Dead Dog Summer

The asphalt shingles dug into the back of Harris's thighs. It was one in the morning, but the summer heat had baked into the roof all day, and the tar still radiated a thick, suffocating warmth. She wiped a line of sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand. Her jaw ached. She had been clenching her teeth for an hour.

Below her, three houses down the hill, the party was a loud, glowing blur of blue pool lights and thumping bass. Harris rested the heavy barrel of the DSLR camera on her drawn-up knee. The plastic casing of the camera was warm. Her right foot tapped a restless rhythm against the gutter. Tap. Tap. Tap.

She lifted the viewfinder to her eye. The 240mm lens chewed through the distance, pulling the wealthy, careless bodies of her classmates right to her face. She adjusted the focus ring. The blur sharpened into the sharp edges of James's jawline.

James was the neighborhood golden boy. Quarterback, student council president, owner of a smile that made teachers forgive late assignments. Right now, that smile was gone. His face was red, distorted by anger. He was standing near the edge of his massive, kidney-shaped pool, shoving a finger into Trent's chest.

Harris held her breath. The air in her lungs felt stale. She pressed the shutter button. The camera clicked, a heavy, mechanical sound that was entirely drowned out by the distant bass.

"Back off," Trent was yelling. Harris could read his lips perfectly through the glass. Trent was James's best friend, a guy who lived in a permanent state of bored entitlement. Right now, Trent did not look bored. The veins in his neck were popping.

Marie stepped between them. Marie, the girl everyone wanted to be, wearing a white sundress that looked expensive even from three houses away. She put her hands on James's chest. He slapped them away.

Harris's stomach did a slow roll. Not out of fear, but out of a sharp, electric anticipation. She snapped another photo. And another. The memory card was filling up with their rage. James turned his back on Trent and stormed toward the pool house. Marie followed him, her white sneakers bright against the dark wet concrete.

Harris lowered the camera. Her hands were shaking slightly. She rubbed her thumbs over the rough grip of the camera body. The battery indicator flashed red. Twelve percent. She stayed on the roof for another thirty minutes, watching the party thin out, until the mosquitoes became unbearable and the battery finally died.

She climbed back through her bedroom window, dumped the camera on her unmade bed, and fell asleep in her clothes.

The sirens woke her at seven.

Harris sat up. Her mouth tasted like copper and old sleep. The sound was close. Too close. It wasn't the distant wail of the highway; it was the sharp, panicked yelp of police cruisers turning into the neighborhood.

She walked to the window and pushed the blinds aside. Two cruisers and an ambulance were parked diagonally across the street, blocking the driveway of the old Miller house. The Miller house had been foreclosed on two years ago. The bank owned it. The yard was a jungle of brown, dead weeds, and the large rectangular pool in the backyard had been drained, leaving a deep, empty concrete pit.

Harris threw on a pair of jeans and walked downstairs. Her mother was already gone for work. The house was quiet, smelling faintly of stale coffee. She walked out the front door and down the sidewalk, her bare feet slapping against the warm concrete.

A small crowd of neighbors had gathered near the yellow police tape. Harris stood at the back, her arms crossed, her breathing shallow.

"It's the Davis boy," Mrs. Gable was whispering to a man in a golf shirt. "James. They found him in the pool."

"Drowned?" the man asked.

"No, the pool is empty, remember? The bank drained it. He fell. Broke his neck. The police think he was drunk. Wandered over from his own party."

Harris looked past the yellow tape. The morning sun was hitting the deep end of the empty pool. A paramedic was climbing down a metal ladder into the basin. A white sheet covered a shape at the bottom.

She felt nothing. No sadness. No shock. Just a cold, heavy pressure behind her eyes. She turned around and walked back to her house.

In her bedroom, she pulled the SD card from the camera and shoved it into the side of her laptop. The screen flared to life. She opened the folder and set the image viewer to full screen.

Click. James yelling at Trent.

Click. James shoving Trent.

Click. Marie stepping between them.

She scrolled through the final batch of photos. The ones where James walked away. She stopped on a wide shot of the pool deck. The lighting was terrible, washed out by a floodlight, but the resolution was massive.

Harris leaned closer to the screen. She grabbed the mouse and drew a box around the bottom right corner of the frame. She zoomed in. Two hundred percent. The pixels blurred, then snapped into rigid squares.

It was Marie's foot. She was standing near the edge of the patio, stepping away from the pool house.

Harris zoomed in to four hundred percent.

The white rubber sole of Marie's sneaker.

Along the side of the shoe, smeared across the white leather, was a dark, wet stain. It wasn't mud. Mud dried brown and matte. This was dark, heavy, and caught the glare of the floodlight.

It was blood.

Harris sat back in her chair. Her foot started tapping again. The floorboards vibrated. James was dead in a dry pool, the police thought it was an accident, and Marie was walking away from an argument with blood on her shoe.

Harris smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the tight, involuntary stretching of muscles on a face that had just realized how much power it held.

The Receipts

The coffee shop was three miles from the neighborhood, a sterile place with concrete floors and metal chairs that scraped loudly against the ground. Harris sat in a corner booth. She had ordered a black iced coffee. The condensation pooled on the table.

Marie walked in at ten-fifteen. She looked terrible. Her blonde hair was pulled into a messy knot, and she was wearing oversized black sunglasses that covered half her face. Her hands were jammed deep into the pockets of a massive gray hoodie.

She spotted Harris and walked over. She didn't sit down.

"You texted me," Marie said. Her voice was thin, rough around the edges.

"Sit down," Harris said.

"I don't have time for this, Harris. I'm dealing with a lot right now. James is... you know."

"I know," Harris said. She pushed a manila envelope across the wet table. "Sit down."

Marie looked at the envelope. Her jaw tightened. She pulled out the metal chair and sat. The chair made a horrible screeching sound. "What is this."

"Open it."

Marie slid her finger under the flap and pulled out the single sheet of printer paper. It was an eight-by-ten glossy print of the zoomed-in photo. The white shoe. The dark red smear.

Marie stared at it. She didn't move. She didn't breathe. Behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses, Harris could see her eyes widening.

"That's your shoe," Harris said. Her voice was flat, totally devoid of empathy. "Taken at one-forty this morning. After James shoved Trent. Before James ended up at the bottom of the Miller pool with a broken neck."

Marie dropped the paper on the table. Her hands were shaking. She grabbed her cracked iPhone from her pocket and placed it face down on the table. "You're crazy. That's dirt. It's mud. I stepped in mud."

"Don't cap to me," Harris said. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. "I have the receipts. I have the raw files. Mud doesn't look like that. Blood looks like that. James's blood."

"I didn't kill him," Marie whispered. Her voice broke. A tear slid out from under the sunglasses and cut a path down her cheek. "I swear to God, Harris. I didn't touch him."

"I don't care," Harris said.

Marie stopped crying. She looked at Harris, confused. "What?"

"I don't care if you killed him," Harris said. "I really don't. James was a jerk. But the police will care. They think he tripped because he was drunk. If I show them this, they stop looking at the concrete and start looking at you."

Marie swallowed hard. The muscles in her throat worked visibly. "What do you want."

"Five thousand dollars," Harris said. "By tonight. Venmo is fine, but cash is better. And I want in."

"In where?"

"The pool house. The basement. Wherever you and Trent and the rest of you hang out now. I want a seat on the couch. I want to know what you know."

Marie stared at her. "You want to hang out with us?"

"I want access," Harris corrected.

Marie looked down at the photo. She picked it up, folded it in half, and shoved it into her hoodie pocket. "Fine. I'll get the money."

By three o'clock that afternoon, Harris was sitting on a white leather sectional in Marie's finished basement. The air conditioning was cranked so high the room felt like a meat locker. Trent was slumped in a beanbag chair across the room, staring at the TV screen where a video game character stood idle, breathing in a digital loop.

Trent looked worse than Marie. He had a dark bruise on his jaw, and his right hand was wrapped in an Ace bandage. He hadn't said a word to Harris when she walked in. He just glared, then went back to staring at the screen.

"Do you want a water?" Marie asked, hovering near a mini-fridge.

"No," Harris said.

Harris opened the laptop she had brought with her. It wasn't hers; it was James's old MacBook. Marie had handed it to her along with an envelope of cash. 'He left it here yesterday,' Marie had said. 'Take it. I don't want to look at it.'

Harris opened the lid. The screen glowed. There was no password. James was arrogant enough to think no one would ever touch his things.

She started digging.

Harris ignored the photos and the school documents. She went straight to the browser history and the hidden folders. Her fingers moved quickly over the trackpad. The basement was silent except for the hum of the AC and the occasional click of Trent's controller.

It took her forty minutes to find the Discord channel. It was buried under a fake application icon. When she opened it, the chat logs flooded the screen.

Her eyes scanned the text. Her stomach tightened.

It was a marketplace. James wasn't just a quarterback. He was running a massive, localized deepfake ring.

There were hundreds of files. Videos. Photos. All of them featuring the faces of girls from their high school, seamlessly grafted onto pornographic material. Harris recognized the girls. The cheerleaders. The debate team captain.

Marie.

Harris looked up from the screen. Marie was sitting on the edge of a chair, chewing on her thumbnail, staring blankly at the wall.

Harris looked back down. She checked the transaction logs. James wasn't doing this for fun. He was selling them. And the buyers weren't strangers on the internet.

They were the guys in this very neighborhood.

Harris clicked on the payment history. It was all handled in crypto. Ethereum, mostly. She traced the wallet addresses. One address appeared more than any other. Massive transfers. Thousands of dollars moving into James's wallet over the last six months.

Harris copied the wallet address and ran it through a block explorer. She cross-referenced the timestamps with the chat logs. The user paying the most was tagged as 'T-Bone.'

Harris slowly turned her head.

Trent was still staring at the TV. His jaw was clenched. The bruise on his face looked purple in the harsh light of the screen.

Harris looked at his bandaged hand. Then she looked at the crypto transfers.

James was blackmailing Trent. Or Trent was buying from James. Either way, Trent was funneling massive amounts of money to the dead boy in the empty pool.

The Wake

Harris waited until Marie went upstairs to use the bathroom. The basement door clicked shut. The silence in the room became heavy, pressing against Harris's eardrums.

She closed the MacBook and set it on the glass coffee table. She stood up. Her legs felt stiff from the cold.

"Trent," Harris said.

Trent didn't look away from the TV. "What do you want, freak."

"I want to talk about Ethereum," Harris said.

Trent's thumb slipped off the joystick. The digital character on the screen walked straight into a wall and stayed there, jogging in place. Trent slowly turned his head. His eyes were bloodshot.

"What did you say."

"Ethereum," Harris repeated, taking a step closer. "You've been sending a lot of it to James. Every week. For six months. Right up until yesterday afternoon."

Trent stood up. He was tall, built like a linebacker, and moving much faster than Harris expected.

Before she could take a step back, Trent crossed the room and slammed his hand against her throat.

The impact drove Harris backward. Her shoulders hit the exposed brick pillar in the center of the basement. The rough brick scraped the skin off her shoulder blades. Trent's fingers dug into her windpipe.

Harris gasped. The air stopped in her throat. She gripped Trent's wrist with both hands, her fingernails digging into his skin, but his arm was like a steel bar.

"Listen to me, you little rat," Trent hissed. His face was inches from hers. His breath smelled like old mints and stomach acid. "You don't know what you're looking at. You don't know anything."

Harris's vision started to narrow. Dark spots danced at the edge of her sight. Her lungs burned. She didn't panic. Her brain went cold and clear.

She brought her right knee up, hard.

She aimed for his groin but hit his upper thigh. It was enough. Trent flinched, his grip loosening for a fraction of a second. Harris twisted her shoulders, breaking his hold, and ducked under his arm.

She stumbled away, coughing violently. She leaned against the back of the leather sofa, holding her throat.

"You pushed him," Harris rasped, her voice sounding like tearing paper. "You shoved him into the empty pool. You wanted the hard drive."

Trent grabbed the back of a chair. He looked panicked. The anger was gone, replaced by a raw, naked fear. "He was ruining my life. He had pictures. He was going to send them to my dad. I didn't mean to kill him. We were fighting. He fell."

"Where is the drive," Harris demanded.

"I don't have it!" Trent yelled, running a hand through his hair. "I checked his pockets. I checked his car. He hid it. It's in his house."

The basement door opened. Marie walked down the stairs, stopping halfway when she saw them. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Harris said. She grabbed her bag from the floor. She didn't look at Trent again. She walked up the stairs, past Marie, and out the front door into the blinding summer heat.

Harris walked home. Her throat throbbed with every heartbeat. She didn't pull out her phone to call the police. The thought never crossed her mind. Trent was a killer, yes. But Trent was also weak.

James had built a machine. A machine that printed money and fear. The machine was still sitting in James's house, on a physical hard drive, waiting for someone to turn it back on.

Harris wanted the machine.

The wake was held two days later at James's house. The street was lined with expensive SUVs. People in dark, unseasonably warm clothes stood on the lawn, holding plastic cups of water, sweating and whispering.

Harris wore a black dress she hadn't touched since eighth grade. It was tight across the shoulders. She walked through the front door. The air inside was thick with the smell of lilies and catered roast beef.

James's mother was in the living room, surrounded by a circle of weeping women. Harris slipped past them. She walked down the hallway, keeping her head down, and turned up the back staircase.

The second floor was quiet. The heavy carpet swallowed the sound of her footsteps. She walked to the end of the hall and pushed open the door to James's bedroom.

The room was perfectly clean. A shrine. His football trophies lined the shelf. His bed was made.

Harris closed the door behind her and locked it.

She went straight to the desk. She pulled open the drawers. Notebooks. Pens. A calculator. Nothing.

She checked under the mattress. Nothing.

She stood in the center of the room, her breathing shallow. Her jaw clamped down. Where would a paranoid, arrogant teenager hide a physical drive?

She looked at the computer tower sitting on the floor under the desk. A massive, custom-built gaming rig with a clear glass side panel. The inside was lit with LED strips, though the computer was off.

Harris dropped to her knees. She unspooled the thumb screws on the back of the case and pulled the glass panel off. She reached inside, maneuvering her hand past the massive graphics card and the cooling tubes.

There, tucked into the empty drive bay at the bottom of the case, held in place by a strip of black electrical tape, was a small, silver Seagate external hard drive.

Harris smiled. Her fingers closed around the cold metal. She pulled it free, tearing the tape.

The bedroom doorknob rattled.

Harris froze.

"I know you're in there," Trent's voice came through the wood. It was barely a whisper, but it sounded like a scream. "Open the door, Harris."

Harris shoved the hard drive deep into the pocket of her dress. She didn't answer.

Something heavy slammed against the door. The wood splintered around the lock. Trent was kicking it.

Harris stood up. She looked at the window. It was closed, the latch pulled tight.

Crash. The door bowed inward.

Harris unlocked the window and shoved the pane up. The hot, humid air blasted into the air-conditioned room. She climbed onto the sill just as the bedroom door kicked open, the lock tearing free from the frame.

Trent stood in the doorway. In his right hand, he held a golf club. A Titleist 9-iron.

Harris didn't hesitate. She threw herself out the window.

The Nine Iron

Harris hit the slanted roof of the first-floor porch. The asphalt shingles tore the skin off her knees. She slid down the incline, grabbing the gutter to stop her momentum. The metal edge cut into her palms.

Above her, Trent leaned out the window. His face was twisted into something unrecognizable. He swung the golf club at the window frame, shattering the remaining glass.

Harris dropped from the gutter. She fell ten feet, landing hard in the mulch of the flowerbed. Pain shot up her left leg, but she didn't stop to assess it. She scrambled to her feet and ran.

She sprinted across the manicured lawn. The grass was wet from the automated sprinklers. Mud splashed up the back of her legs. She heard a heavy thud behind her. Trent had jumped from the roof.

"I'm going to kill you!" Trent roared. The sound tore through the quiet, affluent neighborhood.

Harris didn't look back. She vaulted over a low stone wall, her feet slipping on the damp slate. She hit the ground rolling, pushed herself up, and kept running.

Her chest felt like it was full of shattered glass. Every breath was a fight. The heavy, humid air offered no oxygen. She ran through a line of thick arborvitae bushes, the dry branches whipping against her face and arms.

She knew where she was going.

She cut across the Gable's backyard, dodging a set of expensive patio furniture. She could hear Trent behind her. He was faster on a straightaway, but he was clumsy. She heard him crash into a metal trash can.

Harris darted between two houses and hit the street. The asphalt burned against the thin soles of her shoes.

Three houses down. The Miller property.

Harris ran toward the overgrown yard. She ducked under the yellow police tape that was still tied across the driveway. The weeds caught at her dress.

She ran to the backyard. The empty pool gaped like a massive concrete grave. The sun had set behind the trees, casting the deep end into deep, bruised shadows.

Harris didn't run around the pool. She climbed down the rusted metal ladder in the shallow end. Her shoes slipped on the cracked concrete. She ran to the deep end, crouching in the darkest corner, pressing her back against the rough, cold wall of the pool.

She waited.

Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. She clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of her own gasping breaths.

Footsteps in the dry weeds. Heavy. Dragging.

Trent appeared at the edge of the deep end. He was silhouetted against the fading purple sky. He was breathing hard, the golf club gripped tightly in both hands.

He looked down into the dark basin.

"I know you're down there," Trent said. His voice echoed off the concrete, sounding metallic and hollow. "There's no way out. The ladder is in the shallow end. I'm going to come down there, and I'm going to cave your head in."

Harris didn't move. She slid her hand into the dirt and debris gathered in the corner of the pool. Her fingers closed around a chunk of broken concrete, roughly the size of a baseball.

Trent started walking along the edge of the pool, moving toward the shallow end to find the ladder. He was walking right on the lip of the concrete, looking down, trying to spot her in the shadows.

He was ten feet above her.

Harris stood up. She stepped out of the shadow.

"Hey," she said.

Trent stopped. He turned his head sharply, looking down at her. He raised the golf club.

Harris threw the chunk of concrete.

She didn't aim for his head. She aimed for his legs.

The heavy stone hit Trent square in the left kneecap.

Trent yelled. It was a sharp, surprised sound. He flinched, stepping backward.

But there was no ground behind him.

His heel slipped off the edge of the pool. His arms flailed, the golf club flying out of his hands and clattering uselessly onto the pool deck.

Trent fell.

He didn't fall gracefully. He plummeted straight down into the deep end, his arms wheeling in the air.

He hit the concrete floor just five feet away from Harris.

The sound was something Harris would never forget. A wet, heavy crunch, followed immediately by a sharp snap that echoed like a gunshot.

Trent didn't scream right away. The air had been knocked out of his lungs. He lay on his back, his mouth open, his eyes wide with shock.

Harris looked down at his right leg. The shin bone had snapped cleanly in half. The jagged white edge of the tibia was pushing through his slacks, glistening with dark blood.

Then, the shock wore off. Trent screamed.

It was a high, thin, terrifying wail. He grabbed his leg with both hands, writhing on the concrete.

"Help!" he screamed, tears streaming down his face. "Oh my god! Call an ambulance! My leg!"

Harris stood perfectly still. She didn't reach for her phone. She didn't move toward the ladder.

She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out the silver Seagate hard drive. She held it up, letting the dim light catch the metal casing.

Trent stopped screaming for a second. He looked at the drive. Then he looked up at Harris. The pain in his eyes was slowly being replaced by a horrifying realization.

"You pushed James," Harris said, her voice calm and steady. "You killed him because you were scared of this."

"Please," Trent sobbed, spitting blood onto his chin. "Please, I need a doctor."

Harris pulled her phone out of her other pocket. She opened the camera app.

She stepped closer to him. She framed the shot perfectly. Trent, lying on the floor of the empty pool, his bone sticking out of his leg, crying like a child.

She pressed the shutter. The flash illuminated the pool for a blinding fraction of a second.

"I'm not calling an ambulance, Trent," Harris said. She slipped the phone back into her pocket. She looked down at him, her face completely blank. "You're going to lie here until someone hears you. And when the police come, you're going to tell them you fell looking for your golf ball."

Trent stared at her, terrified. "What?"

"If you mention me, or if you mention James, I will release everything on this drive to the entire school, your parents, and the police," Harris said. She turned and walked toward the shallow end. "And from now on, Trent? You work for me."

Harris climbed the rusted ladder out of the pool, leaving the screaming boy in the dark.