California is both a place Violet Markey once called home and a destination she imagines returning to after her family moves to Bartlett, Indiana. Its warmth and remembered family rituals make it more than a point on her college list: it represents an earlier life whose meaning changes as grief reshapes her plans.

Past Home and Family Rituals

Violet recalls California as home before the move to Indiana, when Eleanor was a sophomore and Violet was about to enter ninth grade. The recollection gives the place a clear position in her personal timeline, but not a specific city or landscape. What she remembers most concretely is the life her family made there together.

One California ritual was the family’s bookstore hunt. Violet, Eleanor, and their parents would get into the car, each choose a book to find, and keep searching until they had located every title. They might visit eight or ten stores in a day. The ritual made travel a shared game of attention and persistence, with the family’s return home dependent on completing the search.

A Destination Reconsidered

When Violet is asked about college, she recalls that a year earlier she would have welcomed the conversation. She and Eleanor used to imagine the places they would go and people they would meet, away from Bartlett, Indiana, where they felt like outsiders. After Eleanor’s death, Violet’s plans change: although New York University’s creative-writing program had been her longstanding dream, she no longer intends to apply early admission as planned.

California reappears as a possible destination during Violet and Theodore Finch’s first wander. Asked where she might want to go, she says she wants to return to the California of four years before, when her family still lived there. Her stated reasons are practical and sensory: it is warm, and it never snows. Yet the qualification matters—she is not simply making a settled plan. She also considers studying in Argentina or Singapore, and admits she might stay where she is. California is an imagined alternative, not a decision.

Her application choices also include California institutions: the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University, and Berkeley. Their presence on the list sits alongside options elsewhere, while her abandoned early-admission plan for New York University recalls the particular college ambition she held before the accident and its aftermath altered her direction.

Memory Renewed in Indiana

The bookstore hunt returns when Finch takes Violet to Bookmobile Park, a line of seven book-filled trailers set beside cornfields outside Bartlett. Seeing the trailers, Violet leans toward the dashboard and remembers the family game from California. She is out of the car and climbing into the first trailer before Finch has caught up. The new place does not reproduce her old home, but it gives a familiar pleasure a different form: books and searching again, now encountered with Finch rather than with her family.

This memory makes California present without turning it into a fully described setting. The remembered routine is portable; it can be recalled in Indiana and renewed in an unfamiliar place. At the same time, Violet’s wish to return remains tied to an earlier version of her life, while her changing college plans show that the past cannot simply dictate what comes next.