Swimming Sweet Arrow

by Maureen Gibbon

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were". After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

Release date: November 11, 2009

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 242

Sample

Acclaim for Maureen Gibbon’s

“An amazing novel of hard lives and hard sex. Vangie Raybuck is a riveting original who goes all the way and then some—and who is able to look truth in the eye without blinking. Swimming Sweet Arrow is unflinching in its honesty and integrity. A wonderful debut!”

— Paulette Bates Alden, author of Crossing the Moon

“If a female Ernest Hemingway were contemporary and were to write a story of two young women and their raw, visceral, small-town lives, the story might well be Swimming Sweet Arrow.”

— Kristianna Bertelsen, Express Books (San Francisco)

“It’s exhilarating to find a fictional character who’s in control of her desires—even when they lead her into dangerous territory…. [Gibbon writes] with an artistry as straightforward as the arrow in the tide of her novel.”

— Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)

“I read Swimming Sweet Arrow in one impassioned sitting. Maureen Gibbon has done something brave and intelligent—and erotic.”

— Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut

“A startlingly candid debut novel.”

— Chris Waddington, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A sexually explicit novel that’s neither repulsively blunt nor falsely lyrical. For men who wonder what girls talk about when they talk about lust.”

— Walter Kirn, GQ

“The accomplishment of Swimming Sweet Arrow is in the voice—an affecting blend of innocence and experience, an attempt to give words to what seems inarticulate about love…. This coming-of-age story is both satisfying and unexpected, an account of swimming in deep water and navigating its currents alone.”

— Maile Meloy, New York Times Book Review


“Swimming Sweet Arrow is an almost crazily courageous knockout of a first novel, beautiful in its risky honesty.”

— Elizabeth Tallent, author of Honey

“Gibbon convincingly pinpoints the unembarrassed drives of late teenhood and the curious way that such energetic openings up to love, sex, and the world can cause some major shutdowns as well.”

— Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“As the reader tumbles through this admittedly explicit novel, the realization dawns that it is merely written in the language of sex…. The words and vivid description provide a racy vehicle for deeper concepts of love, life, decisions, and growing up.”

— Gina Temple, Ripsaw (Duluth, MN)

“Refreshing…. The two friends’ closeness and unpredictability, even to each other, is one of the best things about Swimming Sweet Arrow.”

— Ann Ryan, Creative Loafing (Charlotte, NC)

“A harrowingly impressive debut… Gibbon’s writing is blessedly free of condescension…. She skillfully immerses us in this world of chicken factories and greasy spoons, of keg parties and drunken couplings. And she ultimately persuades us to care
—deeply—about her unlikely but strangely endearing heroine.”

— Kevin Riordan, New Jersey Courier-Post

“Powerful…. An impressive accomplishment…. Maureen Gibbon’s first novel explores the many elements—violence, poverty, drug abuse, and religion—that can intertwine in unfathomable ways…. The sex scenes alone are enough to keep any hot-blooded reader turning pages.”

— Kara Jesella, Nylon

“There now it is all written down. The broken, working-class families, the sex, drugs, dead-end lives, and through it all the thing one really longs for: a true decency. Luminous, simple, tough, and written with stunning candor.”

—James Salter, author of A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years

WHEN I was eighteen, I went parking with my boyfriend Del, my best friend June, and her boyfriend Ray. What I mean is that June fucked Ray and I fucked Del in the same car, at the same time.

The first time it happened was an accident. We’d been at a formal dance at the school, and we all wanted to go parking and kissing for a while. The speed we did—in the bath-rooms just outside the gym—was still in our systems, but the whooshing of June’s long, fancy dress and my long, fancy dress on the car seats drove us all over the edge. I think Del and Ray even came at the same time, what with all the rocking in the car and general excitement.

After that, we planned the nights together. Each couple still had their private times—unlike Del, I couldn’t come with the others in the car—but all four of us liked the feel of the extra kissing, sucking, and nakedness going on. We went to the same cornfield each time, parked beneath the trees on the property line, and drank a case of beer. We drank and talked until,
by some cue, the touching started and the talking stopped. When we fucked, Del and I didn’t talk to June and Ray, and they didn’t talk to us. The only sounds in the car were small groans and sighs and sometimes the slippery sound of cock moving into pussy. We used either Del’s or Ray’s car, and we took turns being in the backseat.

On this particular night, we were in Ray’s car and Del and I had the front seat. After we screwed, I lay with Del between my legs, my knees opened as far as they could be between the seat and the dash. Two of our feet were up on the seat, and two were down there by the gas and brake.

“I can’t believe we do this,” June said from the backseat. I could tell from her voice that she was feeling silly. “I’m best friends with you, Vangie, and there you are.”

She and I could see each other —just eyes and the tops of heads—in the space between the seat and the door.

“You broke my rhythm with all your humping,” Ray said from the back to tease Del, and when we all laughed, Del slipped out of me, slip, just like that.

“Now I’m cold,” I said, and meant the wet place between my legs, but Del reached down on the floor of the car and gave me my shirt.

“Cover up,” he said. “I’m going to piss.”

“I’m out,” Ray said, and he climbed off June. He and Del straddled the car doors, legs going through the open windows. They had to climb out of the car like that because June and I never wanted them to open the doors and make the light go on. We liked to get dressed in the dark, grabbing our clothes from the floor, talking and laughing.

“Their asses look so funny when they do that,” June said, and it was true. The whole side of the car filled with butt, and I couldn’t stop myself from watching. I mostly watched Del, but I snuck looks at Ray, too. He had dark hair that almost looked black, but his skin was ten times fairer than Del’s. He was taller than Del, and thicker through the chest, and I thought that made him seem right for June. When I squeezed June’s arm when we were acting crazy or when I wanted to bug her, it was soft in a way that made me want to go on touching it. I thought holding her had to be that way, too, and that Ray would be good at it.

“They look silvery in the moonlight,” I said, and June nodded. She was sneaking looks at Del, too, but like the rest of what we did together, the looking June and I did at the other’s boyfriend did not seem strange or unnatural.

By the time Del and Ray were coming back, June and I had put on our bras and shirts. I watched Del walk barefoot and naked across the ground. He looked handsome. He wore his hair long in the back, and the black hair framed his face and shoulders.
Because his eyes seemed half closed and because of a small, crooked scar that split an eyebrow, Del’s face had a tough, lazy look that I liked. I also liked seeing
behind that look when he smiled or was being sweet with me, or when he was on top of me, fucking me, and the skin around his eyes puffed up because he was moving into me so hard.

There was something good about being able to see Del naked and walking toward me. I was able to look at his face and his chest and his penis, all at the same time. His body looked like it fit together, and it seemed like a dark, natural thing. What I liked best was how dark his cock and balls were, darker than the skin of his thighs and belly. I could not stop looking at the dark, good color, and just seeing him loosened something inside me. Of course he saw me looking—I was staring—and he smiled as he got back in the car.

“So you like my cock,” he whispered when he slid onto the seat beside me. His teeth were crooked and doubled back on themselves in places, and I passed my tongue hard over them when I kissed him to give him his answer. He took my left hand and moved it to cover him, to hold him, and I thought what I always thought when I touched him there: that skin couldn’t be softer.
It was like the skin behind your ear but even softer, and now he was damp against my hand.

“I like it,” I said. I knew June and Ray probably heard the whole thing, but I didn’t care. I liked that Del talked to me like that, and I liked the way his face looked when he said those kinds of things to me. He was not afraid to do things, not afraid to try things with me, with my body.

“Are you ready?” June asked.

We always went to pee together, not because we were afraid of the woods or anything, but because it was friendlier to do it with someone else. She couldn’t see where my hand was, but I think she knew anyway. I let go.

“Sure, now the lights can go on,” Ray said when we opened the car doors. We all laughed because he was sitting in the backseat,
holding his shirt over himself. A line of hair snaked down his belly, and that’s where I could see how white his skin was.

June and I walked to the first line of trees, where we could squat and pee. I even liked doing that: being outside and feeling the cool air between my thighs, the leaves and bits of dirt beneath my toes. We didn’t bring tissues to wipe ourselves but stayed and air-dried a bit.

“I just leave it all here,” June said to me.

“What?”

“Everything,” she said. “Piss, come. It all just runs out of me.”

“I know,” I said. It was why we never put on more than our shirts and bras—because we knew our pussies were so wet. I liked knowing that it wasn’t just piss running out of me but also Del. Something about being wet with his come made me happy in a way I didn’t have words for. It made me feel wild, I guess, and like a woman—but those words didn’t get at how I felt when I smelled that sharp smell or felt that slipperiness. When June and I talked about sex we sometimes used this one phrase:
young and dumb and full of come. I didn’t feel dumb, but I liked the saying because it rhymed and because it used the word come. I didn’t wash any
of it away before I went to bed, either. I might wash my feet, dirty from walking barefoot, but I’d leave that smell on me.

“Are you staying over?”

“I told my mom I was,” June said.

“Good. I don’t want to be alone.”

“I’m someone.”

“I know,” I said.

I’d heard talk in school about other couples screwing together, but as June and I walked back half-naked to the car, I knew that no one could ever be like us. No one would be better friends than June and me, and no one would screw like us. What other people did inside their cars or beside the lake didn’t matter. The four of us were inside our own web.

All the way out to the house, Del and I sat in the backseat. He kept one arm on the door, his hand in the open air, and one hand between my thighs. I squeezed his hand with the muscles in my legs to get him to think of the other way I squeezed him
—with the muscles in my pussy—and I put my arm around his shoulders. I felt tough and older when I put my arm around him.
Del was a year older than I was, and I saw him as a man, different from other guys in our grade.

“One time we’ll have to go camping,” Del said to me. “You can tell your dad you’re with her.” He rubbed his fingers over the wet part of my jeans.

“Maybe she and Ray can go.”

“I don’t give a shit what they do. I want to be with you.”

I thought about how good it would be to sleep in a tent with him, and I smiled and made a secret sign on his shoulder
blade with my fingernail—a butterfly. Sitting like that with him, I knew what I always knew after we’d been together: that it was sweet to Del, too. That’s what I saw in his face when he walked back to the car and asked me if I liked his cock. He was glad I liked his body, he was glad I liked to touch him. He would never say it that way, but I knew he felt it. Sweet, sweet, I thought when we were driving around the lake, which was called Sweet Arrow. Sweet arrow means straight arrow, an arrow that flies straight and true.

“What are you thinking about?” Del asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just about you.”

NEITHER OF my parents wanted me, so I lived by myself in a run-down apartment my dad found for me. I shouldn’t say it like that. My mom offered to have me come and live with her in New Mexico, but I didn’t want to change schools and I didn’t want to leave Del. My dad wanted to be a bachelor again, so it seemed like the best plan for me to live on my own in the kitchenette. That was what my dad called the place he found for me. It was one room with a kitchen area and a sofa bed, and a separate little bathroom. The apartment was above a small-engine repair place on the way out of town, and I think my dad picked it because he was only about five miles down the road. He bought me groceries and checked on me once each night—to see how I was, and to make sure I didn’t have Del over. I guess that’s what he thought a dad did: buy groceries and be ready to raise hell.

When the four of us got to the apartme. . .