"Seriously, are you mistaking me for Brittany or something?" I ask Brent as he's settling into a chair he put in the kitchen atop the wooden floor. Near him on the counter is a brand-new haircutting kit, complete with an electric trimmer.
"I trust you," he said, handing me the trimmer. "I'll walk you through it step by step. You just have to do a number four on the top and fade it to a number one in the back."
"What's a number four?" I asked him, eying the detachable combs, two of which were labeled right and left. "Do you use these based on whether you're right- or left-handed?"
My sister was the one who went to cosmetology school. She's the one who attended classes to learn how to cut hair. The most I've ever done is trim my sister's hair about a quarter of an inch when we were kids.
But since moving to Illinois, Brent has had one horrific haircut. He came home from this haircut with uneven hair on top, an uneven shaved line in the back, one sideburn, and a cut on his head. His barber was apparently blind.
The second haircut he went to cost him more than he was used to paying in midtown Manhattan, and the back of his head looked like a piece of notebook paper with all the lines in the back.
So asking someone with exactly no experience to cut your hair from now because you're sick of bad haircuts seemed like the obvious choice. Oh boy.
Never have I ever cut a guy's hair, and I most certainly have never used those electric clipper things. I told Brent that I'd be happy to try and cut his hair after Brittany showed me how to do it step by step if I felt comfortable doing so.
He promptly ignored that request and told me he was ready. So I took a chip clip and pinned an old towel around his neck, stuck my tongue out of the corner of my mouth, and followed the instruction manual on "How to Cut Hair."
Brent kept telling me I had to keep the clippers flush with his head, but I was so scared of either cutting him or cutting the hair too close, I kept lifting it higher than it was supposed to go and asking him if I was cutting too much. Cutting around the ears was nerve-wracking. And making the hair fade from a number four to a one seamlessly in the back took awhile. And I felt like I had to brush the blades free of hair after every pass.
But when I was done, I have to admit that it looked better than either of his Illinois haircuts. Sure, as the day went on, I noticed that I could have faded the hair a bit better on the left side and trimmed the sideburns a bit more, but I was quite proud of myself. All in all, it just looked like he got a normal haircut. Well, normal for somewhere other than Illinois.
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