Philip Hamilton x George Eacker becuz I said so

Chapter Eleven - His Mother

George Eacker couldn't remember his Mother.

He knew what she looked like, there were a few pictures in the house of her, but it was like going into a friend's room and seeing pictures of their other friends from camp or something. You know they exist, but they have no relations to you and in a way, it's like the don't exist at all.

He also might have remembered her laugh, but he couldn't be sure it was actually hers.

George's Mother had left when he was three years old on the grounds that she wasn't ready for a child -or that was what his Father drunkenly cried about some nights.

He never liked to think about her, but since he was the only one left awake at sleepover in Philip's finished basement, she seemed to be the only thing he could think about.

Despite having left almost 15 years ago George's Mother had still not quite left the house. Once, when he was eight, George's Father had tried to through out a box of the things she had left behind. George had fished it out of the garbage and hid it in his room.

The contents of the box had been gone over a million times by George. A gray knit scarf, a packet of sunflower seeds, a few CDs and tapes George had never found the courage to listen to, a poster from the college she went to, and some journals.

Her journals were George's favorite things in the box. They started at the beginning of her college experience- describing in detail the stress, and the parties, and the professors, and the life there. And they ended six months before she left- where she described how small George had been, and how excited she was to see how'd he grow up, and the beginnings of her doubts of wanting to have a child.

The journals provided George with a way to see into her brain back then, how she felt about the world and everything in it.

But the journals also made him sad, because he could see her start to doubt him, and start to wish for the life back when she hadn't yet had a kid yet. And they made him realize how she hadn't loved him or his father enough to stay.

George could feel himself sinking into a figurative hole by thinking about her. He had been in the hole before, but he couldn't seem to grasp the edges and pull himself back up, and stop thinking about her.

He could feel the edges fade away, and feel himself sinking fast when suddenly someone was touching his arm and whispering him name.

"George!" Philip whispered, shaking his arm lightly "Come make pancakes with me!"

"It's, like, four in the morning." George grumbled.

"4:33." Philip corrected "And so what? Time isn't real, and I want pancakes. Come make pancakes with me."

George smiled at Philip's insistence to make pancakes. He could feel Philip pulling him out of the hole of thinking about his mother.

George pushed himself into a sitting position. "Ok." He said. Philip grinned happily at him, and George realized that he was smiling back.

Philip had pulled him out of the figurative hole, and he was going to be alright.

George Eacker was going to be alright.