Lara Jean's senior year

Lara Jean's senior year turns the usual milestones of high school into a negotiation over timing: college applications, graduation, travel, and leaving home all arrive alongside changes in her family and friendships. UVA’s decision not to admit her disrupts the future she had hoped for, but the year also makes room for other routes, including a possible transfer, a friend’s gap year, and a family trip to Korea tied to memories of her mother.

School Rituals and the College Countdown

The year’s public calendar begins with Senior Week, when each day has a theme. On school-spirit day, Lara Jean wears Peter Kavinsky’s lacrosse jersey and pigtails tied with light-blue and white yarn ribbons; Peter arrives with his face painted half blue and half white, and she screams when she sees him. The rest of the schedule promises seventies day, pajamas day, and a characters day she especially anticipates, before the class leaves for a three-day senior trip to New York City. The themed clothes and shared trip make senior year feel communal, even as its students wait anxiously for individual college decisions.

That anxiety becomes part of Lara Jean’s private routine. One sleepless night, she reviews her application credentials: volunteer work at Belleview, a library internship, SAT scores above the UVA average, and a five on the AP U.S. history exam. Her essay is personal, about her mother and the ways she shaped her daughters both before and after her death. Although her teacher praises the essay, Lara Jean cannot know whether it will make the difference. Unable to settle her thoughts, she gets up and measures ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, turning waiting into a familiar, practical activity.

The admissions process sharpens the contrast between older and newer ways of imagining a future. Lara Jean checks her phone through a week of silence from UVA, expecting the decision to appear in the Student Info System after an announcement on social media. She remembers her teacher describing the older ritual of acceptance letters arriving by mail, with parents calling the school and students racing home to check the post. The remembered letter makes waiting seem romantic, but Lara Jean’s own wait is digital, public, and difficult to escape.

Rejection and Alternative Routes

When UVA decisions are released, the outcome unsettles the plan Lara Jean had built around attending the university. Peter is admitted, and he responds to her disappointment by imagining a way they might still end up there together. He recalls that a former student first attended PVCC and later transferred to UVA, then suggests that Lara Jean could begin at another four-year college and apply to transfer the following year. His confidence offers a route forward, but it also shows how strongly he imagines her future as one that should converge with his at UVA. Lara Jean has not yet adjusted to the rejection, and transferring had not occurred to her before he raised it.

The year places her decision beside other ways of moving into adulthood. Chris plans to take a year off and work on farms in exchange for room and board; she also imagines possibilities such as working at a surfing school in New Zealand or learning winemaking in Italy. Later, as she considers college and UNC with Lara Jean, Chris admits that she sometimes wonders whether she will miss out by not starting college alongside everyone else. Lara Jean reassures her that college will remain available next year or later. Their exchange makes clear that the friends’ paths are diverging, but neither has to treat a different schedule as a closed door.

Lara Jean’s own plans remain unsettled even when she gives them a shape. She tells Chris that she will spend a year at William and Mary and then go to UVA. The plan carries the hope of eventually joining Peter, but it is still a proposed path rather than a certainty. Across the year, college appears less as a single destination reached by everyone at once than as a choice that can be delayed, redirected, or pursued again.

Family Change and New Responsibilities

The approaching transition takes place within a family that is changing too. Lara Jean recognizes that her father has been alone for so long that his solitude had begun to feel normal, and she is glad he has found a partner in Trina Rothschild. When her father takes time to find a ring and kneels to propose, Lara Jean squeezes Kitty’s hand; Kitty’s eyes shine as their father tells Trina that he had thought his chance at love was over, until she came into his life. The proposal gives the family’s new relationship a public turning point, while Lara Jean’s response shows that she welcomes her father’s happiness rather than treating the change as a threat.

Lara Jean’s growing independence also appears in a disagreement about Beach Week, the post-graduation gathering at a boy’s house without adult supervision. Her father worries about the arrangement, but Trina reminds him that Lara Jean will soon be living on her own and frames the event as practice. After he leaves the table, Trina offers Lara Jean practical advice about looking after one another: the friends should take turns drinking so that someone remains sober enough to help the other. The conversation links parental concern with a more direct preparation for adult responsibility.

Graduation, Travel, and What Comes Next

At graduation, Lara Jean’s father gives his three daughters a trip to Korea with their grandmother. The surprise answers a wish the sisters have discussed for years and recalls that their mother had always wanted to take them there. The timing is immediate: the sisters will leave the following month, while their father and Trina go on their honeymoon. The gift makes travel both a celebration of graduation and a way for the sisters to carry their mother’s memory into a new experience.

Taken together, these milestones do not resolve Lara Jean’s future into a single, seamless passage from high school to college. Senior Week offers shared rituals; the admissions decision forces a change of plan; conversations with Chris make room for different timetables; and her family’s engagement, Beach Week, and Korea trip place independence beside belonging. The year’s significance lies in that coexistence: Lara Jean moves toward a life beyond home without treating detours, family attachments, or remembered hopes as things she must leave behind.