The blue jacket changes owners

Text C: an original fiction extract.

At the clothes swap, Beth placed her blue jacket on the rail and smoothed the sleeves one last time. It no longer fitted across her shoulders, but from the front it looked exactly as it had on the day she bought it. She had checked the pockets at home and removed two cinema tickets. The swap rule was simple: bring something wearable, take something you could use. Her sister chose a scarf immediately. Beth watched the jacket instead.

A girl in a yellow shirt tried it on. The cuffs covered half her hands. She turned them back, studied herself in the mirror and asked the volunteer whether taking the jacket meant she could alter it. The volunteer said it would be hers. Beth almost added that the sleeves were meant to look long. She had worn them that way for two years. Her sister touched her arm and asked whether she wanted to keep the jacket after all.

Beth said no. She followed her sister to the shoe table, then drifted towards the mirror again. The girl had found a strip of patterned fabric in the craft box. She was holding it along one cuff, trying to imagine a brighter edge. Beth recognised the colour as one she would never have chosen. She felt briefly as though the girl had criticised the jacket without saying anything about it.

At the repair table, a volunteer offered to pin the cuff rather than cut it immediately. The girl put down the fabric to show him how the sleeve twisted when she moved. Beth could see the problem then. On her own arm, the seam had fallen in another place. The girl was not failing to wear the jacket correctly; she had different arms. Beth laughed at the obviousness of this, quietly enough that nobody asked why.

While moving the lining, the volunteer found a third cinema ticket inside a narrow inner pocket. The girl read the date, asked whose jacket it had been and handed the ticket to Beth. Beth thanked her and started describing the film. She stopped after the first sentence. The girl was listening politely, but had come to choose clothes, not collect somebody else's account of wearing them. Beth said she hoped the alteration worked and went to try a green waistcoat.

A month later, she saw the jacket outside the library. The cuffs had a patterned edge and the missing button had been replaced with a dark wooden one. Beth had forgotten that the button was missing until she saw its replacement. The girl waved and lifted one sleeve to show that it stayed clear of her hand. Beth lifted her own arm in reply. The green waistcoat fitted well over her shirt. In its pocket, she still carried the returned ticket, which no longer had to remain attached to the jacket to belong to her.

You are Beth. Write an article for your school magazine about what the clothes swap taught you.

In your response:

• describe why giving away the jacket was less simple than you expected
• explore how your view of its new owner and her alterations changed
• explain what you would suggest to someone taking part in another swap

Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.