Dinah Jane Victoria Johnson
N I C K N A M E S
"Most people just call me Dinah or Dinah Jane. Not a big fan of nicknames."
DJ {most common and the only she normally allows}
A G EX:XD A T EXO FXB I R T H
21 : April 3rd
S E X U A L I T Y
Bisexual : Biromantic
E T H N I C I T Y
African American
J O B
Senior at NYU, double majoring in Botany & Chemistry : Marijuana Grower : Hairstylist (Occasionally)
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G O D SX&XM O N S T E R SXB YXL A N AXD E LXR A Y
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5'5
W E I G H T
130 lbs
E Y EXC O L O R
Hazel
H A I RXC O L O R
Brown : Currently, black
XF U L LXD E S C R I P T I O N
It would not be a lie to call Dinah a very lovely young woman with her brown-flecked almond-shaped green eyes, peanut-butter brown skin, naturally full and plump lips, and slim yet curvy body. Her bust area may not be the most boast-worthy feature on her form, but what she lacks in that department she more than makes up for with her rounded and perky bottom, which leads to toned thighs and sleek looking legs. Her hair, which she consistently dabbles with, can be seen in two ways: one, is in it's more natural state, where her long, thick brown locks are left out and styled in whatever way she deems fit. As of recently, however, she has dyed her hair black. The other is her long-standing love for miniature, waist-length Marley twists. Currently, her hair is in the aforementioned twists, interspersed with brown, red, and white-blonde extensions. Currently, she has black Senegalese twists with white-blonde interspersed. She has a bit of an edgy bohemian style. The piercings Dinah actually does have are in her ears and they're the simple standard piercings, a piercing in her right nostril though the occasional fake septum piercing can be confusing, and she has a tattoo on her lower back that her sister still threatens to have removed.
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S C A R SXB YXT O V EXL O
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A lot of people, when they discover this little tidbit about Dinah Jane, are relatively surprised upon finding out that she is a preacher's daughter. Hell, a good number have been rather appalled by the revelation. In a way, she fits the stereotype of a preacher's kid: that idolized, sweet girl you see in the pew while her daddy gives speeches who's probably a little freak once the church dress and pristine white gloves are removed. The wild child who's got her poor little daddy rummaging through his bible every night, sweating profusely in the middle of praying to the Almighty to deliver her from her sinful ways. At the same time, the whole reckless-heathen-going-to-hell isn't really her own fault, and Dinah makes sure to remind her father of that little fact every time they talk. Luckily for the both of them, those talks are few and far in between. Plus, she's perfectly fine with being called or considered bad. Bad gets her paid. She's not completely incorrigible and downright evil, but she's definitely not the goody two-shoes that left Randall Memorial United Methodist Church close to four years ago.
The main difference between the Dinah she was before she left for college and the woman she has become now is that she seemingly lacks a conscience. She tends to lack guilt, remorse and shame for her actions, especially now that she's gotten into cultivating some rather intoxicatingly dangerous marijuana. She doesn't see what she's doing as wrong as it is a survivalist strategy. She needs money to get by and she spends her time surrounded by plants anyway; why not use such resources to her advantage while maintaining her 3.99999999 GPA? It's the same with her personal life. She doesn't typically feel ashamed for hurting someone else's feelings with her bluntness and she's known as a spitfire to most of her classmates, so it's not like they aren't prepared for it. Before, she took things and people in stride - was actually the sweet Christian child her grandmother would have been proud of. But once her father and church members lost her trust, that was the end, finite. And it's evident in a few of her relationships.
Dinah Jane has become a bit of a manipulator and she's so unassuming with it that most people don't actually notice that she's doing it. Hell, sometimes she doesn't recognize when she does it, but that's a tidbit for later. Most of her relationships have not formed out of shared occurrence or random conversations. As troubling as it sounds, Dinah befriends most people based on how quickly and effectively the connection can benefit her. With that in mind, she also is selfish enough to believe them to be dispensable as well and she has no qualms against cutting people out of her life - ask her father, he'll be the first to attest to it. A part of it is as selfish as it sounds - Dinah Jane, that same cute little hazel-eyed beauty you sat beside in your first year math class because everyone had to take it, is the same girl who can charm and throw away a person in the same breath. She tells herself that she doesn't have time for genuine emotional connections or random bouts of sympathy. It did her no good before, so why bother? The other part of it is...well, again, most of this is simply because a strategic survivor and if it means a bit of self-preservation at the cost of another person's feelings, then so be it. She got what she needed from them and, depending on the person, they received what they needed from her at the time. No real loss...though, such a detached and callous mentality can easily be shifted depending on whether or not a child is involved, or even if the situation is far more sympathy-inducing than she would like. After all, Dinah is still a bit of herself. Just colder.
So what if she has managed to become a bit perceptive in that she uses her manipulatively friendly ways in order to find and possibly exploit people's weaknesses when they piss her off? It's a bit of a sign that Dinah Jane is still that teenage girl looking for approval all around her and not finding it. Hell, she still is looking for approval. She is sensitive - far more than her pride wants to admit. More than that, she's looking for genuine relationships, even if her occasional machinations make that hard to believe. She doesn't even recognize when she's not manipulating people, lending to a whole lot of people in her contact list but not as many on an actual friends' list. It goes to show how much her trust and past naivete has been compromised. She became so used to being used and objectified that she's forgotten to just be, and she's supposed to not feel shame for any of this. She knows she does. Then again, she swore she was done with her faith in God and yet, she still has her grandmother's bible under her pillow. So, Dinah Jane just contends with being that really smart girl with ulterior motives and one hell of a secret when it comes to the plants she cultivates outside of the ones actually permitted by her school. The really smart girl with a lot of baggage.
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W I L DXT H I N G SXB YXA L E S S I AXC A R A
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✦Singing ✧Her braids ✦ Trap music ✧R&B music ✦Criminal Minds, Supernatural, HTGAWM, The Leftovers, Power & Empire ✧Chemistry ✦Being in control of lab assignments and projects ✧Marijuana ✦Drawing ✧Doing someone else's hair ✦Long, hot baths ✧Getting high ✦Plants ✧Cooking family recipes ✦Black Panther, Storm, Rogue, Black Widow & Deadpool ✧Learning ✦Motorcycles ✧Brownies ✦Listening to music ✧Brownies ✦Chai tea ✧The idea of developing natural medications ✦Going to the movies ✧Apple fritters ✦Gospel music ✧Shopping ✦Hair beads and other hair accessories ✧Tacos ✦Chicken and bacon pizza ✧Rings and bracelets ✦Feeling the thrum of the music through her veins ✧Frank Ocean, Lana del Ray, ZZ Ward, Emelie Sande, Zara Larrson, Sasha Keable, & The Weeknd ✦Snow ✧Being busy ✦Her grandma's bible ✧Red wine ✦Sex ✧Making money ✦Being able to sleep ✧Peach-flavored Ciroc & Sprite ✦Seafood
D I S L I K E S
✦Coffee unless it has enough milk and sugar in it to send her into a sugar coma ✧Sodas ✦Her current thesis paper ✧Instability ✦Twizzlers ✧Being forced to do something ✦Not being in the know ✧Overly rambunctious or flirty guys at the club/bar ✦When people tell themselves they can make Cajun cooking ✧Her father ✦Clowns ✧NYU and the way they treat their students ✦People who look down on others ✧Bullies ✦Anyone who thinks they can control her ✧Guys who think they're tough shit ✦Not having lotion ✧Going to church ✦Being cheated out of money ✧Bigotry of any kind ✦Feeling weak or out of sorts ✧Clients who don't know what they want her to do with their hair ✦Beyonce's BeyHive ✧Failed experiments ✦Laws against marijuana ✧Kale ✦Being underestimated
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S T R A N G EXB I R D S XB YXB I R D Y
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What Dinah's father likes to tell people is that his alcoholism had yes, been a result of the personal demons he had not been able to face. But it was, in no way, the reason why her mother walked away when she was five years old. Or the richer, more successful and impossibly more attractive football player turned lawyer from their college days whom she had never truly lost contact with. He never really liked remembering that little facet of their lives, simply liked telling the story from the second he was saved and realized he had a calling to work in the Lord's name and blah, blah, blah. Besides, talking about that diminished any sort of trauma or pain Dinah might have felt at being abandoned by her own mother and that was good. At least, for him. Talking about those long nights where he would be out drinking what money he did make while Dinah practically raised herself and occasionally babysat the children next door for a measly wage in his absence just truly spoke to how wrong he was in his life and for a self-righteous deacon of the illustrious Randall Memorial United Methodist Church of Washington D. C - that would just not do. In the big scheme of things, what Dinah will never say is that she never had a roof over her head and food to eat. While that might have had more to do with the fact that she had to learn to cook when she was small and sometimes get groceries from the next door neighbor of their apartment complex, it didn't really matter because she had survived. They had survived. Even if they survived with her now waking up in the wee hours of the night because that was usually when her father slammed into their home, drunk off his ass and always angry. Luckily for her, Dinah has no long-lasting bruises or scars to show for it.
However, during those years, Dinah had not succumbed to her bitterness nor had her father's occasional drunken, verbal assaults hardened her. In an attempt to not allow it to do so, she focused on school and thrived - which was probably a shock considering the fact that the public school system in D.C. had been known to fail so many African-American students. Dinah surprised herself, teachers and her father for how well she performed in school, particularly in science and mathematics. She was relatively a sweet girl and while she wouldn't go so far as to say that she was good every second of the day since no one is, she never let her growing into her preteens affect the amount of time she spent with the children she consistently babysat. They were her saving grace, if we're being honest - solace, if you will. And when her father joined the church, so did Dinah. Her father was baptized when she turned twelve and it was the first time she had officially met her maternal grandmother. While her father lost himself following what he called the "righteous" way - since joining the church and having his own personal testimony gave him the audience he would have never received in the outside world - Dinah's experience with the Methodist church was much more genuine and comforting. She didn't necessarily or, to be honest, ever have the holy ghost, but it was refreshing to have someone or something to believe in. She grew to love singing like her grandmother, helped with Sunday school for the children, started a green initiative with the young people ministry, and still managed to keep up her grades. Because, to the rest of the church, Dinah was a good girl. Her Dad was really becoming a good preacher and was even invited by the church's pastor to take over Sunday services and travel to events for the Baltimore-Washington Methodist conference.
But Dinah was also growing up and that meant developing, so it meant suffocation, apparently. It meant that when Dinah occasionally danced with the dance ministry, she had to change up the uniform or not perform a certain move for caution...you know, for the men in the church. Her father was even worse. Dinah's body and a few other girls' were policed consistently during her teen years and it was only worse for her when her grandmother wasn't at the church anymore to buffer them. And even worse when she caught the eye of one of the church's proclaimed babies. Unlike Dinah, Perry had been a member of the church since he was in his mother's womb and with his mom being the finance chair and his father the Minister of Music, he had more defense than she ever could. Not to mention money, but bringing that up meant there was something un-Christian-ly about the Elliots and that just would not do. Her Dad loved that she caught the class president of her school's eye. He was the main supporter of the relationship, if you would call what they had a relationship. Dinah would never. She can't - even today - deny - that she had been attracted to Perry. She was definitely more attracted to Alexa from Calculus, but that was an entirely different conversation that got her grounded. And at the time, with applying for colleges and exams coming up - not to mention her grandmother's recent diagnosis of breast cancer - Dinah didn't have time to be stressed over her father's refusal to accept her sexuality. And she was, in fact, attracted to Perry. Up until he decided that, despite the many times that Dinah told him no and that she wasn't ready, raped her. Twice, since the first time, she had really wanted to believe that perhaps she had wanted it and she had only been nervous. It took the second time to realize that, nope, all of this was force and not right.
The assault itself wasn't what did Dinah in. As probably unhealthy as it sounds, she had always been jumpy when people were stupid drunk, especially when slammed doors and yelling was involved. She survived not running away; to her, the sexual assault wasn't even that big of a deal,
To be completely fair, it wasn't like she expected NYU to be some kind of safe haven where everything was perfectly okay and taken care of. No, she wasn't that naive. However, she didn't expect there to be housing issues and complete and utter disregard to the fact that she wasn't an in-state student. It didn't matter though. Dinah made it work; she had taken care of herself before and she could do it again. So, she worked - first, she started with simply braiding black girls' hair on campus since it was hard to find people who could do it with the prices she offered, then with being a waitress while being a teacher's aid in the chemistry department. However, the bigger money came when, in the middle of smoking marijuana with a few classmates, she pondered cultivating her own cannabis. It was easy to get weed, but the potency could be lacking and she knew people who wanted something stronger - something that could give them the best high. Her Dad was barely helping and there was only so much her grandmother could do with having to pay for chemotherapy treatments on her own since the cancer had come back when she had supposedly been in remission. So, she got creative and used her connects, and the labs at the school. She would go from couch to couch, and even sometimes staying in student suites with classmates she found useful for the time until she found the perfect strains of marijuana that enabled her to earn more cash.
Which was how she found her way to working with Nick Moreno and even finding out about the apartment complex he was staying at. Sure, she could have been the good girl and continued busting tables and earning clean money. But she had tried the good girl way and it didn't work. Plus, she gets a better pay now and can say that she's found a place all on her own, and doesn't have to give a fuck about people who would fail her. So what if that meant she's a bit harder than before? That's life, right?
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C O O LXK I D SXB YXE C H O S M I T H
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Girl2Fine2
F A C EXC L A I M
Kiana Brown
V O I C E
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