It was 1995 when Roy saw Pam for the first time. She was sitting on those stone bench things outside the high school and he saw her from the back. Pretty hair, decent figure. She was bent over a notebook or something, drawing, he guessed. Whatever. Football practice was over and he had nothing to do so he jogged up behind her, sat down.

"Hey."

She looked up, smiled shyly. Cute. "Hey."

He stuck out a thick hand. "My name's Roy. What's yours?"

She laughed and he thought it was very musical. "Pam."

"What grade are you in?"

"Sophomore. You?"

"Junior. I haven't seen you around here before. Are you new or something?"

The girl, whose name he now knew was Pam, looked confused. "Uh, no. I've lived here my whole life." She shrugged and smiled again. "Guess I don't stand out much."

Feeling suave, Roy leaned back on his hands and offered a broad grin. "I wouldn't say that."

Suddenly a car pulled up, blasting a Soundgarden song. "It's my ride," he explained before jumping up. "Nice meeting you."

"Yeah," Pam said. She watched him run to the car, then sat, puzzled and contemplative, until her mother arrived to pick her up ten minutes later.

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She didn't see him again for almost a month, and by then she'd almost forgotten about him. There was a school pep rally, a mixed blessing because though it allowed her to skip a class or two, it was…well…a pep rally. She found a seat near the back where she could scribble on a piece of paper until the damn thing was over with, and had barely sat down when she saw him making his way up the bleachers to talk to her.

What was his name again? Ron? No, Roy. Roy. That was it. She was pretty sure.

"Pam!" he said, and he looked genuinely happy to see her, which both pleased and surprised her, and she slid over to allow him space to sit.

"That was it, right?" he continued. "Pam?"

She laughed and he had to strain to hear her answer over the crowds of students. "Yeah, that was it. And you're Roy, right?"

He patted her on the back a little too hard. "You remembered! "

The pep rally started as a legion of cheerleaders skipped out onto the basketball court to painfully loud bass beats. Roy was on his feet instantly, clapping, pumping his fist in the air.

"Scran-TON! Scran-TON! Scran-TON" He grabbed her hand, pulled her up with him.

His enthusiasm made her laugh hard, nervously, and she looked up at the boy who was holding her arm, helping her cheer along with him, and wondered if he liked her or something. No guy had ever paid this much attention to her before.

They sat down, and Pam felt heady as the cheerleaders skipped off to the sidelines to allow the reigning basketball heroes in.

"If this was football," Roy yelled in her ear. "I'd be so out there! I'm a football player!"

She nodded. "I remember the uniform!"

"Man," he continued as the volume of the music dropped. "I love these things, don't you?"

Ten years later, Pam wondered what would have happened if she'd answered honestly.

"Oh yeah," she said, and the football player named Roy beamed at her so gladly that she had to smile back.

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By the time the pep rally ended, he had her phone number. By the time the week ended, they'd gone on the first date. And by summer, they were going steady. Pam and Roy. Suddenly she had a circle of friends, though she didn't really feel close to them in any way, and a boyfriend, of all things, who was a football player. She was never a huge sports fan but she'd dabbled, occasionally watched a quarter or a half or two on the weekends when there wasn't much else on. Now she never missed a game.

Roy was so strong, so fast. The respect people accorded him—and correspondingly, her, as a football player's girlfriend—was unlike anything she'd ever experienced. Girls she'd never seen before were stopping her on the way to class to ask if she'd like to go the mall after school. Suddenly she had plans on weekends and a boyfriend who loved her and life was speeding along at a breakneck pace. She didn't have as much time to draw on her back porch or to read but things were okay, things were good.

After a few months, she stopped accepting invitations to go to the mall or the movies with most girls. They were generally football player's girlfriends like herself, but they were boring beyond belief and didn't get any of the jokes or references she made. They only wanted to chat about football games or dates they'd gone on with Brian or Todd or Jeff, and soon Pam came to think of them as "accessory girlfriends", and hoped she didn't seem like that.

"It's like in the Godfather," she told her mother one day. She'd tried to discuss it with Roy once but she wasn't sure he'd understood. "Like how all the mob guys wives hung out together all the time. It's weird. I was talking to this one punk girl one day after school, and they all started giving me looks."

"Looks?" Pam's mother raised an eyebrow.

"Looks." she said, and she punctuated this with a sneer that she hoped would convey the expressions they'd been giving her.

Her mother nodded. She'd been through high school. "Ah, looks."

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And so after she'd stopped going out with the girls, it was just her and Roy most of the time, and she liked that best anyway. He was always so kind to her and when her birthday came around he got her a little gold filigree bracelet, which was so exciting that she almost cried. And for the first time she had a date on Valentine's Day, with roses and everything. They'd gone out to dinner at Chili's and Roy had tried to order a drink even though he was only 17 at the time, and that made her laugh.

"I tried," he said, throwing his hands up and looking goofy. "I guess we'll have to settle for beer in the truck after."

"I guess," she said, but she didn't even like beer and she thought he remembered that. After dinner they went out to the truck as planned and made out for a while, and for the first time Pam let him do things she'd never let him do before, though they didn't go as far as he wanted. It was a tiring and exciting evening.

They finally had sex three months later, just before Roy's 18th birthday. He liked it and she thought it was okay, though a little disappointing. The pats on the back he started getting from his teammates for a week afterwards troubled her a little too, even though he swore he hadn't said anything to them. They got better at it after a little while and Pam started to like it more.

When fear of the Millenium Bug hit, they'd been dating for five years and Pam was at Scranton Community College trying to get a degree. She'd wanted to go somewhere else—somewhere bigger—but Roy had told her that he couldn't bear to be without her and here he was with this great new job at the auto shop…and so she stayed. On December 31st of that year they partied like it was 1999 because it was 1999, for once, and though they were still stuck in Scranton they were together, and that made it okay, Pam decided. Maybe next year they'd be somewhere else.

They weren't somewhere else the next year…or the next year…or the year after that, and after eight years of a relationship that suddenly seemed to be going nowhere, Pam got restless feet and told Roy she wanted to take a vacation with some of her old girlfriends from school. She did, and for a weekend she was in New York. It was only the second time she'd been there and the rhythm of this enormous city thrilled her in a way she hadn't felt in years and years. She loved walking down Broadway even though she couldn't afford to see the shows, and she loved the museums and she loved the street performers.

"We have to come back," she told her friends, but that summer Mary got a job in New Jersey and left, and Ann got married and she almost never saw either of them anymore.

Early in 2003 she started talking to Roy about leaving—not leaving him, of course—but leaving Scranton and going somewhere new and exciting. She'd been working as a receptionist at a dull little paper-supply company for a while now and while it paid the bills, she didn't really like it. Who would? Roy had quit his job at the auto shop to work in the company warehouse and though it was nice to have him closer to her, she was starting to feel stuck. A week or two after she brought it up he proposed to her.

And so now she was engaged, and for the first time in a while her life seemed to be going somewhere. She happily flashed her ring about—it wasn't big, but that didn't bother her—giggled and made wedding plans with her female coworkers. She looked at wedding dresses online and examined other girls' fingers to see if they, too, were engaged or married. They hadn't set a date yet, but they were planning to do so soon. Pam thought summer or fall would be nice.

2004 hit and Pam and Roy weren't married yet, nor had they set a date. Whenever Pam brought it up, Roy would become antsy and anxious and so she stopped worrying about it, at least outwardly. Soon , she told herself, and she would sit on the couch and scribble little plans in notebooks, ideas for wedding dresses and menus and dream homes with terraces while he and his friends watched football games and asked her to get them beer.

One day, a new employee showed up at the office. His name was Jim, and Pam thought he had wonderfully expressive eyes and a nice smile. A little voice in her head whispered, If only you weren't engaged but she silenced it immediately. She hadn't been thinking about Jim that way at all, of course. And why would she? She was practically married already.