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

5.

Adam wanted to finish his master's degree, then get a PhD, followed by a postdoc position, a full-time teaching job, and finally tenure. It was not so complicated when you laid out all the steps like that, and he always got his assignments in on time. He also had a brother who had died of brain cancer when Adam was only fifteen, and this, he was convinced, granted him a certain immunity when it came to life's difficulties. So far, he'd never received lower than an A- in school and was rarely rebuked by the girls he wanted to sleep with.

He had a trendy bowl cut and wore black pants that made his skinny legs look like a cartoon drawing. His skin was so pale that sometimes when he was about to come, Jenlena could see the blue blood rushing down his body. She'd reach up and chase it with her fingertips.

She wasn't foreign, just named after three dead grandmothers at the same time, a mélange of cancers and bad luck. Mostly, she liked to write poems in a coil notebook that had daisies on the cover. Every so often, she typed them up to share on Instagram. During the siege, her feed was made up mostly of the people she went to university with, those who loved the animals so much more than anyone else. They posted selfies crying about it and shared infographics: 5 Signs Your Dog Was Faking It When You Came Home from Work.

Sometimes, someone conservative from her high school popped up, those who respected the government because of how the animals were breaking into people's homes. "They're going to undermine our whole infrastructure! " Jenlena read aloud to Adam for a laugh.

"No!" he said. "Really?" He leaned over to see for himself,

regarding the post as if it were a cultural artifact.

They were in his bed, both dressed in his clothes, but this, the grotesque horror of other people, brought them even closer. "Boys with that haircut always go on like that," Adam said. "I reckon they get the idea from that program about Vikings."

She asked him if he thought there would ever be an all-out war. By now, already, the animals had lasted longer than anyone had expected. "Would you fight?"

Adam said he was more inclined to fight with the animals because they saw more eye to eye on environmental issues. The government, on the other hand, would poison anyone as long as it came with a profit.

"No," Jenlena meant. "If they made you."

"Then they'd make you too," he said.

She said no because she was a girl.

"Doesn't matter." He shook his head with his lips tight. "Not in this day and age. Girls are the same as boys now."

"Then I'd run away," she said. "That'd be exciting. Go to an island somewhere. Swim if I had to, live out the rest of my life wearing really comfy clothes with nothing in particular ever happening again."

The one story she was proud of was that as a kid she'd been very good at swimming. "I passed six levels in a single summer," she'd told him. "It set a record at the pool. There was me, this tiny little girl, swimming with all the teenagers." She said she could still remember the way the boys' chiseled arms had splashed through the water. "No one has ever been as big to me as the boys from high school when I was small," she said, then added wistfully, "I wonder what they're doing now, if they ever think about swimming too."

Gun to his head, if there was one thing wrong with Jenlena, it was that she could be a little insecure. She was always asking questions about her weight and how her body compared to the women on the reality TV shows where British people had sex with each other on an island. "They don't have pretty faces, though," he'd say.

Jenlena, he thought, looked like a girl from a movie who you don't necessarily notice at first. She was petite in both mind and body, but he was often impressed by her sexual enthusiasm. Even if he didn't always quite believe her, he knew that in this day and age it was considered violence to not take people at their word when it came to sexual matters.

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.