Chapter 17
Benji
“Absolutely not,” I said, looking at the photos on his laptop. “Peter. PETER. These look like mugshots. These look like the kittens committed a crime and you’re documenting them for the police.”
Peter needed adoption photos for the kittens, and I had opinions.
“They’re standard clinic photos,” he argued. “White background, good lighting, clear view of the face and body.”
“They’re depressing, Peter. Look at this one.
” I pointed at the screen, where LaTavia was staring at the camera with the wide, frozen expression of a hardened criminal who had been placed on a white sheet under a fluorescent light and told to be adoptable.
“She looks like she’s being held hostage.
Shit, Peter, she looks like she’s blinking ‘help me’ in Morse code. ”
“She looks like a cat.”
“She looks like a cat who has given up on life. And this one.” I swiped to Beyoncé’s photo, which was blurry because Beyoncé had obviously been in the process of escaping when the shutter clicked.
“This isn’t even a photo. It is a crime scene.
I can clearly hear the police saying into the camera, ‘This is the last known image before the subject disappeared.’”
Peter was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, watching me critique his photography. He understood, after months of forced cohabitation, that once I engaged with a topic at this volume, the most efficient path to resolution was to let the energy run its course.
“They’re adoption photos,” he said. “They don’t need to be art.”
“They absolutely need to be art. These photos are the kittens’ Glamor Shots.
They are the difference between someone scrolling past and falling in love.
You have five incredible kittens who need homes in two weeks, and you’re sending them into the job market with the visual equivalent of a LinkedIn profile taken in a bathroom mirror. ”
“Fine. What do you suggest?”
I was stunned. His surrender had come far too easily. This had to be a trap.
“I suggest,” I said slowly and deliberately, waiting for the springer to spring and teeth to snap and my foot to be snared. “You let me do a photo shoot.”
“A photo shoot?”
“A professional photo shoot with good lighting, good backgrounds, and personality-driven compositions. Each kitten gets a setup that matches his or her individual vibe. Beyoncé gets action shots because she’s a diva and an escape artist. LaTavia gets soft lighting because she’s gentle and deserves to look like the angel she is.
Kelly gets something cozy because she’s the cuddler.
Solange gets the regal treatment because she’s the quiet one with hidden depths.
And LeToya . . .” I paused. “What does LeToya do, exactly? What is LeToya’s whole thing? ”
“LeToya bites.”
“LeToya gets an edgy shoot. She’s punk rock kitten. We lean into it.”
Peter stared, eyes squinted, for a very, very long moment.
His face was doing the thing where multiple expressions competed for dominance and none of them won, resulting in a kind of tectonic stalemate that read as neutral but that I’d learned to interpret as an active internal debate.
“When?” he asked.
“Saturday. You’re off, I don’t work until five, and the light in the living room is best between ten and noon.”
“You’ve assessed the light in my living room.”
“I’ve been filming TikToks in your living room for months, Peter.
I know where every photon in this apartment goes.
The ten o’clock light comes through the east window and hits the couch at an angle that makes everything look warm and golden.
By noon, it moves to the kitchen and the whole room goes flat.
We have a two-hour window. This is a precision operation. ”
“It’s kitten photos.”
“It’s kitten photos that will determine whether five living creatures find permanent homes or continue to languish in a system that is already over capacity. We’re talking ‘Please, sir, may I have some more’ territory, Peter. The stakes are high. This is not a drill.”
He uncrossed his arms, reached for his coffee, and took a sip.
“Fine.”
On Saturday morning at 9:45, I turned Peter’s living room into a photography studio. Peter watched from the kitchen island, a man observing a natural disaster that he had technically authorized.
I’d borrowed two ring lights from Mia. She had delivered them personally, along with a bag of props she’d assembled from what she described as “my content emergency kit.” Said kit contained feather toys, miniature hats, tiny bow ties, a square of faux fur, several swatches of colored fabric, and a small stuffed mouse that looked like it had been purchased specifically for this purpose within the last twenty-four hours.
“You told Mia,” Peter said.
“Mia is my creative director. She is essential to this operation.”
“Mia brought tiny bow ties.”
“Mia is a visionary. Respect the art, Peter. Respect the art.”
Mia, who was setting up a fabric backdrop over the couch, looked over her shoulder and said, “The bow ties are optional but strongly recommended. A bow tie increases adoption click-through by thirty-seven percent.”
“You just made that up. It’s not a real statistic,” Peter said.
“All statistics are real if you say them with enough confidence and have a chart. I can show you my Excel spreadsheet. I learned that from the internet.”
Peter opened his mouth to respond to this, appeared to calculate the futility of arguing with two people who were already arranging ring lights around his couch, and closed his mouth again. He poured a second cup of coffee, clearly fortifying himself for an ordeal.
“I’m going to need your help. You’re the kitten wrangler or kitten whisperer, whatever you want to call yourself.
We’ll get it right in the credits, I promise,” I told him.
“I can’t shoot and wrangle at the same time, and Mia’s on the camera because her phone takes better photos than mine, and she’ll fight me if I don’t let her shoot. ”
“You want me to wrangle kittens?”
“You wrangle kittens every day. This is just wrangling with a purpose. Wrangling with intent. The deliberocity of the wrangle.”
“Deliberocity isn’t a word.”
“Peter! Don’t argue with my muse. It’s impolite and alters my aura. The quints need our auras strong in this moment of direness . . . dire . . . necessity . . . in this moment.”
He sighed.
It was the sigh I’d come to think of as the Peter Capitulation Sigh.
It was a long, slow exhale that communicated, in the nonverbal language of a man who had been gradually eroded by proximity, that he was going to do the thing I wanted, and that he wanted me to know it was under protest even though we both understood the protest was ceremonial at best.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll get the kittens.”
LaTavia went first because LaTavia was the easy one.
I placed her on the faux fur square that Mia had positioned in the center of the golden light patch.
She sat there with the placid, agreeable expression of a kitten who was genuinely happy to be wherever you put her as long as the surface was soft and no one asked her to move quickly.
She was the only kitten in the litter who seemed to have been born without the gene for chaos, and I loved her for it the way one loves a harbor in a storm.
Mia got thirty perfect shots in four minutes.
LaTavia in profile, LaTavia head-on, LaTavia mid-yawn (which Mia captured at exactly the right millisecond to make it look like a tiny roar), and LaTavia with a bow tie that she accepted without complaint and wore with the dignified tolerance of a cat who understood that fashion was a collaborative process.
“She’s a natural,” Mia said. “If I could shoot every animal the way I shoot LaTavia, I’d have a calendar by now.”
“She’s a good girl,” Peter said, scratching behind her ears with one finger. “Always has been. She’s going to make someone very happy.”
Something in his voice snagged, a micro-hesitation that I caught because I’d been calibrating my ears to Peter’s voice for months and could detect emotional weather changes at barometric pressures most people missed.
He was thinking about the kittens leaving.
He’d told me he didn’t name fosters because naming creates attachment.
I’d named them anyway, and now we were both attached, and in two weeks they were going to homes that weren’t ours.
I filed that away.
Today was not the day for that.
Today was the day for tiny bow ties and golden light.
“Bring in Kelly,” I said.
Kelly was the cuddler. The cuddler’s primary interest during the photo shoot was not being photographed but rather climbing onto the nearest human and falling asleep.
I placed her on the faux fur.
She immediately stood up, walked off the faux fur, climbed Peter’s leg, scaled his torso, and settled into the crook of his neck. She began purring at a volume that suggested she had mistaken his body for a heated bed and intended to stay.
“Kelly,” Peter said.
Kelly purred harder.
“Kelly, I need you on the fur.”
Kelly closed her eyes and bonded more aggressively with his neck.
“This is going to be a problem,” Peter said.
“No, this is going to be the best photo ever,” Mia said.
She was right.
What she captured in the next thirty seconds was Peter Loupier standing in a column of morning light with a kitten asleep on his shoulder and his face doing the thing it did when an animal chose him.
“Delete that,” Peter said.
“Absolutely not,” Mia said.
“That’s not an adoption photo. That’s a photo of me.”
“That’s a photo of a kitten on a person who loves her. It’s going to make someone cry in the best possible way. You can fight me on this, but you will lose.”
Peter looked at me for support.
I raised both hands in a gesture of neutrality that was not neutral at all.
“She’s the creative director,” I said. “Besides, I’m scared of her.”