PUNK PROSE: ZOET TIMELINE by MJ Weerts

I was belly down on the floor of Zoet’s carpeted living room sniffing their Ritalin by myself. They came out of the shower and checked the bottle while dripping on me. 

I’d sniffed their hospitality. The bottle had dropped below an unspoken redline. I asked to buy a few. They said I had to leave. 

This was the end of our friendship.

It started when I was kicked out of my mom’s house for starting a pizza cardboard kitchen fire. Zoet drove up to my new high school in the city for the opening night of Romeo and Juliet. We’d miscalculated and shown up to the cast party with a full-size bong and a bottle to a parental-presence Boggle thing.

After high school I learned how to kill people and Zoet swallowed a whole bottle of psych meds. Their mom said they needed us now because a dormant problem woke up in their brain. I’d tried, when they got out of the hospital, but for me that meant getting them high and driving around for two hours looking for an ATM that would give tens.  

Zoet stood with me outside their downtown apartment. It was a 200-unit brutalist building, subsidized for people with mental health issues. I was six months into an AWOL jag. They asked me a question and went back inside without an answer. 

I walked all the way to the 24-hour Super America at the end of Riverfront Drive, where I bought a bottle of Nodoz from the daughter of a woman I’d worked with in the nursing home laundry the year before.  

--MJ Weerts