J.D. and the Great Barber Battle Read online

  Kokila

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Kokila,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Text copyright © 2021 by John Dillard

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Akeem S. Roberts

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  Kokila & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 9780593111543 (PBK)

  ISBN 9780593111529 (HC)

  ISBN 9780593111536 (EBOOK)

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  To my mother for being such a patient parent, my family for loving me for who I am, and my siblings for the memories we created over the years. To my dear friend Anje, this book wouldn’t be possible without your dedication and belief in me, and for that, I thank you.

  —J. Dillard

  Contents

  Chapter 1: A Crooked Fade

  Chapter 2: The Nervous Breakfast

  Chapter 3: The Most Horrible First Day

  Chapter 4: Jordan’s Magical House

  Chapter 5: Another Bad Hairstyle

  Chapter 6: Me vs. the Clippers

  Chapter 7: The Grand Reveal

  Chapter 8: My First Client

  Chapter 9: The Start of a Business

  Chapter 10: Henry Hart Jr. Has a Problem

  Chapter 11: The Visit

  Chapter 12: Henry Jr. Makes Good on His Threat

  Chapter 13: The Little Barber Strikes Back

  Chapter 14: The Plan

  Chapter 15: The Challenge

  Chapter 16: The Rules

  Chapter 17: Spreading the Hype

  Chapter 18: The Night Before

  Chapter 19: The Barber Competition

  Chapter 20: The Winner?

  Chapter 21: A Real Job

  Chapter 22: Let’s Make a Deal

  Chapter 23: Off to Work?

  Chapter 24: My New Competitor

  CHAPTER 1

  A Crooked Fade

  “Sit still and look straight into the mirror,” my mom said as she turned on a set of clippers.

  The buzzing sound made me a little nervous. I shifted on my stool in the one bathroom my entire family of six (three adults and three kids) shared. It was the Sunday night before the start of third grade, and I was in the middle of a family tradition. In the Jones family, none of us kids got our hair cut before we turned nine. Up until now, my mom always cornrowed my hair and I’d liked it that way, but I was excited for my first real haircut.

  I had been checking out my friends’ haircuts all summer for ideas.

  My friend Xavier, who lived across the street, had his cool dad cut his hair into the most amazing hi-top fade. But Mr. Boom was an ex-marine and strict. He made it clear HIS time and HIS money were only for HIS kids. Even when he took us all for ice cream he made sure everybody’s parents gave their kids enough money to pay for our own stuff. No way I was ever asking him for anything.

  “Come back with five dollars!” I imagined him saying if I asked him for a haircut.

  And I’d want to yell back, “Your prices are steep!”

  But not with Mr. Boom. I’d just say “Yes, sir!” to everything.

  My best friend, Jordan, who lived next door, also had cool hair thanks to his older brother, Naija.

  Naija had already graduated from college. He would come home after work, change into his clothes that were straight fire, and sometimes cut his and Jordan’s hair. He had skills and could cut designs like playing cards into the back of his head. I would watch him and study his technique for hours. But it seemed to be happening less and less. He was a grown man with a full-time job, a new car, and a girlfriend. Naija didn’t have time to cut hair all day.

  I didn’t just want to copy one of my friends’ haircuts, though. I had so much hair that maybe I could get a small Afro with an edge up like Steph Curry. Or even something wilder like that quarterback on the Kansas City Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes.

  Jordan had an iPhone and sometimes I would look on his Instagram account at barber hashtags. I loved the guy who cut designs into people’s heads and then colored in the outline with a pencil.

  I was good at art. I always kept a set of colored pencils and paper in my backpack so I could draw whenever I felt like it. After I saw those Instagrams, I started drawing myself with all types of Marvel characters cut into the back of my head.

  Deep down, I knew I could never get The Amazing Spider-Man or any of those other styles I really liked, especially since there was only one barbershop in town, Hart and Son. They offered three types of kids’ haircuts—a baldie, a Caesar, or a fade. Sometimes I’d go with my friends on Saturdays, and getting a haircut there took longer than it did to sit through one of Pastor’s Sunday sermons. Your day was shot to pieces. I figured my mom could manage something simple, and plus I knew we did not have extra money to spend.

  “I want a basic fade,” I told my mom.

  I asked for her phone and showed her a picture of Michael B. Jordan, the villain from the movie Black Panther.

  “Okay, baby,” she said. “I can’t believe you are going to third grade.”

  I loved the weekly time my mom set aside to style my hair. My younger brother, my older sister, plus my grandparents, lived with us. It was hard to get alone time with Mom. Especially since she ALWAYS seemed to be in school, even more than me!

  At first, she told us she was going back to school to become a nurse. But after spending six months working at the hospital, she quit.

  “I hate the hospital,” Mom said one night after a long shift. “Everybody isn’t treated the same.”

  I didn’t know exactly what happened, but I used to overhear her talking to my granddad about people being turned away for not having insurance or patients being given pills they didn’t need!

  So after she sat at the dinner table one night with tears in her eyes, Granddad told her if she hated the job that much, she just had to stop.

  “There’s plenty of other jobs in the world,” he told her.

  I knew it was hard for her. Mom loved medicine and her dream was to become a nurse and help sick people. It made me so proud to hear how great she was at it and how neat and clean she kept all the patients’ rooms. It made me keep my bedroom extra clean, too.

  So Mom went back to school to get something called an MBA and her thick books that said ANATOMY now said things like STATISTICS 101 and MANAGEMENT. She had told us she had seen a job opening in the mayor’s office, but she needed this MBA thing to apply.

  Mom’s super smart. She didn’t always get a 100 on her tests, and she di
dn’t expect us to, but she said the important thing was to always try as hard as you could.

  A couple of years ago, all of us moved in with my grandparents after my granddad had a heart attack.

  “It’ll just be for two months, until Granddad feels better, then we’ll move back with Dad,” my mom had told us.

  Well, two months turned into two years.

  Dad sent money sometimes, and Mom never said anything bad about him, but I didn’t really know why they split up. They met when they were track stars at Mississippi Valley State, and even today Mom had what she called her “runner’s legs.” Sometimes she would race me and my sister around the big track at the local high school and she’d remind us why her nickname as a kid had been “Cheetah.”

  So it was my mom, my older sister, Vanessa, my baby brother, Justin, and my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Slayton Evans, all in an old house built in the 1930s. Like most houses in Meridian, Mississippi, it had a closed-in porch so you could sit outside when it was hot, which was most days, and all the rooms were on one floor. Luckily, I still got my own room since Vanessa slept with Mom and Justin loved sleeping with my grandparents.

  “Baby, did you hear me?” my mom asked. I checked the time on her phone. It had been about twenty minutes already, and she’d finished cutting my hair.

  “Well, what do you think?” she said. “I can’t believe how grown you look.”

  I stared into the mirror.

  What I saw was not good.

  My mom had cut my hair down, all right, but my hairline looked like a hilltop or a mountain range. It definitely wasn’t straight like I’d seen in pictures or on my friends.

  “I can’t go to school tomorrow looking like . . . this!” I told my mom.

  “Nothing is wrong with your hair,” she said. “You are not missing out on the first day of school. Now please get ready for bed.”

  I sighed and my shoulders fell three inches as I reached for my toothbrush and started to get ready to brush my teeth.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep.

  Maybe I could fake being sick?

  My hair looked terrible.

  I didn’t want anyone at school to see me like this.

  How many ways could the third-grade class of Douglass Elementary make fun of a bad haircut?

  Well, I was about to find out.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Nervous Breakfast

  The next morning my entire family sat around eating grits, eggs, bacon, and buttered toast with jelly. Granddad had to watch his diet now, but he could never pass up a good piece of bacon or two.

  My family was always busy, but Grandma loved to make everyone breakfast before we all left the house. “Fuel for the day,” she’d say as she and my grandfather drank cup after cup of coffee without talking much.

  The people in my family weren’t big talkers except my sister, Vanessa. I was pretty sure she was friends with every girl in Meridian between the ages of ten and thirteen. The only person in my family who had a cell phone was my mother, and so Vanessa would spend as much time as she could talking on my grandparents’ landline, dragging the cord around the house as she talked.

  I sat at the table quieter than normal, wearing a Mississippi Bulldogs baseball cap.

  “James, take that hat off while you’re eating!” my granddad said.

  Granddad, a tall, slim man with glasses, had recovered well from his heart attack. In fact, even though he had retired from running the local JCPenney, his health scare inspired him to go into the burial insurance business.

  “We’re all going to die, right?” he said. Granddad treated it like any other regular fact.

  Everyone in our family had a burial insurance policy. Even us kids.

  Granddad didn’t play. We couldn’t even say “Huh?” or “What?” around him. Everything was “Yes ma’am,” “Yes sir,” “No ma’am,” and “No sir.”

  And his punishments were terrible—like not playing outside for a week or making us read boring books aloud to him and give reports.

  So the first time he asked, I took off my hat.

  No one said anything. They just looked at one another nervously until finally, Vanessa spoke up.

  “What happened to J.D.’s braids?” she asked.

  “I cut his hair. It looks fine,” my mom said. “Now let’s finish eating. Everybody has a long day.”

  The morning was moving too fast, and I’d have to leave for the bus soon. I needed to think of something quick.

  “I want a ride to school today,” I said.

  “Why?” my mom asked. “You always take the bus with Jordan.”

  Granddad jumped in before I could continue.

  “Stop this hardheaded act you got going on this morning, James!” my granddad said.

  What he meant was that we already had our rides figured out. He took my mom to school, my grandmother and Justin to her ceramics studio, and he dropped off Vanessa on the way. Vanessa was already in middle school even though she was only in fifth grade. In Meridian, grades five through eight were all in a separate building. Her school was close to Mom’s college.

  “Oh, Lord! James, stop all this fighting first thing in the morning,” Grandma piped in.

  “Oh, Lord” was her favorite thing to say. Grandma, a deep-brown-skinned woman who kept her salt-and-pepper hair cut short, LOVED church and she was the reason we always had to go. And not just on Sunday mornings. There was weeknight Bible study, Sunday morning Bible school, and choir. Granddad played piano at church sometimes and even practiced on the Baldwin piano in the living room. Mom and Vanessa were excellent singers. I usually lip-synched. Musical talent was something that skipped over me, but I was good at art like Grandma.

  Like Granddad, Grandma didn’t play, so I dropped it.

  On a normal day, I loved taking the bus with Jordan. He was my best friend, but he could also give me a hard time.

  Jordan would definitely have something to say about my hairline, and I would need EXTRA-tough skin to make it through the ride to school.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Most Horrible First Day

  I snuck out of the house with my baseball cap and walked to the bus stop with my jacked-up hairline covered.

  I stood quietly next to Jordan, and it wasn’t long before he had something to say.

  “You never wore a hat to school before, J.D.,” he said as he knocked my hat to the ground, sending up a puff of red Mississippi dirt when it landed.

  “Whoa!” he said as soon as he saw my head. “What happened to your hair? Your hairline looks like LeBron James’s.”

  “My mom did it,” I said. “It’s okay, though. I’m going to get it fixed.”

  “By who? I know you don’t have money to go to the barbershop. You don’t even have money to pay Naija for a haircut!” Jordan said, rubbing it in.

  The ride to school only got rougher when Jordan took my hat and tossed it around the bus and even more kids saw my hairline.

  I pulled out my notebook and started to draw pictures of comic book characters and cartoons. I would usually draw the entire Marvel universe over and over, but today’s teasing called for something more complicated, like Lego Batman.

  My art was award-winning. Once I got third in a competition for a sketch of a bass fish. It was still hanging up on a wall in the Meridian mall.

  “J.D.’s hair looks worse than Kevin Durant’s!” Xavier said, smacking my notebook closed.

  “Yeah, J.D., you looked better with your braids.”

  That comment came from a girl named Jessyka. Jessyka always sat with my friends and me at lunch because she was on the peewee football team with us. She wore her hair in ponytail twists, and her nails were always painted different cool colors and designs every week. Sometimes while we ate, we’d look at YouTube videos on her phone. I always wanted to watch barber channe
ls.

  Jessyka was also Vanessa’s friend from kids’ track-and-field. And she wasn’t just ON the team, she was the STAR. Jessyka anchored the boys’ and girls’ 4 x 100 relay team, so that meant she was faster than EVERYBODY. She was so good, she got to run with ten- and eleven-year-olds. Sometimes she would come over to my house and paint Vanessa’s nails.

  “My mom wants me to look like Flo-Jo when I run my races,” she told me. “Flo-Jo is my hero! I watch YouTube videos of her. I’m going to start uploading videos of my own races soon. And maybe videos of me doing other kids’ nails.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure who “Flo-Jo” was, but when I asked my mom, she said Flo-Jo was an amazing track star and her hero, too.

  Even Jessyka’s last name, Fleet, made her sound like a born athlete.

  It was so embarrassing to hear her say something bad about my hair.

  But if I was being honest, I was used to being teased.

  My clothes and shoes were hand-me-downs from my aunt and uncle in North Carolina. They had kids a bit older than me and mailed a box of my cousins’ used clothes every time the weather changed, so I was always out of style.

  Before, my hair was the only thing no one made fun of!

  We finally pulled up to Douglass Elementary after the longest bus ride ever. Nothing had changed about it from the year before. Everything about Douglass was old. Our dusty schoolbooks nearly fell apart, the stairs creaked when you stepped on them. One time a kid almost fell through!

  We had to change classes after every subject, and although I tried to keep my hat on in between, every teacher told me I had to take it off when I sat down at my desk. So all morning, different groups of kids of all ages could get a crack in.

  “Yo, your hair looks a mess!”

  “J.D.’s MOM cut his hair . . . !”

  Jordan could always get the other kids to pipe down if it went too far. But Jordan was never in class with me because I was in honors classes. He could be, too, but I think he filled in the wrong bubbles on multiple-choice tests on purpose.