“Max,” she smiled once more. “Will you cook breakfast!?”

“I see,” said Max. “Now I know the real reason you forced me awake!”

Sakura shook her head. “No, I promise it was because you need to go buy a new suit and I need a new dress and it wasn’t because I was about to die of starvation—erm, I mean—was a little peckish.”

She brought him over a mug of hot coffee.

“I did make coffee though,” she said in a conciliatory tone.

Max took the coffee mug out of her hands and walked into the kitchen. He took a sip and decided what to make for breakfast.

“How do you feel about pancakes!”

“Hurray!” shouted Sakura. “That’s exactly what I wanted!”

Max cooked them up some banana pancakes with maple syrup and butter with some fruit and crème fraîche on the side.

They sat together at the kitchen table and munched along happily.

After breakfast, they gathered their things and headed down to the tower-zone main shopping center.

Max and Sakura walked along the air-conditioned aisles of shops, looking out for a store that sold formal wear.

“Ooh! Let’s go to that perfume shop over there next, no to the shoe shop over there!” squealed Sakura in delight.

Max was still exhausted from the mid-term exams that he had no willpower to fight Sakura and so let himself be dragged wherever she wanted to go.

Eventually, they got to a shop that sold men’s suits.

Sakura rushed in ahead of him and picked out five suits.

“Try these on,” she said, pushing them onto him. “I bet they’ll look great.”

Max stumbled into the changing room with his pile of suits while Sakura waited outside.

“C’mon out when you’re ready so I can see,” she hollered across the change rooms.

Thankfully, apart from the shop owner, it was just Sakura and Max in there. So the embarassingness was kept to a minimum.

When Max came out in the third suit Sakura had chosen for him, she clapped with delight.

“That’s the one!” she said.

Max looked at the suit he was wearing and then at himself in a mirror.

Without being too immodest, he thought to himself, he did look pretty good in the suit. He was slender but toned with muscles on par with a professional athlete in the outer-rim. For years, he never saw himself ever wearing a suit and going to a dance like just another normal kid.

I guess my life is still far from normal, Max thought to himself. Yet so different from where I was only a few months ago. For the most part, his life was far better than it had ever been before.

He looked at himself and the suit in the mirror.

It was a classic black and white suit with a white shirt and black tie.

“Perfect,” said Sakura. “That suit screams smart and handsome.”