The next morning, after smiling ridiculously at it for longer than she would have felt comfortable admitting, Pam slipped the coffeesleeve into her purse after carefully programming Jim’s name into her phone, and set about doing what she really should have done the day she’d moved back in after ending things with Roy—or maybe not then, because she’d been utterly physically and emotionally exhausted, but soon thereafter.

Or maybe, a little bit of her said not loudly but enough to be heard over the din of voices within her, something she should have been gradually doing all along, since she’d changed since she was a child.

She was going to redecorate.

Step one of that was to remove literally everything from the walls and heap it all on her bed. Well, step one was to remove it from the walls—the bed was a side-effect of lacking any other consistent flat space to put everything that wasn’t already covered in the various things her mother had stuck up in her room over the years “just in case you want it later” crossed with all the things she had actually needed or wanted herself. There were plenty of those on the bed too (she had lost the battle of “how many pillows is actually reasonable for one person’s bed” long ago) but they could be covered more easily, since she had actually managed to keep the bed sleepable.

Step one-A, it turned out, was to go find her dad and get a hammer, and step one-B was to add an impact wrench to that, so that she could actually take everything off the walls. Because Pam had been in more than one room in her life that had had a lot of things on the walls before that had been taken down but left all the spots and the nails and the screws and all the other ways of hanging things that had been used over the years still in place, and she had no desire to have her room become that. It was depressing enough to realize how much all the things on the wall had spoken to a Pam that wasn’t here anymore; it would be much worse to leave the gaping wounds on the wall where that Pam’s stuff had been.

Step one-C, which probably should have been step two but she hadn’t actually thought of it, was to repaint the walls, because it turned out that having posters and paintings and such over half the wall and not the other half over a light wall color meant that you could still see where every single painting and poster and etc. had gone when they had been up, even in their absence, even without the nails and the screws and so on. And while Pam was willing to be a little avant-garde about this, she wasn’t so avant-garde as to embrace the differential fading on her walls.

That meant step one-C-little-Roman-numeral-i was to move everything in her room out of her room so that she could actually paint the walls.

It was about the point at which she was reaching one-C-little-Roman-numeral-ii (figure out what paint color the walls were, or what new color her parents would let her repaint) that she realized she hadn’t had lunch. Or breakfast. Or anything at all. Fortunately, Penny’s room was the only other one being blocked by the assemblage of random dressers and other furniture she’d lugged out in the hallway, and Penny didn’t care, so she left it.

And so it was from her parents’ kitchen table, munching on a hastily-assembled sandwich made from whatever she could find in the fridge (and thus, ham and cheese) that she finally texted Jim.

Since it was two-fifteen in the afternoon, she was ravenous enough to overcome her jitters at having his phone number, and just threw herself into it.

Hey!

Sorry I’m not there today!

Tell Dwight hi!

That was too many exclamation points. She looked demented. And the way her phone had autocapitalized every line made her feel like she was definitely not giving the casual, flirty, cool vibe she was hoping to give off.

Though, to be fair, Jim had met her before, so that was probably a lost cause anyway.

The little dots started and then stopped and then started and then stopped and she wondered why it was taking Jim so long to reply to her.

And then she realized that she hadn’t actually told him it was her—and he’d given her his number but not the other way around.

This is Pam, btw.

She quickly deleted the period (what am I, seventy? Get it together, Pam) and uncapitalized the T, then wondered if it looked weird that the other texts were capitalized and the T wasn’t, then stopped herself from thinking about it more by hitting send.

Who was she kidding? She still thought about it more.

Ugh.

She faceplanted into her ham and cheese.

Texting was the worst, except for all the other ways of communicating.