Page 2 of Room Serviced
“So you think there’s nothing out there in the woods that we don’t already know about?”
“I didn’t say that,” Sloane pointed out. “I’m not saying that, like, human knowledge is complete, we’ve found everything, let’s pack it all in and go home because we’re done learning things. We find new species of bugs literally every day. I’m just saying that I’ve never seen any evidence of Screaming Pete or Snagtooth or Bigfoot or the Fresno Nightcrawler things or ghosts or any of it. If there were compelling, scientifically sound evidence?—”
“Okay, what exactly does that mean? Tons of people have seen these things.”
“It means scientific!”
Max made a two-handed waving gesture, sloshing the remnants of his old-fashioned around the bottom of his glass and nearly spilling it. Sloane figured that meant Kindly define what you mean by scientific.
“You know, scientific,” she said, already aware that this was unhelpful. “It means you gotta have findings, and they gotta be replicable, and testable. They have to stand up to rigorous scrutiny and all that. It can’t just be some mountain man saying he made out with the Low Pine Crawler?—”
“Eyewitness accounts are valuable!”
“Eyewitness accounts are trash.” Sloane was on a roll. “People have terrible memories, and we’re so easily influenced to remember things differently than how they happened. Eyewitness testimony probably shouldn’t even be allowed in court! Do you know how many wrongful convictions there have been based on eyewitness?—”
“I’m not putting people in jail; I’m saying that maybe Crazy Brian isn’t all that crazy and we should check out where he says the Newt Gobbler lives,” Max said, as if that was a reasonable statement.
Sloane paused again and tried to drink more champagne. The glass was empty. Right. “Is that a newt that gobbles or something that gobbles newts?” she finally asked.
“I think it gobbles newts, but it can be hard to tell with Crazy Brian,” Max admitted.
Sloane nodded, because that did make sense. “So did you?” she asked. “Check out the Newt Gobbler’s cave?”
“Of course I did. No Newt Gobbler, but…” Max paused, raised both eyebrows, and gave her a sly smile. “No newts, either.”
He didn’t seem inclined to say more. Just smirked at her like he’d somehow won this debate, which he obviously, obviously had not.
“Absence of newts is not evidence of a Newt Gobbler,” Sloane said. She couldn’t believe she had to say it out loud.
“But it is consistent with the presence of a Newt Gobbler.”
“So are a hundred other things!”
“One of which is a Newt Gobbler.”
“And one of which is aliens from the planet Kerfawobble whose entire species will die out if they don’t harvest enough newt slime, and Earth newts are their last resource.” Fuck, she was kind of tipsy and starting to get louder and was definitely yelling about the planet Kerfawobble, none of which was proper behavior for a wedding guest.
But when she glanced back at the ongoing party, twenty feet away—the bride’s older relatives sitting around tables, drinking and talking, the bride and groom and other friends on the dance floor—no one seemed to notice that she was yelling at Max. So it was probably fine.
She took a deep breath and turned back to Max, who was still sitting opposite her in the loose circle of folding chairs that everyone else had abandoned and who was still infuriating, face-wise.
“Psst. Hey,” he said, and in one weirdly graceful move, he put his feet on the ground and then leaned in toward her.
Sloane narrowed her eyes. Max’s hands were still curved around his (empty) old-fashioned glass. They looked too large to hold it that carefully, but they were. He had short gold-brown hairs on his wrists that somehow managed to catch the low light from the lanterns hung in the oak tree above them.
“What?”
“C’mere.”
Sloane glanced around. There was no one within earshot.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“Just tell me from there. Who’s gonna hear you?”
He sighed and looked like he was trying not to smile and turned the glass around in his careful hands that still seemed slightly too large for it, and Sloane had drunk too much because everything about that was…interesting.
