Buckingham Nicks A/U Series Part 4: The Dance

When The Rain Washes You Clean You'll Know

Santa Monica, California
Friday, May 16, 1997
(4:15 pm)
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"If you don't let me watch what I want, I'm going to tell Mom when she gets home that you're smoking pot in the house!"

Sara Buckingham was nine years old and barely four and a half feet tall, but she showed no signs of backing down.

She stood in the center of the living room, hands indignantly placed on the hips of the plaid skirt of her school uniform, staring down her older brother as he attempted to change the TV channel from Nickelodeon's Clarissa Explains It All to his own after-school selection. Aaron was dangling the remote in his hand, taunting his little sister, and what had begun as a little sibling disagreement was becoming a fight.

"Go watch TV in your room, Sara! Get off my back!" Aaron flopped down on the sofa, remote in one hand and a joint in the other. Their parents were not due home for another hour from rehearsal for the big show the following week, which gave him just enough time to finish the Jay & Silent Bob movie he'd started last night in his room but fallen asleep an hour in. It also gave him time to get stoned and spray the house down before they came home.

"You can go watch your stupid movie in your room, Aaron! You can't just come in here and take the TV!"

"Watch me." Aaron went over to the home entertainment center and began to remove the VHS tape of Mallrats from its cardboard sleeve, and Sara ran over to her brother and began slapping his arm. Aaron flinched, waving her away roughly. "Goddamn it, Sara, that hurts! Fuck!"

"I'm telling Mom you said two bad words too, you moron! I'm telling her everything, too!" There were tears beginning to form in Sara's eyes, but she ignored them. "I'm going to tell her you come home at eleven but your school ends at two, I'm telling her you smoke pot, I'm telling her you brought that ugly girl home yesterday and you locked the door to your room even though Mom says keep the door open if there's a girl here...and I'm even going to tell her you hit me and yelled at me when you and Olivia came home on Monday with that white stuff in the bag and told me it was none of my business and to fuck off!" Sara was openly crying now, but Aaron could see they were angry tears. She wiped away her tears in a hostile motion and said, "You can fuck off, Aaron! I'm done, and I'm telling!"

And with that, a very angry and hurting little girl who was a carbon copy of her mother ran upstairs and slammed the door shut to her room and let out the rest of her tears.

Sara had always wondered what it would be like to not be so much younger than everyone in her family. She had the oldest parents in her class, and sometimes, when she told her friends at school that her brother was a senior in high school and her sister went to college in New York, they didn't believe her. She understood, of course, why her true stories were hard to believe; she spent so much time making up stories just for fun. Her mother had told her all about the stories she wrote in her journal when she was little, and for her eighth birthday, one of her gifts had been a pink crocodile journal with a lock and a matching pink pen that wrote in purple ink that had become her most prized possession.

"Grandma Barbara used to listen to my stories every night when she'd put me to bed, and then one day she bought me a fancy book to write them all down," her mother had told her that night, tucking her in after a day of cake and ice cream and balloons and presents that was her eighth birthday party in the backyard. "You're like me, Sara...you love to make up cool stories. Now you have a place to put them that's all yours. You can show people your stories or you can keep them a secret if you want; it's up to you, baby girl."

"Mommy, I'm eight now," said Sara, lying beneath her fluffy pink comforter and looking up at her mother's long, shining blonde hair. "I'm not baby girl anymore."