“Soooooooooooooooo….” Izzy draws out the word. “He’s definitely into you.”

“Iz…”

“No, Pam, I’m not going to let you hide from this one.” Izzy sips her coffee and makes an impressed face. “Especially not if it means I don’t get to come drink here again. This is actually good!”

“You think all coffee is good,” Pam complains, seizing on the one non-Jim-related part of that statement. She feels a fizzy feeling in her chest that’s neither entirely pleasant nor entirely unpleasant: if she focuses on the feeling itself, it’s warm and buzzing, but if she focuses on the fact that she’s feeling a buzzing in her chest and warmth in her face, she halfway wonders if she’s having a stroke or a heart attack or something. She knows this is related to Jim, and specifically to the idea that Izzy thinks Jim is into her, which implies that this might possibly not be all in her head. But she doesn’t really want to pass out at the table, so she’s going to avoid that if at all possible.

Fortunately, at least initially, Izzy is distractable. “No, Pam, I don’t.” She takes another sip. “I choked down that burnt sludge at Starbucks because you were actually getting out of the house and being productive, so I wanted to encourage it—and because I don’t like any of their other drinks any better, except for the ones that are basically milkshakes and I was not drinking a milkshake every time I wanted to see my best friend somewhere other than her parents’ house.”

She puts the coffee cup down carefully, almost reverently. “But this…this is drinkable. This is good. So that Jim of yours is doing something right at least.” Her eyes narrow. “Speaking of which, don’t think you can make me forget we were talking about him!” She jabs a finger at Pam. “He likes you. And since you’re redder than you were that time you fell asleep on your watercolor of a sunset, you like him too.” She keeps eye contact while she reaches for her cup. “I knew it. I knew I saw something there!” She takes another sip, and Pam is just annoyed enough at her crowing to not point out that she’s accidentally picked up the cup with the beet juice in it.

This is a mistake, as it happens, because in the next moment Pam is the one wearing the beet juice coffee.

“What the…” Izzy looks down at her coffee cup and realizes it’s the one that Dwight sent to her, a size smaller than the one she was drinking from before. She carefully takes another sip, prepared this time. “Huh. This is surprising.”

“You think you’re surprised?” Pam is thankful, she supposes, that the beet juice coffee is on her and not her laptop, but it’s still not exactly comfortable. “I’m the one who’s suddenly in beet couture.”

“Actually, beet couture is much more fashionable than anything I have ever seen you wearing.” Dwight Schrute is suddenly at their table—he must have seen Izzy drinking from the beet coffee cup and headed over—and, to her surprise, hands her a napkin. “Fact: beet greens, properly treated, make a renewable, sustainable, and fashionable fabric that is both breathable and light.” He turns to Izzy. “Fact: beet juice in coffee is shown to increase cardiovascular function, intelligence, and stamina.”

Pam takes that moment to flee to the restroom, napkin in hand.