My mom told me everything when I was 13. Too much. She got this job as a teleworker for the LA county welfare system and told me there were Romanians hacking people’s EBT accounts again. This time they’d been arrested in a warehouse raid, and it was her job to call around and inform everyone. Your food stamp account balance is zero, we are working overtime to correct the issue, all funds should be restored by Labor Day.

Pretty creative, she said, pulling out of our driveway. They got us.

Yeah.

This time.

Right.

She was so sick of me. That same week she’d written me a heartfelt letter to explain what terrorism was, “why” it was, folded and slipped under my bedroom door. There had been a bombing near a cluster of historic hotels in downtown LA, three homemade explosives made of crockpots and powdered sugar (flammable, makeshift fuel) by a man acting alone, not in the name of any particular extremist belief, nor because he was ugly. Out of sadness, my mom had explained.…