Excerpt from Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Jenlena too; she'd have been an animal if she could. Really, she'd have grown a tail. Adam wouldn't have minded eating from a trough. He'd always found cutlery bourgeois. See? They were not even asking to fly.

4.

They survived on what he had in the pantry: peanut butter, instant ramen, graham crackers, and marshmallows, all in various combinations. Adam did French lessons on his phone in the mornings, and in the afternoons read literary theory for his master's degree. This was how they knew each other: he was the TA for one of her classes at school.

Jenlena felt certain she'd always remember the moment she first saw him. "Adam, from England," was how Professor Hudson had introduced him to the class, and he'd stood up in his denim shirt with the top three buttons undone. He was studying in Canada because he was obsessed with America, but America was too frightening, so Quebec would have to be the compromise.

Everyone loved him. You could feel it in the room when he gave his minilecture using examples from The Office. Everybody laughed and laughed. They would have laughed at anything, probably; it was simply a pleasure to make noises in his presence. "It might not make sense to you at first," he said of postmodernism, "but just think about it. Be open-minded. Then one day you'll be sitting on a bus and it's like a light bulb goes off. It'll all click into place. You'll be experts at it then. I'll be out of a stipend."

Everyone loved him, but it was Jenlena who ran into him one night at a loft party on Beaubien. She was the one who got to talk to him alone in a dark corner. "Jim Halpert is a fucking loser!" he slurred. "An allegory for the mediocrity of the American white man. No wonder we're in the shape we're in now, when he was a leading man of the aughts." He slid his hand down the small of her back like he could have been using her for balance.

Jenlena agreed with him but said the real problem with their society was that more people knew Hunter Biden's rising sign than who the mayor of their own city was.

He shrugged. "Well, it's different here when you're Anglo. I reckon it's better for everyone if we're not really a part of things."

She supposed she saw his point. "Sun in Aquarius, Moon in Capricorn, Scorpio rising. Year of the rooster, five foot eight." Being pithy about American politics was the love language of their generation. She had wanted to sleep with a professor all her life, but most grown men were too frightening, so a TA would have to be the compromise.

The morning after, he'd pulled out a stack of exams from his backpack and started to grade. "You don't mind, do you? I'm right swamped."

Then, when hers appeared at the top of the pile, he'd asked, "What did you mean here? Your handwriting's so messy."

"That's Edward Said," she said, pronouncing it with much sophistication.

In time she would have done anything. A usual story. He was four years older than she was and she liked the way he talked about "the telly." A person has to like some things, she figured; they've got to give it a shot. She would have jumped off a bridge, shaved off her pubes, grown out her pubes, let him into her asshole. He said it "grossed him out."

What Adam liked was to come inside what he called her "wet hot tectonic pussy." She had an app on her phone to tell her when it was safe to tell him yes or the five days a month it became necessary to politely redirect him to her mouth.

Her own desire was somewhat less reliable. "What do you want?" he'd ask in the heat of the moment.

"You," she'd say.

"Your hard cock," she'd say.

But that wasn't it, not exactly.

Her orgasm could be fickle, hidden among layers of childhood memories, scenes from Hollywood movies, and tips she'd heard on podcasts. Adam grew frustrated when a trick he used Wednesday did not work again on Saturday. "It always works on other girls," he said. And now his wrist was sore.

Excerpted from Mood Swings by Frankie Barnet. Copyright © 2024 by Frankie Barnet. Excerpted by permission of Astra House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.