Sweet Romance12 min read
The Peach App, The Fallen Panels, and the Boy Who Was a Tree
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1
"I didn't think an app could change my entire life," I said aloud to the empty room, more to prove I was still myself than because I expected an answer.
"Apps do strange things," Everest Olivier replied from the chair opposite me, voice low and almost amused. He was exactly as my old drawings had always painted him—delicate, tired, impossibly pale. He leaned forward. "Did you get the peaches?"
"I did." I touched the cardboard box like it might be another dream. "A box of white peaches, Everest. They smell like... like something I drew once."
"You fed them already," he said.
I turned the box lid and laughed without humor. "I ate one. It was the best peach I've ever had."
"Because it's attentive to you," Everest said simply. "It was made to be."
2
For the record, I had downloaded that silly social app because I was tired of being the woman at home who kept missing the world outside while drawing panels no one seemed to remember. I had posted one silly want-ad: looking for someone to... be an other half, play a scene, make me feel less alone.
"I saw your post," a moderator wrote at first. "I'll keep an eye on things."
He signed that message with a handle that was odd and pretty: PeachSong. I thought it was a joke. I thought: some cute teen trying to be clever.
"Why are you even moderating?" I poked at his avatar. "And why are you telling me male peaches are worth twofold when female peaches are one? What kind of world is that?"
"Different people value different things," he typed. "My peaches lengthen lives. Male fruit twice female."
"You mean... what? This is ridiculous."
"Then stop wasting my time."
3
We argued like that for a month. The app kept our thread alive, and we kept answering. It turned from rational debate into ritualized insults.
"You're ridiculous," I typed one night, exhausted.
"So are you," he wrote back.
"You're a fool."
"No, you are."
"You're the fool!"
Our stupid ping-pong of petty anger lasted and grew comfortable. It was a fight that felt like being seen; the argument itself became proof we existed to each other.
"What's your name if I'm to insult you properly?" I demanded at some point.
"Everest," he answered.
"Ha," I snorted. "That sounds like a mountain, not a boy."
"Mountains can be lonely," he replied.
4
Then one day I saw his photo: the face I had always failed and failed again to draw the right way. A pale-skinned youth, like the lead I had sketched years ago for my first serial, "Forbidden Peach Orchard." He looked like someone who smelled of chalk and old library books, like those lonely boys in high school who always looked like they were about to leave and never did.
"Hi, husband," I wrote, the words ridiculous and mine.
"…"
"Are you real?" I asked. "Are you a person or just a better lighting filter?"
"Since you're asking," he answered, "I can be both."
5
We made plans. "Meet me," he wrote. "At eight, at the thousand-trees gate."
"What's the thousand-trees gate?" I asked.
"A name," he replied, as if the world should already know. "Bring yourself."
6
I was tipsy that night. I had been to a wedding I hadn't been invited to and then to a bar where I tried to drown whatever thin portion of myself still believed that a life of drawing mattered. I followed a small blue butterfly that had the nerve to look like something you could only find in fairy tales. It hopped from one streetlamp to the next until it led me to a peach tree in peak bloom—yes, in winter, in the middle of a city.
"Look," he said when he stepped from the blossoms. He was exactly like his avatar, because he had been my avatar. He tapped my forehead like a friend, like an old pain. "You like to look. Be careful: I charge for continued viewing."
"You're full of it," I said, and then because I had had too much wine and because he was as beautiful as a panel, I reached for his face.
"You called me a fool," he murmured. "You called me many things."
"I did," I said, because honesty is a bad habit of mine. "You said male fruit is worth more."
"Some truths are older than markets," he replied. "But the truth I want is small and simple: will you be the mother of my fruit?"
7
I laughed hard enough that the tree shook. The world and narrative and my own heart were in knots. "Mother of your fruit?" I said. "Are you a cult leader now, or—"
"I am a thousand-year tree," he said. "Or I was. I'm a character made by you. And I am hungry for endings."
"You're joking."
"No."
8
I woke up in my bed, naked, and with a memory that slid like oil around any clear meaning. There was a peach grove in my chest and a small, sticky sound under my tongue. I called out his handle in the app and received a curt: "See you tomorrow." Then silence.
Days later a box arrived at my door. White peaches, each wrapped in paper like tiny sleeping children. My fingertips trembled as if some distant current of electricity passed through them. I ate one. It tasted like a panel I had once drawn and forgot—a sweetness that filled my mouth and, for a second, filled the part of me that had been empty for years.
9
"Are you sure you should be feeding peaches to my readers?" Everest asked when I posted a picture of the fruit on my personal account. He had begun to find odd ways into my life: he showed up at the bookstore where I bought rice; he learned to make instant noodles badly; he sat at the kitchen table like an accusation.
"They were in my life," I said. "You shipped them."
"We are connected," he answered.
"Connected how? Because you said you were the product of a comic I wrote years ago?"
He did not answer right away. Then, almost shyly: "Because I am."
10
The confession was a dart. "You're a character?" I asked. The room grew small as if someone had pulled hands of time close.
"You made me," Everest said. "But the world let me live. When a character is loved, it wakes."
That revelation could have broken me. Instead it felt like fate making a practical joke. "So this is meta-nonsense," I said. "You came from my childhood scribbles, and now I'm supposed to take care of you because fans liked your hair?"
"You stopped drawing," he said. "Because you were tired, because your parents fought, because the world pulled you away. Without your paintings our world began to fade. I came through the only way I could: I used the app that layers real people over story, and I reached for you."
11
I wanted to laugh at that too. "You reached for me, the useless, broke cartoonist?"
"You reached for me first," he answered. "You created the world that holds me. I have no other claim."
12
Over the following weeks life unspooled like a reel of sketches. I stopped sleeping properly. I cooked for Everest, who folded himself into the chair like he needed to take up less gravity and still somehow took up the entire apartment. He dressed in cheap clothes that fit him oddly well. He took a job at the magazine, which surprised me less than it should have.
"Isn't that our Hunter's department?" he asked casually as we scrolled through editors' faces. Overnight, fate—fiction—convenience—had arranged for Everest to be the new junior editor in my very office.
"Are you messing with me?" I said.
"Not at all," he replied.
13
"Hunter Buchanan, this is the new recruit?" I sent the message in the group chat with Hunter and the blithe editing assistant who had taken an immediate liking to me because my panels were the kind that made people nostalgic for the first time they felt something.
"Very pleased." Hunter Buchanan wrote: "Everest will be on our side; he likes fresh takes."
Everest sent me a single emoji. "Teacher," he typed.
"Don't call me that at work," I told him.
"I won't," he said.
14
At night he would tell me about the orchard where he was born. "We were trees before we were boys," he said. "We understood seasons in a way you can't imagine." He told me how the orchard's elders had dissolved into earth when readers forgot the tale. "I was lonely," he admitted. "I learned to walk in the panels and to stand apart from the ink."
"Doesn't that sound a little...dramatic?" I asked.
"Doesn't being a freelance cartoonist raising rent also sound dramatic?" he answered. "We both have melodrama."
15
He was useful in small ways I hadn't allowed anyone into my life for a long time. He boiled my noodles right—almost perfectly. He started watering the small potted peach pit I had thrown into the planter months ago out of a child's curiosity, and a tiny green sprout pushed shyly from the soil, making him grin in a way that cracked some armor inside my chest.
"You named it already," I said one morning, watching him crouch to inspect the sprout.
"I did," he muttered. "You named it in a hurry."
"What is it?"
"Hope," he said simply.
"Hope?" I repeated. "You can't name it 'Hope.'"
He smiled. "You named it by drawing the word into the margin once. You labeled it as an idea."
16
Over time, my symptoms—nausea, dizziness, the old panic that had grabbed me when I tried to draw—lessened. Everest would sit with his feet on my desk while I forced lines onto paper. Sometimes I would work for five minutes, then ten, then twenty. He never judged. He only sat and said, "Keep going," in a voice that sounded like a draft moving through the orchard.
"You are an impossible person," I told him once. "You are made of ink and stubbornness."
"You're the stubborn one," he answered.
17
One evening my mother, Corinne Mathieu, came by. I had not been speaking to her much since the falling-out years, the kind that anchor families in a debt they cannot pay. But she showed up at the door as if expecting me.
"You have someone living here?" she asked, eyes moving over the apartment like a detective. She did not, of course, see the sprout except as a decorative green thing.
"This is...a colleague," I said, a phrase that sounded truer in some way.
Corinne watered the plant like it was the single most critical act in her schedule. "Your hands are still thin," she observed. "You look paler."
"Working," I said. "I'm drawing again."
"You are? That's good," she replied, and for a beat I saw a softness I had not expected. "I have some old things," she said, touching my elbow. "Your early sketchbooks. I kept them."
My breath stuttered. "You kept them?"
She took out a cardboard box. Inside: letters, sketches, the brittle pages of something I had believed lost. "I thought if you returned I would give them back," she said.
"I left," I said, and the truth was a blade. "You told me to leave," I added. "You told me to never come back if I quit the steady job."
Corinne's face changed. She looked like someone who had reached, too late, for a lesson. "We were afraid for you," she whispered. "We were always afraid."
18
There is a scene in my life I re-live in nightmares: the day my father became ill and the phone never reached me because I had "cut ties." In the memory the house smelled of tar and old paper, and the only person I blamed was myself. Corinne told me, under a voice that trembled from too many sleepless nights, that she recounted every letter she had meant to give me; she had kept them between the pages of a book. "I wanted to fix it," she said. "I wanted to say sorry before it's too late."
We both cried. Everest sat quietly on the floor, his back against the bookshelf. He looked as if he had been waiting for such a thing to happen. "You were afraid," he said to me softly. "It was hard for them to understand the world you stood in."
19
My comic world had been abandoned for the very reason Everest declared: readers left. Without attention, characters grow dim. They are not cruelty personified; they simply lose a shape to cling to. Everest had come through because his longing for a finished story had been louder than the silence. He needed an ending to survive.
"Finish my book," he told me while we held hands by the tiny tree. "Finish the story so we can be whole."
"Do you understand what you ask?" I replied. "Finishing means pouring every last of my energy into linework, into ink. I could—"
"You won't die drawing," he interrupted, but his voice cracked. "Not this time."
20
I worked. I worked because a man who might be made of bark and blossom sat at my breakfast table and said my name like an incantation. That stubborn presence became my scaffold. I finished pages that had been pent inside me for ten years. I drew the scenes I had abandoned; I gave the characters small mercies and the long-awaited resolutions they'd been denied.
When I came back to the studio, Hunter Buchanan sat at his desk and said quietly, "The site's ready to serialize it again."
"You did that," I whispered.
"You never really stopped," he said. "I kept your name in my back pocket."
21
Everest left after sending the pages to the magazine. He said it was time; his work here was done. "You have given me endings," he told me. "You have given me life."
"You will come back," I told him, fighting to keep my voice steady.
"I will be where stories are read," he said. "But I can't stay in this world forever."
The apartment felt empty on the nights he did not return. Hope, the sprout, grew into a little tree that would press its leaves against the window when rain came. I would place my palm to the glass and imagine that that touch could reach him.
22
Then one morning my body shed its lightness. I found myself unable to stand for long. The old dizziness returned and this time it did not pass. Everest came back that night and I could see panic—the real kind—in his face.
"You're burning out, Giana," he said. "Your heart is tired."
"My heart has always been tired," I told him.
"Not like this," he said. "You must rest."
I refused for a time. I built up the pages like pillows around me and drew until my hand no longer answered. When I finally slept, it was heavy.
23
I woke up in a room that smelled like my mother's kitchen and the orchard at once. I could hear someone humming. I got up on instinct and walked to the living room, and there, between the candles and the picture of someone I recognized but couldn't quite place, sat my mother, speaking to the room.
"She always wanted to be more," Corinne said, though she couldn't see me. "She should have had more help."
I placed a hand on my mother's arm and she flinched as if touching air.
"You are here," she said aloud, to no one at all. "I dreamed of you last night."
I could not tell if this was a dream or a waking moment.
"Am I dead?" I asked Everest later in a small, lonely voice.
He looked at me like a man who had been holding a storm in his hands and finally let it go. "You died once," he said. "You came back because I begged and because your story was not yet done."
My world folded into itself. Memory slipped like a film: the ambulance that never arrived on time; the bright, absurd quiet of my own apartment after I didn't wake; the shortness of breath and the last panel I ever drew that had been a sentence that never finished.
24
"Why didn't anyone notice?" I demanded to my mother in one of those impossible moments when she could both see me and not. She held my old sketchbook like a talisman and sighed. "We said things we should not have," she said. "We tried to protect you from a life that would break you, but we did not know how to help you keep living."
Her apology was a rusted key. I felt too thin to answer. "Why didn't you come for me?" I murmured.
"How could I find you?" she asked. "We had no way to call you."
Everest sat on the sofa with his hands folded. "Your death was quiet because it came after giving everything," he said. "Sometimes the world that feeds you only notices when you stop moving."
25
The last pages were finished as if by muscle memory. I drew the orchard one last time, the world where Everest had been made, and inking the final frame felt like threading a needle through my own body. I wrote words I had been afraid to say: apologies and thank-yous stitched together.
"Will this bring me back?" I asked, holding the last panel in my shaking hands.
Everest considered the page. "Stories don't always return people," he said, "but they can reframe them. Finish it well, and you'll be remembered. Remembering is the next-best kind of living."
26
When the site published the serial again, it was like a bell. Messages came rushing—old readers, strangers who recommended the comic to friends, people who remembered it for reasons they couldn't name. Hunter Buchanan sent me a single line in the group chat: "It's alive again."
"You're alive," Everest said, watching the comments flood in. "You made them notice."
"They will read the end," I whispered.
"They will remember," he corrected. "And remembering is a kind of light."
27
The child we named Hope grew, physically, into a small boy of three who called me "Mama" in a voice like wind chimes. It felt absurd and perfect. He walked around the apartment leaving a trail of flower petals and little fingerprints in the dust.
"He's yours now," Everest said the last night he stayed. "He's real in the ways that matter."
"I don't want him to be alone," I whispered.
"He won't be," he promised. "Because you won't leave him."
28
And then Everest left. He kissed my forehead like someone closing a book tenderly and stepped out the door. The elevator doors closed on him with the faint musical chime that echoed in my memory.
"Be good," he told me when the doors were almost shut.
"I will finish," I said.
29
Years later, I tell this story often because it keeps me from forgetting: the box of white peaches; the app with its odd moderators; the boy with hair like winter light who taught me to finish what I start. I live quietly and I draw. I answered messages again and again, and one day my mother and I sat among the letters she had kept—a shelf where my youthful handwriting looked like a map.
"Do you ever regret leaving?" Corinne asked me once, smoothing a crease in the paper like it held a hymn.
"I regret not telling you that I needed help," I said, because I had learned that honesty was, itself, a skill.
"Then this is my promise," she said. "If ever you need me, I'll come."
30
People have asked me if the peach-boy was real. Fiction lovers ask if a character can become real if only enough people love him. Scientists would laugh; my mother would pat my hand and say I had had a fever dream. But I know the smell of the fruit in my mouth and the thickness of paper under my fingers, and I know that when I drew the last panel and signed my name, the orchard in the ink sighed and did not fall apart.
"I remember you," Everest had murmured on the night before he left. "You are the one who made me. I will wait in the pages."
"Don't wait too long," I said, and we both smiled like people who had found permission to be foolish.
31
There was no theatrical punishment for any villain in my story, because there was no true villain—only broken people and the consequences of actions left undone. Corinne apologized publicly within the family decades later, at a small exhibition of my works, when she stood and said, "I did not see what I had nearly thrown away." People in the crowd clapped softly. It wasn't a spectacle; it was a mending. If there must be a punishment, it was the slow work of remorse, which is private and heavy and often far more crushing than any public shaming.
32
The comic ended with a simple frame: petals falling like a pale snow. A boy and a woman sat on a hill and watched the orchard breathe. The last line read, in my handwriting: "When petals fall, we meet again under the peach tree."
Every time I sign that phrase now, I add a little smudge as if to prove the scene was messy and true. People send me messages: "Thank you, Giana," they write. "Your comics saved me when I was small."
I open my desk drawer and run my fingers over the small pot where Hope grows a limb, and I see the imprint of a boy's palm in the soil. The world has many kinds of life in it: the living, the remembered, and the pages that keep both. I learned to care for them all.
The End
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