Ice Cream Adrenaline

3

It was cold in the northeast. Especially in late October. Since Nick was crossing into Canada, and would have to go through at least some of the northeast, the guys decided to hang out in New England. Lake Champlain, to be exact. Somehow, it was even colder than New Jersey, which was only a few hours away. It was so cold that the lake had already frozen over for winter.

The guys were sitting in a small coffee shop, absolutely exhausted. They had made it to Lake Champlain on a train, but couldn't find a hotel. Alex kept Paul and Bob up all night walking. They decided that they had to find Nick before he made it into Canada. Alex decided to text Luca for info.

//ALEX//: do you know where Nick is?

//LUCA//: he's headed to Canada through New York or Vermont.

//ALEX//: dude we're right on the border!! sick!!

Meanwhile, Nick was in Lake Placid.

He was staying in a pretty cheap hotel that looked like it hadn't been renovated since the 1970s. There was also a convention going on for a strange Canadian-American adult hockey league. There were drunk hockey dads everywhere. Nick needed to leave. He was currently crashed in his hotel room, trying to get some sleep. It wasn't working. There were parties everywhere around him, and he could tell that they got pretty wild. He even found a cucumber outside his hotel room, just casually chilling on the floor in the hallway. This was not a safe place. Lake Champlain was only a few hours away, and it was much bigger and much safer than Lake Placid.

Nick grabbed his backpack, put on a hoodie, and opened the door to the rest of the party-destroyed hotel. He had to admit, it was a little scary walking down a hallway with drunk middle aged hockey dads staring you down. Nick stopped thinking about that for a second to just analyze himself. He was a teenage runaway carrying a backpack and wearing a navy blue hoodie, with the hood pulled up over his eyes, so no one could see that he was blinking back tears at this point. Nick realized that he could be easily judged, and that all of those hockey dads would probably make jokes about him later at their parties. That didn't matter. The hockey dads were temporary, and would soon go back to their mundane office lives. Nick was making it out of Lake Placid, and he was making it out alive.

The walk out of Lake Placid wasn't too confusing. There was a main road with a few touristy ski shops and a couple winding roads off of that. Lake Champlain was north of Lake Placid, so Nick just took the road that lead north and hoped that everything would turn out okay.

The Adirondack mountains weren't friendly. They were rocky, cold, and unforgiving. Nick accidentally tripped into a few ditches along the side of a backroad that lead to the New York-Vermont border. Nick was quickly becoming dehydrated, and he would have drank some of the water that Luca gave him, but it was somehow rapidly turning to ice.

As Nick got closer to Lake Champlain, he wanted to find Alex more and more. He wanted to find him and pretend that everything was okay, and that they were best friends, or boyfriends, or whatever they were.

//UNKNOWN//: you in Lake Champlain?

sending

unable to send

Nick hated the mountains. Sure, they were beautiful, but they were cold, slushy, and had little to no cell service. Suddenly, a few hours later, the cell service started flowing in, and Nick realized that he was getting closer to Lake Champlain when he saw a skyline and a frozen lake.

//ALEX//: yeah, why? you wanna hang out?

Nick sighed, shutting his phone off with Alex's text still in his notifications. Why was he suddenly bumped back to the uncomfortable pudding cup zone? Why didn't Alex like him as much as he used to?