The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page A

insane, actually, like I bought my mom a car, and I got my dad this signed baseball that cost twenty-five hundred dollars.”
    I smile and try to look charmed. Milo never sent me anything.
    “So anyway, I remembered that I always wanted to replace the sugar bowl, and it became like my life’s mission to track one down. Milo was no help—he didn’t know the name of the pattern or who made it or anything, but I still had that little broken piece, and eventually I figured out the details. You know they don’t make this stuff anymore?”
    I nod. “I almost never use my pieces anymore because they’re so hard to replace.”
    “Yeah. I’d pretty much given up. With everything that happened between you and Milo, it would’ve seemed weird to just send you a sugar bowl out of the blue.”
    Weird. I guess I would have thought it was. It’s very sweet, but it’s well beyond what you might expect from a man his age. I think he might have had a bit of a crush on me when he was a teenager.
    “So how’d you end up finding it?”
    “Chloe finally tracked one down online. She likes those kind of challenges, so she’d do searches from time to time. It actually just arrived this morning.”
    “Wow,” I say, rather inelegantly. I nestle the bowl in its tissue paper. “Well, thank you. I really love it. It’s a great gift.”
    “Well, good. I’m glad.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket, checks the time. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ve got a meeting with our manager at four. We’ve got to figure out what the rest of the band is going to do until all this is resolved. We’ve got tour dates to cancel … it’s a mess.” We stand up. “How long are you out here for?”
    “Not long. Not much I can do if he won’t even talk to me.”
    “It’s still good you came, I think,” says Joe. “Even though he won’t see you.”
    I look at him. “Really?” I say.
    “Yeah. For what it’s worth, I think he’s being a prick. He could use having you around right now.”
    I reach up to hug him again, run a hand through his bristly hair like a mother might do. He’s always had beautiful hair, dark and thick. Wasted on a boy , my grandmother would have said. “It was great to see you,” I say. “Take care of yourself.”
    “Yeah, you too,” he says. I start to gather our trash from the table.
    He picks up his bag and his phone and looks toward the door. “Well, have a good flight back. You have my number.” I don’t want him to go, I want to keep him here, but there’s nothing to do about that. He wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. “Bye,” he calls, without looking back. The bell over the door jingles.
    I sit back down, even though I’ve already thrown away my coffee. I try to go over the conversation I’ve just had, but everything seems slippery. There’s nothing to grasp. I lift the sugar bowl from the box. It’s identical to the one Joe broke all those years ago. I remember spooning sugar from that bowl onto my oatmeal when I was a child, and spooning it onto Milo’s cornflakes a blink of an eye later. It really does look the same. It’s almost like having the old one back.
    I lift the lid to check for chips, and as I look down into the smooth white curve of the interior I see something inside, a piece of paper folded into a small, thick wedge. I try to reach in to grab it, but my hand is too big for the delicate opening. I turn the bowl over, dumping the paper onto the table. I unfold it to find three words written in careful block letters. The ink is black, and whoever wrote the words went over them several times with the pen.
    Oh, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a B movie is this? Three words. “Someone is lying.”

who cares if he did it? pareidolia rocks!!!!!!
Comment from a message board on FreeMilo.com, Thursday, November 11

Chapter Three

    My first impulse after finding the note is to call Joe right away, but I remember that he’s on his way to a meeting and won’t want to be