Summer

Summer is the threshold between Lara Jean’s high-school life and leaving home for college, a season measured not only in plans but in ceremonies and farewells. A possible transfer to UVA, a year away from college, a trip to Korea, a backyard wedding, and a night beneath the Perseids give this interval its shape: the future is approaching, but its routes remain unsettled.

Plans and Diverging Timetables

The summer’s possibilities do not follow one shared schedule. Chris surprises Lara Jean by saying she will take a year off and work on farms, where labor earns room and board; she also imagines surfing-school work in New Zealand or learning to make wine in Italy. When Chris later wonders whether she will miss out by not starting college with everyone else, Lara Jean reassures her that college will still be there next year or later. Their exchange makes room for a different pace of growing up rather than treating college as a single deadline.

Lara Jean, meanwhile, is adjusting to not attending UVA immediately. Peter imagines a route by which she could transfer after a year at another school, and Lara Jean comes to call William and Mary for a year, then UVA her plan. Margot’s advice adds an independent strand to that future: she urges Lara Jean to make her own friends at a large university, rather than relying on the friends Peter will meet through lacrosse, and to join an Asian association. Margot says studying in a different country has made her feel she missed out on an Asian-American group and on the experience of finding racial identity at college. The advice links leaving home to the work of choosing a community, not simply entering one.

The summer also makes adulthood a question of practice rather than a switch flipped by age. As Lara Jean prepares for Beach Week after graduation, Dan worries that the gathering will be a boys’ house without adult supervision. Trina counters that Lara Jean will soon be living on her own and that the trip is practice. She gives Lara Jean practical advice about a buddy system: friends should take turns drinking so that one remains sober enough to look after the other. The conversation places greater independence alongside continuing care and safeguards.

Heritage, Travel, and Family Change

A long-discussed trip to Korea becomes Lara Jean’s graduation gift. Dan announces that he is sending the three girls with their grandmother that summer; Trina explains that the sisters will leave the following month while Dan and Trina go on their honeymoon. The trip carries a family memory as well as the promise of travel: their mother had always wanted to take them to Korea. For Lara Jean, the prospect of eating Korean food every day also marks the time she will spend away from Peter.

Questions of cultural belonging surface in smaller conversations too. When Peter suggests an Asian wedding custom for Trina, Kitty identifies it as Thai rather than Korean, and Margot objects that Trina need not incorporate Asian culture merely because the sisters are Asian. Elsewhere, Lara Jean imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg in period dress and wonders whether historical accuracy would keep Asian people from being hired. Margot encourages her to imagine herself in the role and to challenge a refusal. Together, these moments show the sisters negotiating how heritage belongs in family life without making every cultural practice interchangeable or compulsory.

Graduation and the Wedding

Graduation gathers the family around a milestone Lara Jean wishes her mother could witness. In the car on the way to the ceremony, she thinks about the major moments her mother will continue to miss and longs for a hug. During the valedictorian speech, Lara Jean scans the crowd for Peter’s family while her own family waves conspicuously; Trina’s wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat is so large that it may block the view of the row behind her. When the principal calls her name as “Lara Jean Song Covey” but pronounces Lara as Laura, she corrects him while accepting her diploma: “It’s Lara, not Laura.” The small correction gives her a voice at the very moment her school formally names her as a graduate.

Trina and Dan’s wedding turns the changing household into a public family ritual. The ceremony takes place in the backyard, decorated with Christmas lights and white paper lanterns, with fewer than fifty guests. Trina wears an ivory robe, while the bridesmaids wear pink robes embroidered with their names; the sisters’ eventual outfits reflect compromise, including Kitty’s short-sleeved shirt, plaid bow tie, and ankle-length pants. On a June day Lara Jean associates with honeysuckle, bloom, and home, the traditional vows move even Margot to tears. Reverend Choi, the pastor from their grandmother’s church, announces the kiss; Dan blushes, kisses Trina with a flourish, and is cheered by the guests as Jamie Fox-Pickle barks.

The wedding’s dance makes that new family bond especially visible. Trina proposes that the girls, rather than she, share a father-daughter dance with Dan, because she has already had that experience and believes the dance will mean more for them. They rehearse on a rented dance floor, and the planned order is Margot, Lara Jean, then Kitty cutting in. Dan chooses “Isn’t She Lovely,” Stevie Wonder’s song for his newborn daughter. Trina’s marriage therefore does not displace the sisters’ relationship with their father; the dance deliberately gives them a place within the celebration.

Keepsakes and Approaching Departure

At prom, Lara Jean puts on Stormy’s ring as her final preparation, thinking of Stormy and the dances she attended. The ring carries remembrance into a night focused on the future: Peter is waiting downstairs with his mother, nervously shaking his knee, and stands when he sees Lara Jean in her dress. The gesture connects Lara Jean’s present romance with a keepsake inherited from an older woman whose memory remains part of her life.

Near the end of the summer, the coming separation becomes immediate. The night before Lara Jean leaves for college, a Perseids meteor shower is forecast, and she and Peter plan to watch it at the lake. Kitty wants to come but cannot bring herself to ask; Lara Jean says goodbye without inviting her, and Kitty’s brief disappointment leaves Lara Jean guilty in the car. She recognizes that she has been possessive of her remaining time with Peter, while also seeing how hard it can be to be the youngest sister left behind. The scene holds two attachments in tension: the couple’s limited time together and the family bond Lara Jean is about to leave. Summer ends not by resolving that tension, but by making departure—and the people it will affect—impossible to ignore.