Maddie was a bright child if you asked her father. Never the top of the class, she was never the bottom either. Preferring to Middle as the other children progressed. School wasn't the worst time for her but it also wasn't the best. Not having a mother quickly became fodder for parent-teacher nights, for something so little in the 80s when it was more often than not, gossip about just where she was overtook other whisperings. Most of the mothers at the school found Maddie's father attractive. He was tall, dark, and resembled Jeff Goldblum in some lights, not at all like his daughter. In turn, their husbands felt the opposite.

In the late 90s, a job opportunity arose for Bill on the east coast. Figuring it quite the adjustment, he offered Maddie the opportunity to stay in California in order to finish her schooling there. A blossoming graphic artist and writer, the idea of the Bohemian city of Ginsberg and Burroughs was too much of a pulll to keep her around the tanned, skating folk of the west, and the pair up and left to start afresh.

Unlike the movies and as she'd been expecting, a fresh start didn't change the person you were or your surroundings. Bill's job paid more than his last, and with each paycheck he put away a significant amount into a fund for her eventual (hopeful) entrance into the New York Academy of Art.

Highschool was therefore not much different to those that went before, the only difference being it was there she realized she liked women. Too intent on maintaining her grades, she didn't get intensely involved with anybody, not even friends. Her father's daughter, the way to a happy life was to find one doing what you loved, and art and writing were more important than screwing contempories. It eventually worked out when, at 22, she got accepted into the graduate program.

In 2010, Bill collapsed at work. At the time, Maddie wasn't living with him and was out on her own sharing with two women she'd met at school. He kept whatever was wrong with him to himself to not get in the way of his daughter's career, but she knew him well enough to know a lie when she saw one, and humored him only until his second collapse in 2011, three days after her birthday.

He's been getting progressively worse since and, for the last six months, has been bed bound. Maddie quit the program, got the first job she could find that had flexible hours waiting didn't allow, and moved back in with him. It's not something she talks about to the point that her closest friends have no idea why she had a sudden change in personality. It's an illness that's taken its toll on the both of them, but has led her back to a church she's always been on slightly uncertain terms with.

There's also the matter of her hair.