Wrong Deck

I boarded the Starboard Queen on a Tuesday afternoon with a duffel bag and a printout of my reservation, because I don't trust phones on open water. The ship was older than the brochures let on. Paint peeling near the waterline, a faint smell of diesel mixed with sunscreen. The check-in guy, a cheerful man named Dario who said he was twenty-four, scanned my ticket and frowned.

"Mr. Rutherford, you are booked under the couples' dinner package," he said.

"There's been a mistake. I'm one person. I'm twenty-eight and single, tragically so."

He laughed, then typed at his terminal for a full two minutes. "It says party of two. Anniversary dinner, table for two, seven thirty."

"Well, the other half of the party stayed home. Or doesn't exist. I booked a standard single dinner through the corporate travel portal, I promise you."

"So the fix is easy," he said. "You still eat at seven thirty. Same window table. I just remove the other chair and cross out the anniversary on the card. Or, if the second guest shows up, you share. Either way, you are fed."

"Fine. Remove the ghost. Feed me. That's all I want from this week."

Honestly, I hadn't even wanted this cruise. My company sent me to Athens for a marketing conference, and the conference ended a day early, and my boss made some joke about me needing a vacation because I look like a fax machine. So I found a last-minute cabin on a week-long loop around the islands, mostly to prove I could do something spontaneous. I know. Booking a cruise alone through a corporate travel portal is not spontaneous. It was the thought that counted, sort of.

My cabin had one bed, one porthole, and a lifeboat drill I slept through the announcement for twice. I showered, put on the one decent shirt I packed, and went up to dinner at seven twenty-five like a man with something to prove to no one.

The dining room was loud in a friendly way. Waiters carrying trays of something fried. A lady at the next table arguing cheerfully with her husband about olives. I gave my name and the waiter, an older man with a mustache you could hide coins in, walked me to a table for two right by the window.

There was already someone sitting at it.

She had short dark hair, a yellow sundress, and she was reading the wine list like it had personally wronged her. She looked up, and we both did that thing where you squint at a face trying to place it.

"Mitch?" she said.

"Poppy. Poppy from the marketing certification thing."

"Oh my god, yes!" She stood halfway up and then sat back down, like standing seemed too big a commitment. "Three years ago. The Tuesday night course. You sat by the window and complained about the parking."

"That was me. You had that thermos shaped like a wave."

"Still have it," she said. "It leaks now. Sentimental leak!"

I pulled out the chair across from her. "Can I just say, this is the strangest table assignment in maritime history."

"Is this the couples' dinner?" she asked, and then she got this look, half horror, half delight. "Oh no. Oh no, did they seat us as a couple?"

"I think they did, yeah. There was a card. It said Happy Anniversary in gold letters and the waiter took it away very fast."

She laughed, that full laugh I half remembered from the classroom. "I booked the romance package by accident. I clicked the wrong checkbox on the website. There was a whole thing about it at check-in. They apologized for like ten minutes."

"And I got filed under couples by a booking system that apparently just does whatever it wants."

"So we're both wrong deck people," she said, and raised her glass of water. "To the wrong deck."

"To the wrong deck." I sat. The waiter appeared with a wine list and the mustache twitched with what I chose to believe was amusement. "House red is fine," I told him, and he poured two glasses and left us the bottle, which felt like a verdict.

"So what do you do now?" she asked. "Three years is a long time. Did you escape the office?"

"Define escape."

"Mitch. You work in an office."

"I work in an office," I admitted. "Marketing coordinator. I make slide decks. I have opinions about fonts that nobody asked for."

"Still." She leaned her chin on her hand. "You were so proud of that. You told the whole class you were the youngest coordinator in your department."

"I was twenty-five and I thought that mattered. I'm twenty-eight now and I know it doesn't."

"That's very mature. Depressing, but mature." She sipped her wine. "I coach surfing now. Full time. Out of a little shop on Naxos when I'm not doing contract weeks on ships like this one. They hired me to run the onboard surf workshop, which is a ridiculous thing, because there is no surf on a cruise ship, so I teach balance drills and paddling technique on deck mats and pretend the pool is a break."

"You teach people to surf on a boat with no waves."

"I teach people to want to surf on a boat with no waves. It's a distinction. Also I get paid."

"That's genuinely better than my job," I said. "I want to be mad about it but I can't."

"You should be mad about it. You came on this cruise to prove something. I can tell. You have that look, like you're collecting experiences for a story you'll tell in a meeting."

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it. "That accurate, huh?"

"Painfully." She refilled both our glasses without asking, which I liked. "Okay, here's my offer, and I'm making it because I remember you. In that course, you were the one who volunteered for every dumb exercise. The role-play negotiation, the trust fall thing, whatever. You showed up. You were bad at half of it and you still showed up."

"That trust fall was humiliating."

"It was. Everyone saw your feet leave the ground and come right back. But you did it." She pointed at me with the wine glass. "So. My workshop. Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, top deck, past the pool. Balance drills, paddling form, some pop-up practice. It's free for passengers. I want you there."

"At eight in the morning."

"Eight sharp. The deck gets busy by nine and I need space for people falling over."

"You realize I have the balance of a filing cabinet."

"Then we'll have something to work on. Look," she said, and her voice dropped a little, more honest, "I've spent three years building this thing I do. I'm good at it now. I was not good at it when you knew me. And part of me wants to show off a little to someone who remembers me when."

"That's fair. I'd want the same."

"So prove you're more than a desk. One morning. If you hate it, you never have to see me again, and you can spend the rest of the week eating the shrimp thing by yourself."

"The shrimp thing is a strong inducement."

"It's very good. I've had it twice."

The waiter came back with bread and some kind of fish that had seen better decades, and we ate and talked about people from the course. The instructor who pronounced "synergy" wrong. The guy who took notes in crayon. She did an impression of the crayon guy that made me snort wine through my nose, which she declared the highlight of her cruise so far.

By dessert we were on the second bottle and the window had gone dark, just black water and the lights of some island far off. She looked out at it, then back at me.

"Eight o'clock," she said. "Top deck. Don't be the guy who books an adventure and then sleeps through it."

"I'll be there. But if I fall over forty times, you're not allowed to laugh."

"I'm absolutely allowed to laugh. It's in my contract." She stood, tucked her chair in, and hesitated a second. "Goodnight, Mitch. This was the best booking error I've ever made."

"Mine too," I said, and meant it more than I'd planned to.

I watched her go through the tables toward the lounge, past that big locked piano bolted to the floor with a velvet rope around it like it was famous. She gave it a little pat on top as she passed, as if greeting an old friend, and disappeared down the stairs.

Eight o'clock. I finished her glass of wine too, because it seemed wasteful otherwise, and went to bed telling myself the early start was the only reason my chest felt like that.

The alarm went off at seven and I lay there arguing with myself for a full minute. Then I got up, because she was right about the collecting experiences thing, and I hated that she was right.

The top deck past the pool had six foam mats laid out in a row and a stack of soft surfboards leaning against the railing. Poppy was already there in a black swimsuit and a whistle she clearly did not need, doing squats like the morning was nothing.

"You came," she said. "I had money on you sleeping through it."

"Who took the other side of that bet?"

"The check-in guy. Dario. He said you seemed like a try-hard."

"Dario bet against me?"

"He bet on you being a try-hard. Which is winning, so far." She clapped her hands. "Okay. Shoes off, get on a mat. We're starting with stance."

Here is what I learned about myself at eight in the morning on a cruise ship: I have the balance of a filing cabinet, exactly as advertised. The stance drill was supposed to be simple. Feet apart, knees bent, low center, pretend you're dropping into a wave. I lasted four seconds before I tipped sideways off the mat entirely.

"That was fast," she said.

"You said you were allowed to laugh. Go ahead."

"Oh, I'm saving it. Get back on!" She came around behind me and put her hands on my hips, firm, adjusting. "Your weight's all in your heels. You're standing like you're waiting for an elevator. Bend the knees. Front foot angled, back foot across the deck. There."

I wobbled. I did not fall. "Is that it?"

"That's the shape of it. Now we add the pop-up, which is where people die."

The pop-up was going from flat on the mat to standing in