Author's Notes: Some people party on the second day of spring break. I study for AP tests and write fanfiction.
Disclaimer: I don't own The Office.
Mirror, Mirror
I.
Meredith Palmer knew perfectly well that she was no role model.
She was employed at a midlevel paper company and didn't think she would be promoted anytime soon. She had commitment issues, and she knew she drank too much. There was that incident with Michael after the Christmas party. She was a promiscuous alcoholic. She liked to party. And while Meredith didn't have any problems with the way she lived her life, she didn't want her daughter following in her footsteps.
Wendy was fifteen. She was smart - straight A's in school. Meredith had always been sure that her daughter would really get somewhere in life. She wouldn't be like Meredith, stuck at some no-name company and stealing drinks every three seconds. No, Wendy would be successful.
Or, that was what Meredith had always told herself.
Jake had spent the weekend with Wendy, their father, and that other woman. He had come home to report - rather smugly, since he was always the one getting into trouble - that Wendy had been caught with drugs and had consequently been grounded.
This was all wrong, Meredith had thought. Wendy was supposed to be interested in textbooks, not drugs. Wendy was supposed to amount to something; Wendy wasn't supposed to end up like her mother. Meredith wondered if she was drinking, too.
Maybe the apple didn't fall too far from the tree after all.
After Jake had gotten absorbed in a video game, Meredith had retreated into the bathroom. She stared at herself in the cracked mirror. She wondered if this was what Wendy would look like in thirty odd years.
II.
Pam had come to the conclusion that sleeping in her childhood bedroom again was kind of weird.
Both Roy and her father were away for the weekend, so Pam and her mom had decided to spend Friday through Sunday together. Pam had driven up after work, and she and her mom had had dinner. It had all been very nice, until Pam had encountered the little problem of Not Being Able to Sleep.
She got out of bed and turned the light on.
Her room hadn't changed much since she was sixteen. Same white walls, same pale purple curtains. There were pictures of herself and Roy here and there, and there were others of her and her sister. Most of the pictures included Roy. She focused her attention elsewhere.
Her bureau sat where it had always been, against the wall opposite her window. It was large and white and had a mirror attached to it. The mirror was round, and Pam had stuck even more pictures on the edge of it.
Pam felt odd and out of place but tried to shake the feeling off. She got out of bed and looked at herself in the mirror.
She was wearing flannel pajama pants and an old t-shirt. She had haphazardly pulled her hair back before going to bed.
She studied her face closely. Her skin was pale. Her eyes had something of a sad look in them. It was as if the spark had gone out of them. She smiled, but it really didn't make much of a difference.
When had it gotten like that? she wondered. When had her spark faded?
She looked at her pictures. She had looked happy in them. She'd had Roy then, and she still did.
Pam looked around the room again, surveying the remnants of the girl who she had once been, whom she was still trying somewhat unsuccessfully to be.
What if she couldn't be that girl anymore? What would everything come to?
III.
Toby slipped out of the office, into the parking lot, and into the his car just to get away from it all. Just to take a break. All he wanted was five minutes to himself.
Today had been rough. Really, though, it hadn't been worse than a usual day. His ex wife being difficult, Michael being Michael, everyone else acting as if he didn't exist: that was the recipe for Toby's daily life. Usually he dealt with it, but today he was tired of it all.
And that was why Toby sitting was in his old car with the faded red paint. He was alone, safe from all his troubles. He considered turning the radio on but decided against it. The silence was golden.
He didn't get a lot of silence, not a lot of time to just sit there and think and do whatever he pleased. His job required him to listen patiently to other people's problems. Toby had always done what he was told to, ever since he was a kid, so of course he listened to his coworkers' issues without complaint. He did it diligently, so well that it wore him out. And it was never silent. It was always - Jim's immature pranks, - Ryan is suck a jerk!, or -you suck Toby.
It was all so loud, in the office, in his everyday life. He needed to get some silence, hence his position in his car.
Toby was good at being silent. No one had noticed him as he left the office. He had gone unnoticed into his car. He was so good at being silent, yet he never got any silence himself.
He glanced at himself in the review mirror. He had sad eyes with prominent bags under them. He looked so tired. And he felt tired. Tired of living to serve everyone else and not himself. Tired of never having any silence.
He cursed himself for not having the courage to change that. He stepped out of his car and entered back into a loud, loud world.