lunch. He’d said something about Katy not being his type, and she’d wondered for the first time: what was Jim’s type? Because if it wasn’t Katy—did that mean it wasn’t Pam, either? And why should she care about that? Why did she care about that?

Not that he’d been telling the truth. Because through all of it: through mocking Dwight to her at exactly the moment she’d needed a respite from Roy, through sitting there thankfully, blessedly ignoring Roy’s idiocy when he decided to tickle her in her workspace as an attempt to get into her good graces again, through…just all of a totally shitty day for her, he’d apparently just been biding his time.

It wasn’t that she’d intended to spy on them. Really, there was nowhere else to look: what she supposed to do, stare at Dwight? The light was on in the conference room, and Jim wasn’t at his desk to distract her, so she’d seen him walk in there and start chatting to Katy. At first it had seemed like nothing much, but then they’d started obviously talking about things other than purses, and he’d pulled out his phone and started typing—did he get her number?—and then she’d kissed him! On the cheek, to be sure, but she’d totally kissed Jim. It was totally inappropriate for the workplace, just like Roy’s tickling, and if she hadn’t thought Michael’s main reaction would be to high-five Jim and talk about manliness and the modern office salesman (or else to have a hissy fit because his own wooing had been a failure—an equally unpleasant outcome for her to deal with) she’d have reported it. She supposed she could have told Toby, but…he and Jim were close. It wouldn’t do anything, except make her feel guilty for being annoyed at her best friend for lying to her about his interest.

And why should she feel so bad that Jim was interested in Katy? He’d all but confirmed it when he’d said something about taking her out that night, though she still wasn’t sure exactly what their plans were: the matching tattoos were obviously a joke, but did that mean dinner and a movie was too? Where would Jim take a girl he liked on a date? Probably not a hockey rink. Maybe Italian. Definitely good food—Jim wouldn’t accept bad food in a fancy place, it just wasn’t him—probably local, since he’d lived here his whole life and had definite favorites. Maybe Cugino’s; possibly Cooper’s? Why was she worrying about this anyway, there was no point. Whether they were doing dinner and a movie or not, they were out the door, Jim holding it open for Katy as they passed through and smiling down at his phone. Had she been texting him from the conference room?

She wanted to puke.

No, she wanted to scream, because it was 5:45 and Roy still hadn’t come upstairs to pick her up. Oh, he was around all the time this afternoon with Katy selling her damn purses in the conference room, but when she was gone and it was time to go home, he was AWOL. Maybe it was dangerous to think about Jim on a first date because it was reminding her eerily of her own first date, and she was feeling the same sort of feeling she’d felt that day when Roy hadn’t come back for her.

She got up and walked to the window. The truck was gone.

He’d actually left her again.

She wandered back towards her desk, then past it to Jim’s and picked up his phone. She wasn’t sure why she leaned against his desk as she dialed—maybe it was to replace the memory of this afternoon when Roy had refused to see how mad she was and had insisted on tickling her right here, in front of Jim. Maybe it was just to avoid feeling trapped in the semicircular hellscape that was her normal office experience. Whatever it was, she felt calmer here than there, and so here she stayed in the empty office.

“Hey, mom.” Her conversation with her mother was brief—Helene had always had a knack for keeping things short when she could tell Pam was angry—and she arranged to spend the night there “just to see you and Dad.”

Her next phone call was not nearly as short, though fortunately Penny had a cellphone and speakers, so she could drive to pick Pam up while they talked. Pen was a good sister. Not a perfect one, just like Pam wasn’t, but the sort of sister who would give up a Friday night party at college to come pick up her stewing, angry sister and drive her home: not Roy’s house, home.

Penny was also the kind of sister you could tell things to, if you didn’t want to bottle them up and explode, and so Pam found herself getting increasingly irate as she finally let herself think about Roy’s behavior that morning and afternoon.

She told it to Penny in reverse order, because it just seemed reasonable to start with the fact that “that fucker,” as Penny called him when she finally arrived and Pam got into the car, had stranded her at work. Then she’d gone into the tickling—a subject Penny could relate to, since she’d learned at a very young age that tickling Pam just got her cold, quiet, and eventually even afterwards. Roy had apparently not learned the difference between Pam being unwilling to cause a scene at work and Pam being happy. He was going to learn. That let her move onto the point that really angered her most of all: Roy’s casual disavowal of their engagement, and more importantly his apparent desire to cheat on her even though he thought they were dating.

“And he said he ought to get someone else to be him while he had some ‘fun,’ Pen. Like being engaged to me—assuming he ever remembers we are engaged, not like he’s done anything to move us beyond engaged into actually married, has he?—was some kind of work. Like Jim’s brilliant prank of getting out of a day of work was a model for him to get out of a day of being my boyfriend, let alone my fiancé.” She took a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh. “It wouldn’t have been so bad, you know—well, it would have been bad, but not that bad—well, it would have been better, if he’d just let that part out. If he’d just slipped up and forgotten to say engaged. That would be frustrating, but…yeah, that’s Roy. Or hell, if he’d said he could have had a double to date Katy—not that I think he was thinking of dating her, but again, that’s Roy. But no, apparently the double gets me and Roy gets to go bang whoever he wants. Well fuck that.”

“Yeah,” Penny contributed when Pam let her get a word in edgewise. “Fuck that. Now, do you want to come downstairs, or what?” Pam stretched the cord on the desk phone just far enough to peer out into the parking lot, and yep, there was Pen’s little sedan parked next to the main doors in the fire lane.

“Oh! I’ll be right down!” She grabbed her coat and purse—not a nice new fancy purse like she’d considered buying, but a serviceable one her mom had given her when she started working in an office—and headed down. When she got into the car Penny had a gleam in her eye Pam couldn’t quite place, and Pam decided to head it off.

“I’m done for tonight. I’m not talking about Roy.”

Penny shrugged and got the car into gear. “So don’t talk about Roy.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “It sounds like Jim had a new prank? You want to tell me about that?”

Pam grinned at her sister, who she knew always loved hearing the recaps of Jim’s and Pam’s pranks when she passed them along. “Oh, you’re going to just die when you hear this one, Pen.”

Retelling the story got them all the way to their parents’ house—a two hour drive, but Pam couldn’t have told you if it was 5 minutes. Her parents, like Penny, were willing to keep the conversation on gently neutral ground, and she almost forgot, for a few minutes, exactly how badly the world had punched her in the face starting at 9 am that morning.