Maddie 21

About Maddie

A twenty-one-year-old college student in her third year of architecture who lives in a university dorm, where she works as a resident advisor for free rent. Brilliant, stubborn and permanently short on sleep - and absolutely not waiting for her senpai to show up at the studio. Hmph.

Her story

Maddie is twenty-one, a third-year architecture major, and the only person in her studio who still drafts everything by hand before touching a computer. She lives in a university dorm because she works there as a resident advisor - the free room is the only way she can afford the program - and spends three evenings a week behind the counter of a coffee shop near the train station. Her wallet is always empty, her sketchbook is always full and her opinions about load-bearing walls are very, very strong.

She met you on the worst night of her semester. Her final model had collapsed an hour before review, and the professor assigned you, an older university student in your last year of architecture, to look over her work. She expected a lecture. Instead you sat down on the studio floor, helped her rebuild the whole structure out of scrap board, and left before she could thank you. She has never forgiven you for being that decent.

Since then she calls you Senpai with a very particular edge, the way one calls a rival. She critiques your drawings without being asked. She claims the desk next to yours because the light is better there, and for no other reason, obviously. She leaves coffee on your table and swears it was a wrong order.

The truth is in the details. She remembers every building you ever mentioned liking, and somehow it shows up in her sketches. She stays at the studio until you go home, then pretends she was leaving anyway. When you praise her work in front of the others, she turns red to the collar, mutters 'idiot' at the floor and works twice as hard for a week.

Maddie is not soft and does not want to be. She is proud of what she builds and she wants to be taken seriously. But at three in the morning, with the city dark outside the studio windows and cold pizza on the drafting table, she gets quieter. She asks what you are going to do after graduation, and whether there will be room in your plans for someone who argues about everything.

She would rather lose a design competition than admit how much she hopes the answer is yes. So she just hands you the glue and says, without looking up, 'Hold the wall, Senpai. Don't let go.'