If you had asked Jim Halpert how he thought today would go, never would he have pictured this. Yet here he was. This was happening. He couldn’t quite believe it actually.
He had closed it. After anxiously standing in front of his potential client’s car in the golf course parking lot for 15 minutes explaining (read: begging) that Dunder Mufflin was the best choice for all paper related needs and how Jim would persist until he won the account. By some miracle, his speech and insistence had worked. And he couldn’t believe it. As he walked back to Andy and Kevin from the parking lot, he was feeling elated. He couldn’t wait to get back to the office and tell Pam, his Pam, about how actually trying at your job might not be such a bad thing at all. He could practically picture her reaction already. It was one of the many, practically limitless, benefits of their relationship. They knew each other so well that sometimes one of them could predict the other’s response before it had happened.
He would smile at her when she got back to the office, a smile that held back nothing (he had years of holding back from her that these days he was an open book 100% when it came to Pamela Beesley) and she would break out into a wider smile, say something like “you closed it?” and then run into his arms to show him just how proud she was of him.
Jim was starting to think about how they should celebrate the success tonight privately- no coworkers, no cameras- just him and her and a bottle of wine as he got closer to where his coworkers were sitting. Jim had decided that pizza would be ordered in since he assumed neither of them would want to go out. Pam would probably just want to unwind after having spent a full day putting up with Michael at the high school job fair and Jim would happily oblige her request to just “spend the night in, just the two of us please”, only after he would fake a groan and say “if we have to” as he would bury his face in her soft curls, his lips finding the spot on her neck that always made her back arch in the most subtle way that would cause Jim to forget all about the pizza they ordered in until it was rediscovered cold on the kitchen counter many hours later.
It was at that point where Jim realized he hadn’t really heard from Pam all day about how the job fair went. He assumed it just meant she was busy trying to make a medium sized paper company sound thrilling to some poor 16 year old or busy trying to prevent Michael Scott from harassing some poor 16 year old. The latter thought made Jim chuckle and shake his head. As soon as he returned to his Dunder Mifflin coworkers and saw the looks on their faces, all chuckling stopped.
“Hey guys. What happened? I was only gone 15 minutes. Don’t tell me Dwight has declared himself King of Dunder Mifflin in Michael’s absence and replaced us all with highly trained killer robots/salespeople?” Jim half chuckles, trying to break the tension. Mostly he just wants to know what’s going on.
“Jim.. Man.. there was a shooting at the Valley View high school and apparently the whole building is still on lockdown.”
It takes him a few seconds to process, as if his brain disagrees with the information his ears are taking in.
Valley View … Job fair … Shooting … Lockdown … Pam … PAM.
If you had asked Jim Halpert how he thought today would go, never would he have pictured this. Yet here he was. This was happening. He couldn’t quite believe it actually.