The Chocolate Run by Dorothy Koomson

school. Everything about her screamed sophistication, which immediately intimidated me. I’d been wearing baggy jeans with a long-sleeved T-shirt and had a nineteen-year-old’s slouch, my plaits were pulled back into a ponytail with a towelling scrunchy. I was everything that Jen wasn’t.
    I’d watched her return to her room from the kitchen and decided she wasn’t like any chocolate or sweet I’d ever encountered. She was one of those new chocolate bars that you spotted as you walked into a shop. Its wrapping was so effortlessly classy it made everything around it seem gaudy and cheap. This chocolate was unique. It was a real white chocolate. Not the creamy colour most white chocolate is, but snow white. It had lots of cream and milk and white sugar, but minimal cocoa. It was soft around the edges, very quick and easy to melt so you had to be careful how you handled it. And because of that, because of the element of risk involved, most people would ignore it, going instead for what they knew. Grabbing their Mars, Twix or Dairy Milk because, when it came down to it, most people tended to stick to what was familiar.
    I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t ignore this unusual, sophisticated chocolate – find myself a Mars to befriend – because she was my neighbour. I had to get to know her. I bit the bullet and knocked on her door when her parents left.
    ‘Hi, I’m Amber, your next-door neighbour,’ I’d said to her.
    ‘I’m Jen,’ she said, and grinned. That grin dissolved my worries about her. You could fake a lot of things but not the warmth that came from that smile.
    Once you bit into Jen by talking to her, by going beyond her looks, you found out how lovely she was. How her nose wrinkled up when she laughed. How her eyes sparkled when she was about to ask you something deeply personal. How silly she could be. Under that white chocolate bubbled real champagne. Fun, refreshing champagne, an experience you wanted to last and last.
    We spent most of our time together after that. She was training to be a primary-school teacher with English as her main degree and I was studying Psychology with Press and Publicity as my professional training subject. It was Christmas, though, that cemented our friendship.
    At Christmas, when everyone was getting excited about going home, seeing friends, spending time with their families, I started to get mini panic attacks. I sat staring into space, gnawing on my thumbnails, my heart almost visible, it was beating that hard in my chest. My parents had separated when I was ten and I was trying to work out which parent would get the 27 to 30 December visit. Which one would be giving me a long, frosty silence down the phone as I explained I wasn’t going to be spending the big day with them. Christmas was so fraught I often tried to ignore it. Then I discovered Jen was going through Christmas Anxiety too.
    Jen’s mum was an ex-model, but her mother, with her fading beauty, was a bitter woman. And her bitterness fermented into a vindictiveness aimed primarily at her daughter.
    When Jen was eight, her mother told her the man she thought of as her father wasn’t her father. When Jen was ten, her mother decided he was her biological father. As it turned out it didn’t matter because he left when Jen was eleven, never to be heard from again. Her mother then had a succession of boyfriends, none of whom liked Jen. Not Jen the person, Jen the reminder that her mother wasn’t footloose and fancy-free. The only one of her mum’s lovers she did get on with was the man her mother met six months before Jen left for uni. Her mother was still with him and Jen liked him a lot, possibly because he showed her and her mother a lot of respect.
    The point is, Jen and I bonded because we knew we were different from our peers. Everyone around us didn’t seem to tread on eggshells around their families; we didn’t run home at every opportunity. So, Jenna Leigh Hartman from Reading and Amber Salpone from