1﴿ Kimberly’s story
When I was at high school there was a girl in my class called Kimberly. She was quite a
goodlooking girl with dark hair and blue eyes, but she had a very unusual nose. It was
quite big and pointed and it made her look a little bit like a big bird. She was very
worried about her nose and it made her very shy and not at all confident.
Some of the boys made jokes about the size of her nose and called her names and this
made the situation even worse. Sometimes Kimberly started crying and sometimes she
didn’t come to class. Her friends tried to tell her that she was pretty and that the size of
her nose didn’t matter, but she didn’t listen and just got more upset.
After I left high school we all went to college or found jobs and I didn’t think about
Kimberly at all. One night a couple of years later I was sitting in a bar with a few friends
when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round and there was a girl with
dark hair. "You don’t recognize me, do you?" she said. I looked again and realized that
it was Kimberly. She looked completely different.
She sat down and started chatting. She seemed like a completely different person from
the shy girl I had known before. But she hadn’t had cosmetic surgery ? she was simply
so confident and so much fun, that she looked great. I thought that perhaps I should
apologize for all the things we had said at school, but instead I asked her what she was
doing and if she was happy. "Oh yes, I’m very happy" she said. "I’m a presenter on
daytime TV. You might have seen me without knowing who I was." I couldn’t believe it,
the shy girl who ran away from school was on TV every day talking to thousands of
people.