Disclaimer: I don’t own anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. I do own many daffodils. But definitely not a single fraction of The Office.
It’s April, late afternoon, and Pam is walking home from class when it strikes her that maybe she should bring flowers to Mrs. Anderson when she goes to Roy’s house for dinner that night. She doesn’t really have any money and she doesn’t want to ask Roy to bring her to the grocery store when he picks her up, so she’s not really sure what to do with this idea until she notices the abundance of daffodils newly in bloom in front of the school library. Say what you will about the University of Scranton—it’s lovely in the spring when the weather is warm and everything is in bloom.
She’d checked that nobody was around when she started picking flowers, but now as she reaches for the last one to add to her sizable bouquet, she sees a shadow fall over the yellow bloom. “I don’t think you’re supposed to pick those,” she hears a deep voice say behind her and she turns with her handful of pilfered flowers to see who it is.
The sun is just setting and the entire campus turns golden in its glow as she meets eyes with the boy who is looking down at her, amusement dancing across his expression. He’s wearing a well-worn white Royals hat and an old gray hoodie over faded jeans. He shoves his hands into his pockets and offers her a smile.
She looks at him steadily as she rises to her full height and thinks for a second, then tilts her head a little to one side. “You can’t show up anywhere empty-handed,” she quips, and extends the hand holding the single daffodil. He looks down and reaches for the flower, then looks back into her eyes as their hands touch. Time slows and she feels a hundred things pass between them in the brief moment before he takes hold of the flower and pulls his hand away. She smiles a little shyly, turns, and walks away, not glancing back until she’s almost around the corner of the library. He’s still standing where she left him, watching her go. She waves a little and disappears.
Later that night, after dinner, she’s hunched over a table in the library trying to finish an outline for an art history paper. She stares blankly at the window between herself and the stairwell, searching for a word in the recesses of her mind, and then sits up suddenly.
There’s a tall boy jogging down the stairs on the other side of the glass. He’s wearing a wide smile and his hat is turned backwards now, giving a fuller view of his handsome face, but Pam barely registers any of that.
All she can see is the daffodil tucked behind his ear.
He’s out the door by the time she’s gathered her things to run after him. It’s dark outside, now, and a little chilly, and her jacket is still in the library so she sighs and gives up finding him without really trying. She guesses she can’t be sure it was the same boy, and anyway, she never sees him again so she never gets to find out.
She gets her associates degree in May, and she and Roy move into their first apartment a month after that. She thinks of that boy sometimes when she sees daffodils but mostly she just forgets. Roy proposes two years later, and soon after that, she takes a job as a receptionist at a paper company.
*
Jim walks into the office on the first real warm day of spring to find Pam still standing behind her desk holding a fistful or yellow flowers. “Daffodils,” he says as he’s hanging up his jacket, and she looks up at him and smiles. “First real sign of spring,” she says, and holds one out to him.
Jim takes the flower and rolls the stem back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, looking down at it thoughtfully. “This one time in college,” he says, a sort of far away sound to his voice, “I was walking to the library and I ran into a girl who was picking these.” He glances up at Pam, then back down at the flower. “She had a whole handful of them. She was cute,” his eyes flick up to Pam’s again. “So I went and said something dumb about now she probably shouldn’t do that and she smiled,” he smiles softly at the memory, “and gave one of them to me, and walked away.” He sort of gazes at the flower like he isn’t really seeing it, then smiles to himself and shakes his head, tucking the flower behind his ear. “It’s funny, you know? The things you remember.” He finally looks back at Pam, and she’s got this look in her eyes like she’s a thousand miles away, too. “What?” He says, curious.
She sort of comes back to herself, and now she’s looking at him in a way she never has before, like there are a hundred things she wants to say, but none of them are manifesting into actual words. “Nothing,” she says finally, her voice softer than usual, more high pitched. She gives her head a little shake, and pastes a familiar forced smile onto her lips. “Nothing,” she says again, this time in her normal tone.
“Ok,” he gives her a little half smile, taps his fingers on her desk, then turns toward his own. Dwight looks up as Jim’s hanging his messenger bag on the back of his chair. “Nice flower, girl,” he scoffs, then looks back at his computer.
Jim waits a beat, then quirks a smile. “Thanks, Dwight,” he says, pulls his chair out and takes a seat. He hears Pam laugh behind him and he turns to shoot her a wide smile before reaching to turn his computer on. He stands, strides over to the kitchen and returns a minute later with a coffee mug full of water. Taking the daffodil from behind his ear, he sticks it in the mug and fiddles with it until the flower is facing him before finally getting to work.
It’ll be years before Pam feels ready to ask him to tell her the story again. They’ll be dating by the time realization will dawn on his face and he’ll stare at her in wonder. They won’t really discuss it, but she’ll be weak in the knees the next day at work when a delivery man shows up with a bouquet of daffodils with her name on it. She doesn’t know, now, and neither does he, that there will be a time in the future, when she and Roy have long since broken up, and they’ll be together, and deliriously happy. For now, all he knows is that pretty girls with daffodils are a sure sign of spring. And she know that Jim Halpert is a man who, whatever age, understands
Today feels good.
Story Notes:
I wrote this, like, 3 years ago but never posted it. This actually happened to me in college, with a different beautiful boy I eventually got to be friends with, but I’m giving the story to Pam and Jim today, in some alternate universe where they go to the same college but never really meet. Enjoy!
Chapter End Notes:
Thanks for reading!
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