MADISON GRACE MCCARTHY
AGE: 26
BIRTHDAY: November 12th, 1998
RELATION: Full sibling
TYPE: Twin
GENDER: Ciswoman
PRONOUNS: she/her
ORIENTATION(S): Demisexual, Panromantic
FACE CLAIM: Maya Hawke
JOB/SCHOOL
GRADE: Sophomore
MAJOR: Fine Art
MINOR: Photography
ABOUT
Madison was very much her parent’s daughter. She was driven, determined, the epitome of a type A personality. Everything she did had to be perfect, anything less than one hundred percent on a test was a failure in her eyes. All she ever wanted was to get her parent’s attention, their approval, and the easiest (and really only) way to do that was to show them she was just like them, she was also dedicated wholly to her future and to being the very best she could be.
She was, as a result, a very anxious child, always stressed about whether her tests were right, whether she’d studied enough, even if her art projects were good enough. All her time went into figuring out how to make herself the very best possible candidate for her college applications. In the fifth grade. That meant taking on as many extracurriculars as she could manage, and one of the ones that she absolutely adored was cheerleading. Madison had up until that point not really enjoyed any of her extracurriculars, model UN, debate team, yearbook committee, band, and even track, they’d all just been to pad her resume, no matter how good at them she was, but cheerleading was different. There was a community in it, a level of trust in everyone around her to make sure that they caught each other, blocked properly so they didn’t run into each other, and it was the nearest Madison had ever felt to being part of a close family. Don’t get her wrong, she loved her siblings to death, she was perhaps a little too overbearing sometimes honestly when it came to making sure they were doing well in school and staying focused, but their home life didn’t look like her friends did, and she knew that she was missing out on something.
Which was why, when Sue Sylvester showed up to offer her a place on her hugely successful competitive cheer team Madison knew she had to take the opportunity. Her parents weren’t about to move out to Ohio for one of their kids to follow their dreams, but they did allow Sue to take temporary custody and become her guardian ad litem and Madison was convinced she finally knew what maternal affection felt like. Sue paid attention to her far more than her own mother ever had, helped with her training, encouraged her cheerleading passions and dreams of turning it into a professional career, maybe even becoming a coach like Sue eventually. She was her idol, and while Sue wasn’t exactly pleased that Madison’s attention was split with other extracurriculars and academic merits, she didn’t stop her either, which Madison took as a sign that she was doing everything right.
She wasn’t though, with her anxiety high going into cheerleading and track finals and her SATs, and with deadlines in her other extracurricular clubs all encroaching on her, Madison was burning the candle at both ends. She’d barely slept more than a couple of hours a night all week, so when she turned up to cheer practice at the end of it, it was a wonder she was even still functioning. But Madison tried to push her exhaustion to oneside anyway, she was the captain of a Sue Sylvester cheer squad, she couldn’t be any less than the best cheerleader in the room, and that meant knuckling down and attending practice even if all she wanted to do was lie down. Had she skipped practice that day, Madison would’ve been reemed out by Sue, probably be made to run extra drills the next week, and been miserable but otherwise okay. Instead, she went to practice and during a particularly complicated series of manoeuvres that involved Madison being at the top of a pyramid, the overtired cheerleader who had skipped lunch to work on the yearbook before the deadline next week started to feel faint, and while trying to steady herself as subtly as possible, misstepped, twisted at the wrong angle to try and compensate, and as her horrified teammates watched on in shock, fell about ten feet to the ground, the impact mostly absorbed by her head and neck that hit the floor first.
When she woke up in the hospital, Madison didn’t have a clue where she was, didn’t know who the tall blonde woman at the foot of her bed was, didn’t even know who she was. It was a long, long few weeks as she tried to recover her memories and piece her mind back together, but once she did she knew that as badly as she had messed up, she was incredibly lucky to not have ended up paralysed or worse. Still, that didn’t mean that Madison had gotten off lightly, she was going to have to learn to do everything by herself again, and as her PT wore on the long-term impact of her accident became more obvious. Her balance was off, she had dizzy spells that were so intense they made her feel nauseous, migraines that felt like someone was shoving a white-hot poker into her head. Her short-term memory was also spotty, and while they were thankfully infrequent, she started to suffer from seizures.
Madison knew what this meant. Her cheerleading career was over, there was no way she could compete when she felt so imbalanced just standing up, and even as she continued to recover and that feeling got less intense (or at least less frequent anyway), she’d never be the same person she was before the accident. She really thought that Sue would stand by her, would still have affection for her, especially considering she was by her bedside when she woke up in the hospital and her parents weren’t (but she supposed they had Face Time’d with her every day after for five minutes), but once it was clear that Madison was never going to be a cheerleader again, that was the end for her affection for her. It broke her heart, knowing that Sue’s attention and affections had been purely transactional as long Madison made her look good, but now that she didn’t serve that purpose it was all gone.
It made her angry too, at Sue, at her parents, at the world, Madison hated everything in that moment because it no longer mattered how hard she had worked prior to this or how thin she had stretched herself, none of it mattered anymore because she was broken, and now, no-one really wanted her. Sue did let her stay throughout her PT and eventual graduation from high school, but no longer paid her very much attention at all, making Madison feel as awful as she had living with her parents too, a feeling that she had very much not missed. However, she wasn’t alone in her recovery, her biological siblings did as much as they could from afar, even if that was just to call her during her sessions to encourage her on, and Sue’s kids didn’t exactly abandon her either, and she’ll always be grateful for that.
Her head injury and memory problems changed her academic trajectory too. Madison’s back up plan to cheerleading had been either a lawyer or a doctor, but her grades suffered terribly with her cognitive issues and Harvard or Yale were no longer in the cards. Hell, any college seemed like a pipe dream after she was told that she had to redo her schooling from the 10th Grade again, despite being only a couple of months from graduating high school. Rather than be ridiculed in school as the twenty-year-old high school sophomore, Madison chose to do it from home instead, knowing that she could take as long as she needed to understand things here without everyone treating her like she was stupid. Because she wasn’t stupid, that was the thing that infuriated her the most, but she felt stupid now her brain couldn’t keep up with her expectations of it anymore.
It was because of this Madison started to lean into more artsy pursuits. With art you didn’t have to be perfect, you just had to create, and while working on her fine motor skills, she learnt that she had another great love in life: painting. It never had to be perfect, it never had to be precise, she could just paint as her heart desired and her emotions dictated and create something that she was always proud of. As she explored this kind of thing, found ways to work on her coordination that also made her happy, Madison also took up drumming and photography. Both helped her cognitively (drumming with her coordination and rhythm, photography with her memory), but were also fun, and she started to realise that in order to be good at something she didn’t need to be miserable or work herself to the bone, she could enjoy them too.
After finally getting her high school diploma at 23, Madison took some time to work on getting herself in the best physical shape possible. While she’d been able to make a lot of progress in the last four years, it was balanced with relearning basics and trying to get through her high school studies too, and Madison needed time to figure out who she was now, what she wanted out of life now that her original aspirations were no longer possible. A lot of her issues resolved or fell into the background, but she still struggles with migraines and seizures, leading her to get her service dog Oreo, as well as short term memory problems, but her coping mechanisms for them are all a lot better.
Madison decided that PSU would be her best option after taking a year to realign her aspirations, now wanting to be a high school art teacher, maybe even an art professor, and so she’s now completing a Fine Art degree with a minor in Photography. Her roommates might not appreciate her commitment to the drums, but Madison has found that it’s a great outlet for any latent rage she feels about the route her life has taken, and now she’s a lot more grateful for still being her and her accident not ending her life than she was when it initially happened.
