Just My Style

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

All his life, Jai knew he wanted to go into hair, but he hasn’t always been good at it. He likes to say he gave his first cut when he was five years old, and that’s true, but it wasn’t as well-received as his services are now. In fact, his mother was more than a little pissed at the hack job he did on his younger sister; she came home from work one day to find the babysitter on the phone in the kitchen and Jai standing over Carly in the living room, a dangerous pair of sewing shears in one hand and one of Carly’s ponytails in the other. Two years younger than Jai, Carly had loved the cut up until the moment she heard their mother’s wail of despair. Then she started bawling, too, and Jai found himself the recipient of a whupping so fierce, he couldn’t sit with the backs of his legs against a chair for a week.

For most people, that experience might have been enough to dissuade them from the glamourous life of a stylist, but not Jai. He simply strove to hone his talent, though his mother and sister never let him forget the one time he screwed up. Whenever they dropped by the salon for an appointment, the first thing either of them said was usually along the lines of, “Remember that time when…?”

Yes, he does. Stop mentioning it already, jeez!

After high school, Jai worked part-time at a discount hair salon, one of those chains located in a shopping mall with cheap prices and zero talent, where the bulk of the stylists’ earnings came from pushing products and not from cutting hair. How could anyone make any money on five dollar haircuts? Clients always tipped on the price they paid, never the price of the service, so if they had a coupon, the stylist got a pittance instead of a decent tip. Jai told himself it was a learning experience, nothing more, but all he really learned was that he hated working there. He hated being part of a chain corporation, and earning a salary instead of being paid per client, and working within the strict confines his managers set. He was meant for something better, he knew. He was meant for so much more.

So he took a few business classes at a local community college, with the idea that maybe he’d open his own salon, but he had no real knowledge of how a real salon operated. He signed on at a beauty academy and learned different techniques—how to cut and clip and shave, how to mix color, how to highlight, how to perm. With all those courses on his resume, he started looking at the high-end salons downtown, this time aiming for the top. Really, what was the worst they could say?

It turned out most of them didn’t even bother to tell him no—they just never called. Finally, though, he heard from Mimosa, a new salon spa in the Museum District that had a few openings and was willing to take a chance on someone like him. Someone with the knowledge and desire and talent but little actual hands-on experience. Of course, Jai should’ve been leery about that, but by then he really needed a job. Those student loans he’d taken out to cover the college courses weren’t going to repay themselves.

Mimosa was where he met Kiki Thompson. She had a booth next to his, and they hit it off from day one. They had the same quirky brand of humor and the same taste in men. Whenever an attractive client came in, Kiki would maneuver around her chair to kick Jai’s ankle. He’d look up at her, then follow her nod to the fellow and grin. Soon they were scheduling their clients so they were always working the same days, and they’d take lunch at the same time so they could spend the hour chatting in the break room or strolling down the leafy sidewalks zigzagging through the old Georgian homes in that part of the city. They became friends, the best of, and even on weekends, they were together, Kiki crashing at Jai’s place or Jai dropping by Kiki’s to pick her up so they could go shopping. They grew inseparable.

Before long, Jai told Kiki about his plans for a salon of his own. She thought it a great idea, and wanted in on it if he ever actually did it. “One day,” he told her, finally happy with where he was at the moment. He lived paycheck to paycheck and had very little in savings, so his own salon was still a dream for the future. A retirement plan, maybe, after he’d paid off his car and his credit cards and bought a house. He was happy at Mimosa, and didn’t see any reason to move on.

He learned a lot at the salon, and probably would’ve stayed there forever if the place hadn’t come crashing down around him after five and a half years. It was late on a Thursday evening—Jai and Kiki had taken off early to celebrate her boyfriend’s birthday at a nearby bar, but Jai had a wedding party scheduled to come in at seven so he left his friends and headed back to work. As he turned the corner, the first thing he noticed were the flashing blue lights from the cop cars closing off the street in front of the salon. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it as he hurried up the block. A small crowd had begun to gather outside, and he saw a few of the other stylists standing among local residents. There were even a few clients—a woman with her hair in curlers, a man still wearing a black cape to keep hair off his neck during a trim.

Jai pushed through the crowd towards the front. “What’s going on?” he asked no one in particular.

Part of him expected a scene of violence—shattered glass, blood spatter, bodies sprawled on the polished hardwood floor. But other than the police officers guarding the open door of the salon, nothing looked wrong or out of place. He didn’t get it. Turning to someone beside him, Jai asked, “What’s happening here?”

He found himself standing next to Marla, the office manager, who was biting her acrylic nail tips nervously.

“What’s this all about?” he asked her. If anyone knew, it’d be her.

And she did. “Apparently we’re out of work.”

Jai blinked at her. “What? Oh no, honey. I have a wedding party in a half hour—”

“The owners filed for bankruptcy,” Marla explained. “They haven’t paid rent in I don’t know how long, and the landlord finally got a court order to evict us.”

Jai felt the rich meal he’d eaten for dinner churn in his stomach. “But all my supplies…”

Marla shrugged. “Someone said you have like ten minutes to grab what you can before they lock us out. The owners are holed up in the office, but once the police break through the door, I’m sure they’re going to jail. So you might want to go in and get what’s yours while you can.”

“Fuck.” Quickly Jai fumbled his phone out of his back pocket. He sent Kiki a hurried text. Come 2 Mimosa STAT. 911. To Marla, he asked, “Has anyone told the clients?”

With a shake of her head, Marla resumed chewing on her thumbnail. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out soon enough, no?”