After leavin’ Stephen (as he makes sure to call it, as often as he can, because it annoys Steve but not actually too much) with Katy, and absolutely destroying Mark at Mario Kart, Jim doesn’t actually have much to do that weekend. He’d gotten kind of used to having the evenings and weekend afternoons filled with spot op duties for Steve’s show (it had gone without a hitch, mostly because his helping Alicia had apparently made him another friend for life and she’d been very patient with him during tech rehearsals. Once he realized he couldn’t actually watch the play and run the spot, and had chosen to just run spot, things had been easy). Now that he doesn’t have that, and after basketball at the Y (which Steve was weirdly absent from) he’s at loose ends.
Saturday he mostly lazes around the house, but on Sunday he hits up Steamtown Mall: he’d planned to do this last weekend, but then Michael had been weird about people working Saturday and he’d been in a shitty mood because of the whole injured nose thing (as he told people)/Pam-and-Roy-in-a-tub thing (as he admitted to Mark and Steve) so he hadn’t actually gone. He hangs out in the Barnes and Noble browsing vaguely. As usual, he gravitates towards the sale material they’ve got laid out on temporary tables towards the back of the store (or, he supposes, the front, if you came in through the exterior doors, but since he’s a sucker for a food court he came in through the main mall entrance).
It’s a sign of how far gone he is that every item on the tables seems to remind him of Pam. He hadn’t thought he was this bad, but there you go. A set of Moleskine notebooks? Sketchbooks for her art, too easy. The complete works of Jane Austen, in the faux-fancy binding that marks it as a Barnes and Noble custom edition that just didn’t sell, maybe because those works have been out of copyright for decades? Might as well have been put there just to tug at his heartstrings. A Funko Pop of Batman? Reminds him of Dwight, which reminds him of Pam, wham bam thank you ma’am for the heartbreak. A box set of a board game he’s never heard of, Dominion? Well, Pam has dominion over his heart, so there you go.
OK, that last one might be a stretch, but it’s also reminding him of just how pathetic he’s gotten in the last few weeks. Ever since Steve told him Pam seemed a little bit down when he’d been gone for the day, he’s been straining to see whether his friend was right. As far as he can tell, though, things are their usual selves in Pamland and its adjoining neighbor Royitania. Roy is still an ass, Pam is still weirdly OK with that, and Jim is probably going to need dental work from all the jellybeans he’s eating for no real purpose other than to get his heart broken. The imperial marriage that will join the two countries still doesn’t have a date, but it doesn’t look from the outside (and oh how he hates admitting to himself he is on the outside) like there’s anything likely to break them up even if the fabled wedding day never arrives. He briefly entertains the idea of what he’d do if they ever did set a date, and decides he’ll probably run away to Australia. It’s the farthest place he knows you can get flights to: he’s pretty sure there are obscure islands in the Indian Ocean that are further away, but while he’s willing to imagine escape he’s not prepared to be somewhere his family can’t visit easily—and Larissa gets seasick, so boats are out.
It’s probably pathetic that he’s planning his future exile for a wedding that was agreed to before he knew the couple, but then again, he’s Jim Halpert. He knows he’s pathetic. He just can’t do anything about it, and he’s still not sure he wants to, because even the idea of the opposite—of a world where instead of him fleeing to Australia Pam is breaking up with Roy and dating him, Jim—is so exhilarating he can only take sidelong glances at the idea even in his own head.
He ends up buying a Moleskine—they’re 60% off, with his membership, so it’s practically bad business not too, and they’re one of the few paper products Dunder Mifflin has never sold so even Dwight can’t accuse him of disloyalty—and justifying it to himself as something he can use for a journal or a planner or something. His mom is always saying he’s too disorganized for his own good (this is the one thing his mother has in common with Dwight Schrute, a fact he’s used to disarm her attempts to get him to organize himself on more than one occasion. His mother has met Dwight, and was properly appalled at the suggestion of a connection between herself and him). Maybe this will help him get things in gear. Maybe an organized Jim can be a happy Jim, or at least a more productive, upwardly mobile Jim, which may be his only option if this one-sided Pam thing doesn’t work out, as he’s beginning to worry it won’t.
He’s torn out of this melancholy mood by a shout and a wave from someone who, to his lovesick eyes, looks a lot like Pam, but turns out to be Katy, selling purses from her kiosk at the mall. He grins at her and walks over, and they have an animated conversation about Steve and Fiddler that keeps getting interrupted by her purse sales. At one point he thinks he actually hallucinates real Pam in the distance, but he’s answering questions about the set design of Tevye’s house (which flew in from the rafters in pieces, but was sturdy enough for the fiddler to actually climb onto, a really cool approach) and he doesn’t get a chance to follow her. He learns that yes, as he’d suspected, Katy is definitely into Steve, and from the blushing confirmation she makes that he didn’t make basketball yesterday because they were having brunch at the aptly named Posh, he’s pretty sure that Steve’s crush hasn’t faded any with time.
He’s happy for them. He really is. He pulls out his phone and texts Steve a selfie of him and Katy making weird faces at the camera (caption, which he doesn’t share with her: guess I’ll be seeing a lot of her in the future, thought I’d get a head start) and immediately gets back a reply (turn around). Steve slips into the picture with two ice cream cones, and Jim pretends to take one before laughingly leaving his friends to take a snack break together, not sure he can actually handle two people who are in love actually getting to hang out together but not willing to be a wet blanket on their clear excitement. As he leaves, he does get them both to blush by suggesting slyly that maybe next time Katy could let Steve make it to basketball so Mark doesn’t sent out a search party.
When he gets home, he’s feeling pretty good, all things considered. He’s not the sort of person to begrudge anyone else their happiness, Roy excepted, and even then he’d prefer Pam and Roy to break up in a way that doesn’t make Roy unhappy, just single. But while it’s been a good weekend, he’s still pining; it’s just that he feels like he’s maybe got a handle on it now, if only because he has his completely ridiculous plan for what he’ll do when the wedding actually happens. He and Mark grill hot dogs in the backyard and he stares up at the stars, wondering just how different they are in Australia—and whether he’ll end up having to find out.
