Just old enough to leave school, but young enough to get him arrested. Which I wasn’t interested in doing since he was my ride out. So I told him, and everyone associated with him, that I was seventeen. Age of consent. As if consent had anything to do with it, ever. I might have hated him. But it was Henderson who got me on my feet. Who took me out of there, speeding down the highway in a diesel BMW, the backseat filled with paperback books, No Exit on the shelf by the back window. He got me to Florida. Not the actual state, hanging off the bottom of America. But to her. Her face, her legs. Until then I hadn’t known what it was I wanted. Till then, I didn’t know who I was. With Henderson, I was trying to be something. I wore my hair long, past my shoulders. I went by Kat Henderson, like I was the little wife, but I was sixteen, and Henderson was twenty-two, a master’s student. We lived together in tiny apartments rented to students for little money. He spent all his time on philosophy, all this stupid shit about God and Ps and Qs that in the end was just math, was just numbers, either adding up, or not.
