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 everheard because of how surprised he sounded by it.
“Sherodehim,” 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 Icould 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 aMission Impossiblemovie 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.”
From the top of the refrigerator, which General Tso had reclaimed, a low growl confirmed that this assessment was accurate.
Beyoncé, still on the counter, purred.
We spent the rest of the morning editing photos at the kitchen island, the three of us shoulder to shoulder over Mia’s phone, debating which shots to use. Peter, whose opinion I’d expected to be purely clinical (“clear image, accurate representation of the animal, adequate lighting”), turned out to have a surprisingly sharp eye for composition.
“That angle makes her look scared,” he said, swipingpast a shot of Solange. “Use the one where she’s looking directly at the camera. That’s the real her.”
“Since when do you have opinions about photography angles?” I asked.
“Since I’ve been looking at bad adoption photos for eight years and watching good animals get overlooked because someone took a picture of them under fluorescent lights on a white sheet and made them look like inmates.”
Mia and I exchanged a glance.
“Did you just admit your clinic photos are bad?” I said.
“I admitted they’re standard, like bad real estate photos taken by a house’s owner rather than a professional photographer.” He swiped to another photo. “Besides, you’re the one who said they were bad. I’m simply acknowledging that you may have had a point.”
He scrolled to another photo. “That one. Use that one of Kelly.”
“I thought you wanted that deleted,” Mia said.
“I changed my mind. It’s a good photo. It shows her personality. It shows that she bonds with people.” He paused. “Don’t use it on TikTok.”
“Just the adoption listing?”
“Just the adoption listing.”
Mia smiled, her gaze drifting from Peter to me,then back.
