Father, you gave Johnny his last real haircut, his last before the head shave he must have had at the Schaumburg Medical Center during his stay there. The haircut occurred a few days before school started. As usual, Clippers was busy at that time of the year. Already Jermaine Tucker, Kevin Stein, Fred Winchester, and Henry Axworthy had come in, each asking for feathered bangs. You kept cracking the same lame joke about feathers: Were they Indians all of a sudden? Were Iron Eyes Cody and Sitting Bull all the rage among thirteen-year-old boys?

You like lame jokes, Father. Hence, the poster on the wall of a bald man with the caption HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW. Or the sign that reads, NO, I DON’T PULL TEETH because in the Middle Ages barbers did minor surgery like tooth extraction. As you told everybody, the red stripe in the helix of the barber’s pole originally stood for blood and the white stood for bandages.

In the summer and on weekends, I liked helping out at Clippers. I would sweep the floors, dust the bottles of shampoo and hair tonic kept in the shop window, and bring patrons glasses of lemonade, which, Mother, you claimed was homemade (though it came from frozen concentrate). You would both send me to fetch lunches at fast-food restaurants. You wanted fried chicken, pizzas, and hamburgers: meals I disapproved of because they cut lives short. I would bring myself back a salad and a baked potato and explain to you how cholesterol built up in arteries till plaque dammed up the blood flow to the heart or brain.

I was describing arteriolosclerosis on the Saturday afternoon in late August when Johnny Henzel stopped in, hair wild and down to his shoulders. I had not seen him all summer. Henry Axworthy, who lived in our building, had taken over Johnny’s paper route. I would sometimes see Johnny’s sister, Brenda, walking Rover the basset hound. She looked a lot like Johnny: same double crown, same dimple in one cheek. One time I had asked where her brother had gone, and Brenda had frowned. Why did so many people frown when I attempted small talk? She had replied with a terse “He’s at camp” and then hurried off.

Johnny did not ask for feathered bangs. He asked for an eighth of an inch off (I figured his parents had sent him for a haircut he did not want). “An eighth of an inch?” Father said. “I never made it to high school, my boy. I can’t even measure that small.”

Johnny and Father came to a compromise: a half inch. Johnny did not talk during the haircut, or even look at himself in the mirror. He simply stared at his lap. He was wearing terry-cloth sweatbands around his wrists, like those worn by tennis players, and I thought he had probably been playing tennis at camp.

When I offered him some lemonade, it seemed he barely recognized me, as though I had changed over the summer instead of him.

Father, you trimmed the half inch and then whisked away the barber’s apron. (I always admired how you did this with a flourish and without leaving any hair clippings on your patron’s lap.)

After Johnny paid Mother his five dollars at the cash register, I went up to him and again attempted small talk: “So, Johnny, did you enjoy your experience at camp?”

“Camp?” he said.

“Yes, Brenda told me you were away at summer camp.”

He looked at me with steely eyes. After a pause, he said, “Yeah, I was away at Camp Squeaky Fromme.”

“Did you have a pleasant stay?”

He finally smiled, or at least the corners of his mouth lifted. “It was a laugh a minute, Boo, a f*cking laugh a minute.”

Then he pushed through the front door of Clippers, and the bell jingled behind him.

Mother, you asked me what was wrong with Johnny. He seemed a little off that day, you said. I told you I did not know if anything was wrong. “He was away all summer at Camp Squeaky Fromme,” I said.

Mother said, “Squeaky Fromme?”

“Strange name for a camp,” I said. “It sounds like the name of a cartoon mouse.”

“Oliver, Squeaky Fromme is the crazy lady out in California who tried to assassinate President Ford.”

“That is illogical. Why would a camp be named after that lady?”

Mother gave me a smirk. “That boy’s pulling your leg.”

I thought, Why would Johnny Henzel pull my leg? Jermaine Tucker, Kevin Stein, Fred Winchester, and Henry Axworthy might do so. Johnny Henzel, however, would not. He was different. He saw the beauty in slate gray skies. He saw the appeal of early-morning solitude.

And, unlike my other classmates, he saw something good and worthy in me.