Chapter 17 #2
“You’re both the problem,” Peter said, though he didn’t take Kelly off his shoulder, and when Mia took six more shots, he didn’t turn away from the camera.
Solange was next.
She was the watcher, the kitten who sat at the back of every group and observed with the quiet, unblinking attention of a creature who was cataloguing everything and sharing nothing. She was the General Tso of the litter, and I respected her enormously.
She sat on the faux fur and stared directly into the camera lens with an intensity that made Mia actually lean back.
“She’s looking into my soul,” Mia said.
“She does that,” Peter said. “She did it to Carlos last week, and he had to leave the room.”
“She’s perfect. Don’t move her. Don’t move anything. This is giving main character vibes, big time.”
Mia shot Solange in a rapid flurry of clicks that she later described as “the most photogenic animal I’ve ever worked with.”
Solange sat perfectly still through all of it, radiating the calm self-possession of a creature who understood that she was being observed and had decided to observe back—and if you looked at the resulting photos closely, you could almost convince yourself that the kitten was the one taking the portrait and the camera was just the medium she’d chosen to allow.
LeToya was a different story.
LeToya was the biter, and LeToya’s feelings about the photo shoot were communicated immediately and without ambiguity. When I placed her on the faux fur, she sank her teeth into the corner of the fabric and attempted to drag it under the couch.
“No,” I said, gently detaching her. “LeToya, dear, we’re taking photos. This is a professional engagement.”
LeToya bit my thumb.
“She has strong opinions,” Peter observed from a safe distance.
“She has strong teeth!” I placed her back on the fur.
She immediately attacked the feather toy that Mia had positioned as a prop, shredding it with a ferocity well beyond her threat level.
Mia, to her credit, kept shooting.
“This is content,” Mia said. “This is the kitten equivalent of an action movie poster.”
“She just decapitated a feather.”
“She’s edgy,” I said. “We discussed this.”
LeToya spent the next five minutes systematically destroying every prop we placed near her, while Mia documented the carnage with the gleeful focus of a combat photographer.
The tiny bow tie lasted approximately three seconds before LeToya ripped it off and batted it under the coffee table.
The stuffed mouse lost an ear. The faux fur would never be the same.
“I think we have enough,” I said, nursing my thumb.
“I think we have a masterpiece,” Mia said. “Several, in fact.”
Peter picked up LeToya, who immediately went limp in his hands with the boneless surrender of a kitten who had spent all her combat energy and was now prepared to be held.
He cradled her against his chest. She purred because that was the contradiction of LeToya.
She would bite your hand and then fall asleep in it, and both acts were equally sincere.
Then came Beyoncé.
Oh, sweet Beyoncé.
“I have a plan,” I said. “We put her on the fur, we shoot fast, and we accept that whatever we get in the first ten seconds is what we’re working with because after ten seconds she will be somewhere else.”
“She’s already somewhere else,” Peter said.
He was right.
Beyoncé was not on the faux fur.
Beyoncé was not even in the living room.
Beyoncé was, based on the sound of tiny claws on porcelain, in the bathroom, doing something that would probably require an incident report and a plumber, possibly a mason with tools and lots of grout.
I went to the bathroom.
Beyoncé was on the toilet tank lid, standing on her hind legs, batting at the pull cord of the ventilation fan.
“No,” I said.
She looked at me.
Her expression communicated that she had heard my objection, processed it, and filed it in the same place she filed all human interference, which was nowhere.
I picked her up.
She squirmed with a full-body, liquid-muscle resistance of which only felines and defiant toddlers were capable. I carried her back into the living room, placed her on the faux fur, and stepped back.
She sat there for exactly two seconds, during which Mia got one photo that was mostly in focus.
Then she bolted.
Not ran.
Bolted.
With the explosive, zero-to-sixty acceleration of a cat who had been engineered by evolution for exactly this purpose.
She launched off the faux fur like it was a springboard, hit the floor at speed, banked left around the coffee table, vaulted off Potato (who did not react because Potato had transcended the physical plane and existed now in a state of pure, horizontal meditation), scrambled up the bookshelf using the spines as footholds, and arrived on top of the refrigerator in approximately two point five seconds.
Where General Tso was sleeping.
The sound that General Tso made when a calico kitten slammed onto his back at full speed was a noise I had not previously heard any living creature produce.
It was somewhere between a foghorn, a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in the grinder, and an emergency broadcast system alert when something has gone very wrong in your area.
General Tso erupted from his sleeping position. Beyoncé clinging to his back like a tiny rodeo cowboy, held on for approximately one and a half seconds before being launched into the air by the sheer centrifugal force of General Tso’s fury.
She landed on the counter.
On her feet.
Of course.
General Tso leaped down from the fridge, landed on the floor, turned to face her, and produced a second vocalization that was lower, longer, and significantly more menacing.
It was a sound that communicated not just anger but a fundamental rearrangement of the world order.
It further communicated his willingness to use force to enforce his new order.
Beyoncé sat on the counter, licked her paw once, and looked at him with the serene indifference of a revolutionary who faced a guillotine and had nothing left to lose.
Potato slept through all of it.
Hiro, who had been watching from his bed in the corner with anxious attention, let out a single worried whine.
Peter, Mia, and I stood in the middle of the living room, frozen, watching the standoff between a twenty-pound orange cat and a weightless calico kitten who was winning through sheer audacity.
Peter broke first.
It started as a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh, more like air burping from a Tupperware container. It was a brief, involuntary release that came through his nose before he could catch it.
Then his shoulders shook.
Then his hand came up to cover his mouth, which was losing its battle against the straightest face in Tampa. Then the hand wasn’t enough, and Peter Loupier was laughing.
It wasn’t his almost-laugh or his twitch.
Nor was it the ghost of a muscle movement in the vicinity of where a smile might theoretically live.
It was an actual, out loud, with sound, full-bodied and startled and entirely beyond his control laugh.
It was water gushing out of a dam that had been breached, all at once and with a force that suggested it had been building for a very long time.
And it was warm.
And lower than I’d expected.
With a catch in the middle where it broke and reformed, like a wave that breaks and comes back stronger.
It was the laugh of a man who didn’t laugh often and whose body had partially forgotten the mechanics.
Mia lowered her camera and stared at him.
I gaped, mouth open, eyes wide.
General Tso’s head snapped around, and even he appeared stunned.
Beyoncé, who had caused the entire thing, yawned and began cleaning her face.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said, still laughing, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just, she landed on him like a—she was on his back, and his face—”
“His face was incredible.” I was now laughing, too, the real, helpless one, because Peter was laughing, and Peter’s laugh was the funniest thing I’d ever heard because of how surprised he sounded by it.
“She rode him,” Mia said. And with those words, she was gone, too, bent over with her phone still in her hand, tears forming. “She rode General Tso like a mechanical bull.”
“He’s going to be so angry,” Peter managed.
“He’s going to hold this grudge for weeks.
He’s going to—” He broke off because the laugh overtook him again.
He had to brace one hand on the counter and let it happen.
His face in that moment was the greatest thing I’d ever seen, open and unguarded and alight with a joy that looked like it was visiting from very far away and wasn’t sure how long it was staying.
General Tso, from the floor, stared at all three of us with such profound, cathedral-level contempt that it set off another round.
Mia slid down the wall.
I was clinging to the couch with one hand while hugging my stomach with the other.
Peter had tears racing down his face. He was wiping them with the back of his hand, still smiling, and I realized I was seeing something that almost no one got to see. It was a version of Peter Loupier that existed behind every wall he’d ever built.
And it was luminous.
“Did you get the photo?” I asked Mia when I could breathe again.
Mia held up her phone. On the screen was a perfectly timed shot of Beyoncé mid-air, legs splayed, ears forward, eyes wild with the pure, uncut thrill of a beast who lived life at maximum velocity and did not apologize for the collateral damage.
She reminded me of an action star in a Mission Impossible movie as he fell from a helicopter that was about to crash.
Behind her, slightly out of focus, General Tso’s face was captured at the exact moment of impact. His expression was a thing of such operatic horror that it belonged in a museum.
“That,” Mia said, “is going to break the internet.”
“That,” Peter said, wiping his eyes, “is going to get me killed by my cat.”