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, bankedleft 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 thatcommunicated 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 ofwhere 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.
