Let's get one thing straight first: I was an asshole. That's important to establish up front, because what I'm fundamentally trying to do here is understand what happened.

It would be so easy to make myself into the hero of my own story—to say that what I did was a justified reaction. But everybody's the hero of their own story, aren't they? You can justify anything depending on how you frame it. The Israelis are defending themselves from terrorists; the Palestinians are resisting the invading oppressors. The evangelicals are preserving the country's Judeo-Christian moral heritage; the atheists are upholding the Constitution. It was obvious she wanted it from the way she dressed. It was money the cheap bastard should've put in payroll to begin with. And so on.

So if I want to know what was going through his head, I've got to set aside the idea that I'm the good guy here. I was an asshole.

So was he, but—no, look. Not blame, just context.

Deep breath. Starting over.



In this story I'm gonna be Jack—Jack Frost. Because "winter is nature's way of saying, 'Up yours'" (Robert Byrne). And he's gonna be Sol Summers, because "if you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun" (A.P.J. Abdul Kalam). Not subtle symbolism, but our relationship was never subtle. We were as opposite as the seasons, and hated each other just as fiercely. And, perversely, ended up complementing each other in our complete incompatibility.

We met in Sol's freshman year of high school. I was a year ahead of him, a junior varsity athlete. Sol was one of the geeks that took AP classes and hid in the library after school. I picked on him nonstop for a year and a half, until one day I slammed his nose into a locker and sent him home with his shirt front looking like an explosion in a red paint factory. The next day, he snuck a knife to school and charged me in the middle of the lunchroom. Everyone scattered, screaming, and he probably would have stabbed me if the history teacher hadn't known judo and grabbed him into a choke hold from behind.

See? Both assholes, in our own special ways.

Sol was suspended for the rest of the school year, and it was kinda shocking that he came back at all. But his parents made a big stink, and knew the right people. There was an investigation into the bullying, and I got formally written up as one of the three prime instigators. When Sol returned his junior year, both I and everyone else left him alone—not because of all the school warnings and extra attention from administrators, but because nobody was crazy enough to push around the dude who had gone psycho with a knife.

As for me, I mentioned to him a while afterward that the bullying investigation had cost me a scholarship—but it was a school I didn't really want to go to anyway. As much as we taunted and mocked each other, and as little as I ever shared about the things I cared about, I'm pretty sure I was sincere. I'd always hated school, struggling for middling grades; losing the scholarship gave me an excuse to bum around for two years after high school and then slide into a manufacturing job rather than continuing to torture myself in classes.

But that's all background—and in any sane world, wouldn't have mattered. In a sane world, we would have never spoken again after high school, and I would have forgotten about him, and he would have gone through years of therapy unsuccessfully trying to forget about me.

Would have, except for a freak encounter the summer after he graduated.



The police said Sol was driving way too fast through town late at night, fiddling with his phone, and overcorrected after his wheels hit a curb. In one of those stupid cosmic coincidences, I was a block away, coming the other direction, driving my girlfriend at the time home.

When Sol's car stopped flipping and came to a rest upside down in the middle of the road, I pulled over and ran up to the wreck. Sol was hanging from his seat, unconscious and snugly belted in. Liquid was dripping and pooling everywhere. The scene smelled of fear and gasoline.

I wriggled halfway into the overturned car as Laura talked to 911, and shook him awake without realizing who he was. "C'mon, man. Can you reach your seatbelt? We've gotta get you out."

He moaned, looked around disoriented, and focused in on my face. Then he froze and blinked. "Oh, fuck. Jack?"

I froze, too, finally recognizing his voice. But I didn't say anything.

He began to laugh hysterically. "I'm in hell. I've died and gone to hell."

"Not yet," I said, "but we're fucking covered in gas and one spark—" I broke off as I rolled over and groped upward for the steering column, turning the keys to kill the engine. They fell on my face and I cursed again. "I'm not here to die for you, asshole. Let's get out of here."

"Surprised you're not out there throwing a match," he said bitterly.

"Fuck you," I said, and reached for the seatbelt. He flinched as I did, and his elbow hit me in the forehead.

It turned out it wasn't intentional, but it was pretty much impossible to figure out intentions at the time. I elbowed him back hard, which nudged something broken. He screamed bloody murder and flailed blindly at my face. I swore at him and gave back in kind. We were still having ourselves a spirited slap-fight in the too-crowded confines of the wrecked car when the paramedics ran up thirty seconds later.

They took one look at the scene and bodily dragged me away, calling in a hazmat team for the spilled fuel. Some nigh-suicidal EMT calmed Sol down and crawled in in my place, after cops and a fire crew spent five minutes dumping sand and spraying foam on all the gas as they could reach.

Turned out the seatbelt catch had been bent all to hell, and they had to cut him down from the seat. We were fighting over something I wouldn't have been able to accomplish if I'd tried.

On the other hand, the police report said that the car would most likely have exploded if I hadn't killed the engine when I did.

What a perfect metaphor for our relationship: the fiercest, most hurtful fighting over the pettiest shit, while the biggest decisions got made unilaterally in silence.



German has a colorful phrase which I think about a lot these days. Instead of saying that the winter weather is freezing, a German might instead say: es ist arschkalt.

"It's ass-cold."

Jack Frost, you see, is possessed of a special brand of assholery best described as arschkalt.

This might sound like a strange thing to say about a guy so comfortably embedded in the fabric of high school—a guy who dated half the senior class, as opposed to Sol, who avoided social contact even before he was treated like a leper. Why, you might ask, do I describe myself as the cold one, and Sol the warm one?

The answer is: The closer you get to winter, the more things freeze.

Case in point:



Sol interrupted a game of Call of Duty two weeks later with a knock on my door. I swung it open without looking through the peephole, and I couldn't keep the shock off my face.

I didn't shoo him off or threaten, I just stood in silence. I think I was trying to figure out how Sol had gotten there. (He'd looked up my last name on the tax assessor's website.)

For his part, he was fidgeting so hard that not even a chest wrap (cracked ribs), neck brace (whiplash) and cast (broken elbow) could keep him still. He managed to make eye contact, and said: "I just wanted to say, Jack…thank you for saving my life."

What could I say to that?

My eyes flicked around, as if searching for cameras. I finally settled on "Okay."

"The engine," Sol clarified. "You turning it off kept it from sparking."

"Oh," I said.

He swallowed.

I waited.

"We're not friends and I'm not trying to change that," he said, starting to stutter a bit. "I'm not forgiving you for what you did in high school, and I'm not asking for forgiveness. But you, when I crashed, you didn't have to…I mean, I didn't expect…" He took a breath to steady himself and changed the subject. "I didn't mean to hit you when you reached for the seatbelt."

I finally let go of the door, shifting to lean against the door frame and crossing my arms.

"Don't roll your car again," I said. "Had to throw out the shirt I crawled in there with."

Sol chuckled nervously. I didn't smile.

"Want me to pay for that?" he said. "Least I can do."

"Nah."

"Okay," he said, and silence descended again.

Sol glanced past me into the living room. "That Call of Duty?"

"Yeah," I said. "You play?"

"Assault class, mostly," Sol said, his tone relaxing. "Been trying to branch out into rifleman."

I shrugged. "Add me on Steam if you want an ass-kicking."

He did.

And it turned out we liked virtually killing each other just fine.



We got to playing, and talking via voice chat. Mostly trading barbs as our avatars exploded in showers of virtual blood, and cursing each other out for cheap plays and bullshit spawn-kills. Turned out we were pretty even in skill, which kept it an interesting challenge. Sol had nothing better to do than play video games while he healed, and I had nothing better to do than play video games in general, so when I got bored with Call of Duty, we started jumping from game to game together.

Then one night I gloated that I had to sign off to go bone my new girlfriend Christie.

Sol was silent for a moment. "How many STDs are you gonna give her?"

"Screw you too."

That just so happened to be the night before Christie left. Sol just so happened to joke about her as we played the following evening. I threw my headphones across the room and logged out of the match.

A message chirped on my screen a few seconds later: dude wtf

Then another: christie broke up with you, didn't she

I typed back: fuck you

And with a biting chirp: hahahahahaaahahahahaaaaa

Chirp: instant asshole karma!

So I made a point of rubbing it in Sol's face when Barbara and I hooked up two days later. He made a point of rubbing it in mine when that fell apart within a week. I bragged about Jane. He sent me an online condolence card with the text "LOL" when Jane and I split up. I texted him naked pics of Anna. He texted back starting a six-day countdown.

He was only off by two days.



Picture a mountain. Giant hunk of solid rock, towering over the landscape. Climbers scale it in the summer; skiers hurtle down its slopes in the winter. It's the in-between times—the borders between summer and winter, when temperatures waver between freezing and brisk—that something remarkable happens.

Water seeps into the seams of the rock. The temperature drops overnight, and it freezes. The water expands into ice. The rock shifts incrementally. The ice thaws during the day, and the water seeps further in. The water freezes, and separates it further.

Then, one day—snap!—the stress of that ever-growing wedge fractures the mountain, and a new stone tumbles off to join the pile of talus at its base.

Snow falls on the talus, packs it down, adds weight that ultimately culminates in winter avalanches. Then summer heat melts the snow, and water rushes down the mountainside, carrying those stones down into the foothills and floodplains.

With endless winter, you'd have an unfractured snow-covered mountain. With endless summer, you'd have an unfractured bare-topped rock.

It's the combination of the two seasons that levels it.




It was Ruby that made us both shift seasons and collide in the middle.

I didn't meet her through my usual dating hookups—I didn't even consider her dateable at first. She had a modest figure and a round face and in general wouldn't have stood out in a crowd if it hadn't been for a firm streak of personal style. She kept a stripe of bright red hair pulled into her usual ponytail, and even in her uniform for the coffee shop where she worked, she always managed to sneak some piece of matching flair into her ensemble. But I was idly chatting with her one day while she was making my coffee, and somehow gaming came up, and we had a brief and spirited debate over the merits of Halo: Reach's plasma pistol, and I made sure to get my coffee from her for the next few days.

Then Denise threw a lamp at my head as she stormed out my door, and I had a chance for a little bit of uncharacteristic reflection, dropping offline for a day or two. Maybe I was starting to take Sol's "asshole-karma" taunts a little too seriously. Maybe I wanted to shake things up. Maybe I saw in Ruby an unfamiliar connection I wanted to explore. But I asked her out—asked her on a dinner date, not just to head home with me after an evening making out—and she said yes. And when I went back to my games with Sol, I didn't say a thing about her.

She ended up sleeping with me that first night anyway. I didn't tell Sol. I invited her back, and spent a frantic day cleaning the house up, and home-cooked a meal for the first time in months. I didn't tell Sol.

Two days later, my computer chirped anyway: are you sleeping with ruby j?

(He'd typed and deleted: "jack you asshole you're fucking ruby now?" And then: "so a little bird tells me you finally caught the karma beast". And then: "something you're not telling me?")

I erased and deleted several lines myself, feeling the weight of that "Jack Frost is typing…" notification on Sol's screen. Then I settled on: no, i'm with her. as in actual relationship shit. so shut up and fuck off.

I waited for a return message. Nothing came in. The incoming call notification on my instant messenger lit up. I put on my headphones.

"Jack," Sol said, "don't."

"Go die in a car accident," I snapped back, and the call was quiet for long seconds.

When Sol spoke up again, it was slowly and precisely, every word emphasized. "It is exactly because you saved my life that I am telling you this, you colossal asshole," he said. "You are some sort of walking cancer on women, so understand how serious I am when I say that if you are attempting an actual relationship, you deserve better."

"Yeah, fuck you, bye."

"Hear me out!" Sol said, talking more quickly. "She's walking poison. Last year she started a thing with Chad in my D&D group—"

"So she's a friend of yours?" I cut in. "This one's finally hitting home, huh?"

"Fuck no, I wouldn't touch her with a ten-foot pole. I don't even want to watch this fall apart."

"Good. 'Cause if you start a fucking countdown timer on this I'm coming to your house with a gun."

"Fucking listen, Jack. She cheated on Chad with Rick. When he found out, she got him to give her a second chance—while keeping Rick on the side. Then she cheated on them both with Dave. She literally destroyed my D&D group."

"I don't give a shit," I said, a little too obviously defensive.

"Jesus Christ, Jack, you should. This is like…fuck. Like you're falling in love with you."

I hung up on him.



That moment is when my understanding of everything starts to blur.

I can't tell you exactly when Sol decided to sleep with her. It didn't cross his mind after the call. But later that week he found himself browsing her Facebook page, and he sent her a private message, and she responded, and somewhere along the line the plan developed.

I can't tell you why Sol thought it was a good idea. Dear God, I wish I knew why he thought it was a good idea. He knew it was an asshole move. He knew it would hurt, and a little voice in the back of his head was cackling in vengeance for years of high-school torture. But he was also doing it because he firmly believed in everything he said during the phone call. He sincerely thought that Jack was making a mistake, and that in some fucked-up way he was obliged to fix it—and that if Jack wasn't going to listen, then cold logic would force him to do something Jack couldn't ignore. The answer is somewhere in the muddy middle of those things; that's all I know.

I can tell you why Sol decided to take a picture of him and Ruby in bed. That was pure, icy calculation. He lied to Ruby about it being a memento; he was smiling into the camera for me.

I can't tell you why Sol decided to print the picture out, put it in an envelope, and walk down to my work for an in-person confrontation. That was nothing short of insanely stupid, but he felt some twisted moral obligation. He even thought to himself as he walked into the building, "This is fucked up, and I'm going to get punched into the face."

He did, and he fucking deserved it.

We can all agree that was a shit move, right? Regardless of the morality of the rest of the story, when he presented that photo, Sol was objectively being a goddamn black-caped moustache-twirling villain. Wasn't he?

But Sol's motives aren't what keep me up at night.

The thing that does keep me up at night comes after what happened next:

I drove home, grabbed a semiautomatic rifle from my gun closet, and got back in the car.



Did I mention that I was a gun collector, by the way? Should I have? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should have come as a surprise. Isn't that exactly the sort of hobby you would have expected from the cold and hypermasculine bundle of young aggression we've labeled Jack Frost?

…Did I mention that it surprised Sol? That when I talked about driving to his house with a gun during our phone call, he thought it was a goddamn joke? So yeah, if you're feeling an uncomfortable sense of escalation right now, think about what was going through Sol's mind when he saw me step out from my car, open the trunk, pull a rifle out, load an ammo clip, and rack the slide.

Then think about what was going through my mind. Pretty easy, right? For what was almost certainly the first time in my life, I'd allowed myself to get emotionally invested in a relationship. The rival I'd accused of having a personal stake in my new partner—the rival I'd avoided telling, to opt out of our sick game of one-upmanship—had poured gasoline all over everything, and in person, to my face, had lit a match and dropped it, for the pleasure of watching it burn.

Everyone's the hero of their own story, right? And Sol was as clear-cut a villain as you're going to get. We'd reached the part where the door gets kicked in and justice gets served.

Except…I didn't.

I marched up to the porch. I hoisted the gun. (Inside the living room, hidden from my view behind the front window's sheer curtains, Sol jabbed 9-1-1 on his cell phone as he scrambled for cover behind the couch.)

Then I stopped. I stared at the door in silence for a good ten seconds. (Sol stared at the motionless silhouette on the porch, and tried to mute the phone noises with his hands, too terrified to whisper into it.)

I lowered the gun. I walked away, threw the gun back in the trunk, and drove off.

I never said a word. I never even knocked.



The police arrived seven minutes later in response to the 911 hang-up call. Sol apologized, and told them he'd misdialed and hung up when he realized his mistake. That, too, was blindingly stupid, but as we've seen, Sol is not exactly a paragon of enlightenment.

He abandoned his house for a few days, staying over with friends.

The next time he logged in to his online accounts, Jack had de-friended and blocked him on every network they shared.

And that's when Sol started trying to figure this shit out.



Everyone's the hero of their own story, right? So I'm trying so goddamn hard not to make this about me. I'm trying. But it's so fucking hard for me to get into Jack's head. Even when I'm telling his story from his perspective, I can't do it.

Why didn't Jack kick in my door and shoot me?

Did he have an attack of conscience? Pity? Did he decide vengeance wasn't worth prison time? Did he decide Ruby wasn't, after all, worth it? Or did he—and this is the terrifying thought—did he get into my head for a moment, and come to understand what I did?

Having paused on the porch to survey the story of Sol Summers, did he empathize with the hero's pain, and comprehend his lashing out, and decide to forgive?

Did he find something in me to forgive?

This is going to sound so unbelievably shitty of me, but that's what galls me: not that Jack made the decision not to shoot me, but the idea that maybe he won. That a fucking gun nut with a high-school degree and a terminal case of testosterone poisoning—a supreme asshole who made two years of my life a living hell—has the moral high ground here. That, in understanding my story better than I understand his, he's the better man.

So I'm trying to tell his story. I'm trying to make it make sense.

And if you know what he saw me do right, please explain it in terms even an asshole can understand.