Senior Week

Senior Week is the themed celebration that carries Lara Jean and her classmates toward graduation and their trip to New York City. Its spirit days offer a playful calendar for the final stretch of high school, while conversations during and around the week reveal that the students are already imagining markedly different routes into adulthood.

A Week Organized by Themes

The first day is school-spirit day. Lara Jean wears Peter’s lacrosse jersey and pigtails tied with yarn ribbons in the school colors, light blue and white; Peter paints his face half blue and half white. When he picks her up, she screams at the sight of him. The costumes turn school loyalty into a shared joke and a display of their couplehood.

The remaining schedule gives each day its own character: Tuesday is seventies day, Wednesday pajama day, and Thursday characters day. Friday is set aside for the senior trip. The daily themes make the week feel both festive and finite: it is a sequence of school rituals leading directly to the class’s departure.

Characters Day and Couplehood

Lara Jean and Peter spend hours debating their costumes for Thursday. Lara Jean argues for Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler, but gives up the idea when she realizes how expensive it would be to rent Colonial costumes on short notice. Peter proposes Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson, partly because he already owns the costume. They settle instead on Tyler Durden and Marla Singer from Fight Club, an idea suggested by Lara Jean’s best friend, Chris, while she, Chris, and Kitty were watching the film.

The choice initially troubles Lara Jean because Marla is not Asian, and Lara Jean has a policy of choosing costumes featuring Asian people. The practical details help bring the idea together: Peter’s mother finds him a red leather jacket at an estate sale, and Ms. Rothschild lends Lara Jean clothes from her own wardrobe, having been young in the 1990s. The negotiation turns a themed-school activity into a small portrait of the couple: Lara Jean weighs identity and expense, Peter favors a costume he can already wear, and their final choice grows out of friends and family as well as their own preferences.

The Senior Trip and College Plans

The class votes between New York City and Disney World, choosing New York. The seniors will travel by charter bus for a three-day weekend. The timing offers a distraction while many students wait to hear from colleges. Peter and Lucas Krapf already know their destinations through early decision: Peter is going to the University of Virginia, while Lucas is going to Sarah Lawrence. Most of Lara Jean’s classmates expect to remain in Virginia, a prospect she finds appealing rather than limiting.

The week’s horizon is not the same for every student. Chris plans to take a year off, working on farms in exchange for room and board; she also imagines other possibilities, including working at a surfing school in New Zealand or learning winemaking in Italy. Later, when Chris worries that she might miss out by not attending college alongside her peers, Lara Jean reassures her that college will still be available next year or whenever she wants it. Their exchange places Chris’s open-ended gap year beside Lara Jean’s more deliberate college plan, without treating either timetable as the only route forward.

Plans in Motion

Lara Jean’s own plan is unsettled by her rejection from the University of Virginia. Peter suggests that she might transfer there after beginning at another four-year college, drawing on the example of Toney Lewis, who went from PVCC to the university. He imagines that she could attend William and Mary or the University of Richmond for a year, visit him, and then apply to transfer. Lara Jean has not yet absorbed the idea that she will not be going to the University of Virginia, so Peter’s suggestion gives her a possible future rather than a settled outcome.

The approaching departures are also discussed at home. As Lara Jean prepares for Beach Week and college, Dan is uneasy about her staying in a boys’ house without adult supervision. Trina argues that Lara Jean is nearly an adult and that the trip can serve as practice for living independently. She also gives Lara Jean practical advice about using a buddy system if she drinks: on alternating nights, one friend stays sober enough to look after the other. The exchange sets parental worry beside the concrete responsibilities that accompany leaving home.

A Graduation Gift and a Family Journey

At graduation, Dan announces that he is sending his three daughters to Korea with their grandmother that summer. The news shocks Lara Jean; she and her sisters have talked for years about going, and their mother had wanted to take them. Trina explains that the trip will happen the following month, while Dan and Trina go on their honeymoon. The announcement adds a family journey to the departures already shaping the season: the sisters will travel together, carrying their mother’s remembered wish into a summer that also marks Lara Jean’s move toward college.