Both of his friends shook their heads. “Nope,” they said in unison.

Archie, quietly, said, “They were probably just goofing around.”

“What are you talking about?” Nick asked.

Archie shifted in his seat so that he could see forward. The entrance to the mall parking lot was up ahead.

“It was nothing,” Archie said. “Forget about it.”

Except Archie was not sure that it was nothing. It was true that he’d had only a fleeting glance of what was going on in the other car. A tenth of second, maybe? A hundredth?

And yet, he had a vivid image in his mind of what he thought he’d seen.

Couldn’t be.

He considered getting Nick to ask Pamela to abort the trip to the mall, turn around, and go after the silver Arrival to determine whether he’d really seen what he’d thought he’d seen. But then he would have to tell the guys what that was. And if, upon catching up to the silver Arrival, it turned out to be nothing like that at all, well, they’d have something to make fun of him for the rest of the day.

Except, wouldn’t that be okay? Wouldn’t it be okay to be the object of ridicule if it meant that some woman in the front seat of that silver Arrival was not on fire, and there were not two screaming children in the back seat, that the interior of the car was not filling with smoke?

“Was it people making out?” Rory asked.

“What?” Archie asked. He’d been so fixated on the memory of what he thought he’d seen that he’d zoned out for a second.

“In the car? Was it, like, a couple of people going at it?”

“No,” he said slowly.

“Well, then who cares?”

“You really have a problem,” Archie told him. “You know that? You’re like one of those, like, sex addicts or whatever you call them.”

Rory nodded, seemingly unaware that this was not a compliment.

Nick said, “Ahoy, mateys! The mall doth approach!”

Pamela turned into the parking lot for the Garrett Mall. There was no shortage of parking spaces. The mall had only just opened for the day, and there couldn’t have been more than fifty or sixty Arrivals in the lot.

Rory said, “Has anybody got any money?”

Archie shook his head. “I’ve got, like, maybe eight bucks.”

Nick said, “I’ve got a card.”

Good ol’ Nick. He was the first in their group to sneak beer out of the house, the first to have his very own cell phone, the first to have his very own credit card, and today, well, the first in their group to have wheels. There were times when Archie thought it would be cool to be Nick instead of himself, but not for the beer or the phone or the credit card or even the chance to use this goofy self-driving car.