I file the daily logs and keep the desk materials neat and orderly. I swab the deck and stack the clean company buckets. I find a corner of clutter that hasn’t been dealt with properly, and I deal with it. I study The Pirate Book of Burdens, The Pirate Book of Crimes, and The Young Pirate’s Book of Crafts. The job blooms before me at its own pace: These things can’t be rushed.

They pay me decently on this boat, just as Farren promised, though I suppose I can’t judge the fairness of my salary, having no experience with boats. Then again, I do recall a skinny canoe from childhood, settling on the side of a grassy lake.

One particular paycheck comes in the form of three red stones, clear at their centers, taped inside a windowed envelope.

The man who handles the payroll has long, twisty hair and a dimple in his chin. He wanders the ship at night, repeating conversations from earlier in the day. He reminds me of my caffeinated boyfriend, the one I date for suspense. Sometimes he perches on a post, nose to the sky, flapping his arms ever so slightly.

“He’s filling in for our parrot, Maurice,” the executive assistant explains.

I see this parrot man every evening from afar, after I finish organizing the daily logs. I’m excited to meet another temporary.

When our paths finally cross, he stops me with his hand, or wing. He puts his other hand-wing on the small of my back and walks me to a quiet corner. He breaks character, the entirety of his face softening and hardening in unexpected ways. I think I notice a rapid growth of stubble where there is none. He’s brand new. He tells me that soon I will walk the plank.

“They’ll throw you overboard, just wait,” he says calmly. He’s not like my caffeinated boyfriend at all. His hand, still pressed against my back, doesn’t shake. His hand, as steady as a wall.

“Sorry?”

“Just wait. You’ll walk the plank.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“I’m just saying,” he says, then he walks away, as if saying something out loud is ever a minor thing. He rearranges his body to once again replicate Maurice the parrot.

I don’t pay much attention to him. No one does. Every office has a long-haired man who doesn’t trim his sideburns, who tells his coworkers things they don’t want to hear, who does a passable impression of a bird. If he gets under my skin, I can report him to the first mate of human resources. Or I can go to my desk, the miniature porthole where I watch the waves and feel at ease. The view isn’t life changing, but it’s nice. I’ve seldom had a window at my workspace, and certainly none with an ocean lookout.

Most everyone else is friendly in an affirmative, nodding sort of way. There’s a woman in a patchwork skirt who makes conversation with me every morning, waiting in line for grub.

She says, “Good morning, Darla!”

I say, “Good morning to you!”

She looks supremely disappointed shoveling hash browns onto her plate, knowing I’m not Darla, that I have no desire to be Darla, that I’m not even in character as Darla, that I’m only humoring her. It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.

I concentrate over my scrambled eggs. I try to feel Darla’s absence as it relates to every other person, using an ancient meditation technique that temporaries sometimes find helpful. It’s not a standard brand of meditation. In fact, the average employee might call it “staring.” The woman in the patchwork skirt sits alone but stares back at me with quiet ferocity. I sense Darla is someone both loved and feared, and I try to adjust my temperament to properly fill her boots. I slap a lot of backs and laugh a lot of laughs, and other times I walk the deck with stern and hollow eyes. A little of this, a little of that.

“Not bad,” the captain says, encountering me on one of my jaunts. “Not bad at all.”

“Thanks,” I say, but then I wonder, Would Darla give thanks?

Under a sunset sky and over a dinner of fish chowder, my cowork-ers explain what Darla would never do.

“Never would Darla do to others as they would do to her,” says the pirate captain.

“She would do them one better!” says his executive assistant, who’s always stealing punch lines for himself. The captain rolls his eyes.

“Never would Darla steal a lady’s pudding,” says the woman in the patchwork skirt, “especially if the pudding was clearly labeled with the name Pearl.”

“Never would Darla brew herself some coffee,” says the executive assistant, “then retrieve the coffee and leave the old grounds sitting there for no purpose other than to prevent someone else from easily brewing a fresh pot of coffee. Never would Darla not brew a fresh pot after she had enjoyed her own coffee, and this is the most important bit, write this down: Never would she claim credit for the new, fresh coffee she brewed, for a fresh pot of coffee without credit is like a love note in your locker—it’s just magic, and if you take credit, you might as well not have made any coffee in the first place, at all, not ever, never! It’s like, What, you want a medal for making coffee? Know what I mean?”

“Would Darla ever drink some ale?” I ask.

“Darla would,” says the woman in the patchwork skirt, whose name is Pearl, and she passes me the canteen with a firm thrust of approval. I’m getting the hang of this, I think.

“Never would she ask for overtime,” says the pirate captain.

“Hear, hear!”

“Not Darla!”

“And never would she ask for severance,” adds the pirate captain.

“For she’s the one who does the severing!” exclaims the executive assistant, laughing and laughing. At this point the captain lifts the executive assistant in the air by his collar and tosses him overboard. We sit for a moment in silence.

“Darla,” says the pirate captain’s wife, using her spoon as a baton, “would never not dance,” and she conducts us across the deck, where we dance until dawn. The moon hangs high, and the boat careens from side to side against a blue horizon. We sway together and apart. We do the customary moves, the shuffles and kicks and awkward thrusts. The parrot man plays guitar, and Pearl plays drums.

“Conga!” the captain cries, and conga we must.

We situate ourselves to sleep under the fading stars, and I think of Farren’s glittered fingers twinkling in the early morning sky. The wind blows over our bodies like a cool cotton sheet.

“Never would Darla not do something asked of her,” whispers the first mate of human resources. His head is perpendicular to my body.

“Compliance is a great skill!” I reply.

“Never,” he says, his hand flat on my thigh, “would she say no. Because then she wouldn’t be Darla.” He uses all his various human resources to roll on top of me. “Darla does this all the time.”

“Really?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says, pressing down. “Sort of.”

So it is understood now that the crew requires something different from me than they require of Darla. It isn’t unheard of to provide assistance for needs not normally associated with a given position. I behave in accordance with the first mate of human resources’ insisted understanding of Darla. He isn’t the first man to miscalculate what a woman would or wouldn’t do, and with his hands under my skirt under the sails under the sky, no one hears a thing, least of all Darla.

Late that night, or early that morning, I feel my necklace burn against my chest. I wander to the edge of the plank, where I find the Chairman of the Board sitting and eating his pistachios.

“So, is the pirate life the life for you?” he asks.

“Yo-ho, I don’t know.”

“Make an effort, kid! You’re barely trying.”

“I am trying. I’m putting my best self forward.”

“Oh yes? Which self is that?” he asks.

I think of my many available selves, coagulated and discrete, compromising themselves for one another.

“Where’s the ambition?” he cries. “Where’s the cutthroat spirit?”

“That’s not really my style,” I say, toeing the edge of the plank.

“Let me tell you something about style,” he says. “Style was the name of my first poodle. I once bought an island called Style, and pronounced it stee-lay, just because I could. I basically invented style.”

I look off to the horizon in the hope of seeing the Chairman’s island. When I look back, he’s gone.

Most everyone on deck is still asleep. The first mate of human resources is snuggled against himself in a satisfied pile of person. The executive assistant climbs the rope ladder back aboard the boat, his clothes sopping wet.

“Hi,” he says, embarrassed. Then he goes downstairs to change.

I brew him the best pot of coffee he’s ever had in his life, and I clean the filter, and then I brew another, and another, and we don’t exchange a single word about it.