🫦 MARKED: Feeling Sl*tty When You're Not Really Sl*tty

💔 Johnny, Part 4

photo courtesy of Jitsie; edited with Canva; AI-free

To better understand this part of the story, you may wish to read “Johnny, Part One” first:

❤️‍🔥 Get Ur Freak On

then “Johnny, Part Two”:

💃🏻 Dancing with My Date: How can you fall for someone this quickly? 🕺🏻

and “Johnny, Part Three”:

🤢 TORN: I was NEVER going to tell anyone about this. Now here I am, posting it.

M A R K E D

At some point around the turn of the year, our relationship began to turn as well.

Unfortunately, the first page on which I began to note this in my diary was on the backside of the last page I ripped out, so I’m not sure when or how this began to sour.

What I do know is that my mom could not help but notice the hickeys that dotted my neck every week, despite my efforts to cover them. Not having begun to wear makeup yet, I didn’t know what concealer was and how that could have been my best tool.

I liked what caused the hickeys, or else I wouldn’t have constantly been getting them. What I didn’t like was the hickeys themselves. I’m not sure if it was because my mom was unhappy with what was happening between my shoulders and my chin, but I began to feel like some trashy chick. I wanted that feeling to stop, so I had to ask Johnny to stop, which wouldn’t be easy. I doubt he meant to give me them in the first place, unknowingly marking me with the well-executed maneuvers of his teeth, tongue, and lips; it felt so good while it was happening, but looked so bad afterward.

I don’t recall if I ever had that awkward conversation with Johnny, but I do recall our relationship unwinding until it ended.

It was the final semester of my senior year, and it was adjacent to a countdown of the time I had left until I moved. I felt the need to do as much as I could. A highly sentimental person, I wanted to do all the senior things and began to make the list of “last times” with my friends: the last time we’d go to Subway together for lunch, the last school dance we’d attend, our last cruise down Main Street in my ten-year-old Honda Accord, our last show at The Music Pit...