If You Were Here

“If You Were Here” is the song Peter chooses for a birthday surprise that transforms Lara Jean’s favorite scene from Sixteen Candles into a shared moment. Its opening notes cue a carefully staged recreation, joining a film-inspired romantic ideal to the couple’s real relationship and to the celebration of Lara Jean’s birthday.

The Song in Peter’s Surprise

Peter brings out a cake he has baked from a box, lights its candles with help from Gabe, and climbs onto a table, inviting Lara Jean to join him. The opening notes of “If You Were Here” begin as she realizes that Peter is recreating the end of Sixteen Candles: Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan sitting together on a table with a birthday cake between them. Lara Jean had previously called the scene the most romantic thing she had ever seen; Peter’s choice of the song makes that remembered preference the blueprint for his surprise.

The staging becomes a collaborative performance. Chris calls Lara Jean up to the table, Gabe and Darrell help lift her onto it, and Chris directs Peter to roll up his sleeve while she adjusts Lara Jean’s skirt and takes photographs. Peter tells Lara Jean how to look at him and lean forward, but the affection the scene requires is already genuine: she finds it effortless to gaze at him adoringly. The song therefore accompanies not just an imitation of a movie image but a moment in which the couple’s own feelings give that image life.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The sequence makes the song a cue for recognition: its first notes tell Lara Jean what Peter has planned before the scene is complete. The film reference is intimate because it draws on something she had shared with him months earlier, and the gesture turns that private recollection into a celebration witnessed by their friends. After Lara Jean blows out the candles, she wishes that she will always feel for Peter as she does then, linking the staged moment to her hope that the feeling behind it will endure.

Across the novel’s wider arc, the song’s scene sits within a period of impending change. At the prom, Lara Jean and Peter share one last dance and recognize that their high-school life together is ending, even though the summer remains ahead. Against that farewell, Peter’s birthday recreation preserves a vivid, joyful image of the two of them together. The song’s importance lies in this convergence of memory and present affection: a romantic scene borrowed from a movie becomes one of their own shared memories.