The next day Pam was actually able to be productive by her mother’s and the world’s standards and not just hers. For herself, of course, the day before had been more than productive: it had been startlingly, amazingly full of wonderful discoveries she never thought actually possible. She had a boyfriend again! One she liked, and more importantly, one that seemed to like the real, authentic her. If there was one regret she had from her time with Roy (and there was more than one regret that she had from her time with Roy) it was that she had been a somewhat inauthentic version of herself from the beginning with him, and had never been able to change back into Pam-herself.

It was, she supposed while musing about her communist-inclined new boyfriend when she was supposed to be finishing up the touchups on the walls of her room where the first coat had been too light (to be fair, she was doing that—it just takes time for paint to dry, Mom), a kind of false consciousness that had led her to believe Roy was interested in her as herself and only discover later that she had been sending him signals that indicated she was other than what she truly was. She didn’t blame Roy for that (there was plenty of additional blame to go on him without adding things he didn’t deserve on top). But she had become aware over the years—some before they exploded and a little after—that she had been playing the role of artsy-fartsy girlfriend to the football player and not recognizing the true circumstances: that she was not artsy-fartsy, with its implications of performative insincerity and self-deprecating irony, but just fucking artsy, thank you very much. And that if her boyfriend/fiancé/holy-shit-almost-husband couldn’t deal with that, if he needed her to hide it under the guise of irony and inferiority, she was not going to stand for it.

To be fair, again (and she was going to be fair about this if it killed her), she had bought into it for a long time too: hence the false consciousness. She had been oblivious to the myriad ways in which not only Roy but Pam herself denigrated her interests, and she had had the false ideal that it was a good thing in and of itself to be dating someone popular and macho.

She knew better now—not just that she knew that she did not want that, and that in fact the work Roy put in to staying popular and macho was a lot of what drove them apart but also that she now could recognize the ways in which past-Pam also did not want that, but was incapable of expressing or even fully thinking it.

So it was a breath of fresh air to remember that her current boyfriend (her current boyfriend) was not that kind of guy at all. That he probably did have his own image of what Pam was like (all people had images of what the people they knew were like, she had one of him too) but that image was both less falsified than what she’d presented to Roy and—crucially—not her fucking problem.

Apparently today was a day for swears. In her head, anyway—with her mom hovering around the corner she wasn’t going to do it out loud except (as now) when she dripped paint in her eye.

Ouch.

Fuck.

Anyway, she thought as she scrubbed at her face in the bathroom and then donned the safety goggles she hadn’t bothered to put on before, she had a boyfriend.

That was good.

And he had already texted her that morning (a picture of Dwight angrily pounding away at a giant typewriter at one of the chairs in the café, along with the caption “why won’t it upload my files?”) and she had texted back and it had not been a complete disaster.

So things were going well in Pamland. She finished up the last touches and threw herself down the stairs to the kitchen table, where she had rolled out a big piece of butcher paper (one of the great things about moving home had been that she’d found a bunch of art supplies from when she was a kid that had just been sitting there unused, including more than one roll of butcher paper that her father had shrugged and said was on sale when she was twelve). She had already sketched out her room walls before going to paint, and now she sat there, pencil in her mouth, thinking about how to arrange the pieces of art she had chosen to keep along the walls.

“Remember the furniture,” Penny had texted when she’d mentioned she was doing this (texting her sister being a favorite method of procrastination). “Don’t put art behind your bookcases.”

It was good advice, so she carefully layered in the various bookshelves, the bed, the chairs.

Huh. She had more wallspace left than she thought.

She took a picture of the butcher paper and texted it to Jim.

It turns out my bedroom’s bigger than I thought it was!

A moment later a reply came back.

Beesly, is that an invitation?

She giggled.

Do you want it to be?

Instantly: you’re killing m ehere! I’m stuck at work until Michael gest back from break

She liked the typos.

That’s OK. She smiled to herself. There’s wet paint on the walls anyway.

But soon, she knew, there wouldn’t be. And she had to think: when exactly would she invite that new boyfriend of hers over to…see the big walls?