4397082.

too much candy gonna rot your soul.

"I feel like Pegaso today." Joshua checks his phone for the time, and it glints in the sun, candy-bright.

Pegaso today. It was D+B yesterday, Natural Puppy the day before; for three days straight before that it was Pavo Real, and the glass of the Shibuya buildings everywhere glittered with the reflections of charm bracelets in the shape of hearts and cupcakes and tropical fruit, the envy of every teenage girl.

When Joshua's done with his trinkets he leaves them on the concrete with the melting ice-cream cones, sticky-sweet and poison-pink, and no one ever picks them up.

"I don't have the money for Pegaso," Neku says.

"Well of course you don't." He lowers his eyelashes. "I'm thinking something in pistachio green... maybe sherbert orange."

"Whatever."

"And something for you too? My treat." Joshua opens up a tin of chocolate mints (free from the D+B 104 when he bought fifty thousand yen's worth of scarves—cashmere and tartan and houndstooth—and never wore a single one) and pops one into his mouth.

"I don't want anything."

"It won't do to be so ungrateful, you know." He slides a mint into the pocket of Neku's jeans, smile beguiling like the pretty promise of sugar, and tugs him toward the sidewalk.

Inside the Shibu Department Store it's cool and fluorescent-lit, gleaming linoleum and uniform racks of carefully colour-coded prêt-à-porter shirts and ties and lockets. Joshua chews his bubblegum in here, loud, sticky and child-sweet; the staff don't say a word when it's him.

He holds a shirt up against himself, robin's egg blue and covered with ice-cream cones and polka-dots; maybe the scramble crossing's next big thing.

"What do you think? Too ostentatious?"

Neku shrugs.

"How about for you, partner?" He smiles his model's smile; he's like Lolita as a boy, clever and fey and cruel.

"Doesn't suit me." Laconic as always, his teenage-boy self probably daydreaming of spray-paint and conbini penny candy.

"Anything suits you. That's the point." It would match his eyes, he thinks; start a revolution, perhaps, pale-eyed Japanese in overpriced t-shirts, Harajuku to Minato to Choufu awash in a sea of blue.

For a couple days, anyway.

"I don't want it."

"Suit yourself."

Joshua picks out a shirt for himself (button-up, in palest mint green, just as he said), and two bags full of things he will never wear—pink hi-tops, strawberry-scented lotion and the Prince's latest cologne.

When they leave, shirt crisp and clean and oh-so-marketable on him, there's already a line-up out the door.

Joshua gets a call from Mr. H. halfway through the day, when the sun is high and the blacktop is burning; his ringtone is synthetic bubblegum pop, innocuous and electric. He sends Mr. H. texts now and again, riddles and rhymes, Korean proverbs and recipes for mille feuille.

They wander to Cat Street, teens lining the sidewalks in J of the M and Hip Snake, ostentatious and insincere. Mr. H. greets them with a donut and a coffee each, and watches the way Joshua eats and drinks and talks as he has a smoke behind the register.

"What's with the bags, Josh?"

He pops a bubble, leans near enough so Mr. H. can smell the spit and artificial peppermint.

"All that cash was burning a hole in my pocket. Tragic, really. I'm sure you know how it is."

Mr. H. smiles around his cigarette. "Right."

Neku leaves his coffee untouched (Hanekoma never listens when he tells him he drinks it black) and instead thinks of how Joshua and Mr. H. share these sweet secret smiles much too often.

"Haven't you got somewhere to be?" Hanekoma says as he stubs his cigarette out on the countertop.

"Yes," Neku says, and Joshua laughs low.

"I suppose we have."

He leaves his Pegaso bags on the counter; you can sell them if you want, he says to Mr. H.—these are gonna be popular.

On the crowded E231 train to the Ebisu station, people are already wearing Joshua's shirt, and the windows are a sea of trendy pastel green.

Joshua smiles behind his bubblegum, innocuous and electric.