Chris

Chris is Lara Jean Covey’s longtime best friend and a force of affectionate independence in her life: while Lara Jean is trying to choose a college and imagine leaving home, Chris is willing to work on farms, learn new skills, and go wherever opportunity leads. Their friendship survives separate plans and impending distance, culminating in Chris’s departure for the Dominican Republic and a small framed photograph that affirms the place each will continue to hold in the other’s life.

Identity and Independence

Chris’s plans resist the assumption that everyone must move directly from high school into college. When Lara Jean tells her about the University of Virginia rejection, Chris proposes that they work on a farm in Costa Rica together. She explains that farm work can provide room and board in exchange for a few hours of labor each day; she has no farming experience, but expects to learn on the job. Surf instruction in New Zealand and learning to make wine in Italy are other possibilities. The appeal is not a settled career plan but the freedom to go somewhere new and find out what she can do.

Her alternatives make the difference between the friends’ post-school paths vivid without making either one a failure. Lara Jean has long imagined a college destination, while Chris has little inclination to follow the usual timetable and is prepared to take a year away. Later, she admits that going abroad excites her even as she wonders whether she is missing out by not attending college alongside her peers. Lara Jean tells her that college will still be there the following year or later. Chris does not resolve the question on the spot; she says they will see, leaving her future open rather than treating delay as a permanent rejection of education.

Friendship in Everyday Life

Chris is part of Lara Jean’s close circle at school and at home. On the senior trip to New York, she sits with Lucas Krapf rather than beside Lara Jean, who rides next to Peter Kavinsky. The arrangement places Chris among the friends sharing the trip, while Lara Jean’s account emphasizes how easy it was to persuade her to come: Chris had never been to New York either. Chris is also the originator of Lara Jean and Peter’s Tyler Durden and Marla Singer costumes for Characters Day, proposing the pairing for its shock value. The idea becomes workable when Peter’s mother finds a red leather jacket and Ms. Rothschild lends Lara Jean clothes from her wardrobe. Chris’s influence thus reaches into the playful details of Lara Jean’s life, even when she is not the one helping her get dressed.

At another point, Chris and Lara Jean sit with Lucas in the school nurse’s office, where Lucas argues that prom bears the weight of unrealistic expectations. Chris’s dismissive response to the idea of New Year’s Eve as a night for “basics” establishes her teasing, unsentimental presence in the conversation. In domestic life, she can be equally blunt. Watching Trina Rothschild direct movers into the Covey home, Chris says she would not want to move into another woman’s house because she would feel that the furniture and wallpaper belonged to the woman who had lived there before. Her comment gives voice to the unease that can accompany a changing family home, even though Lara Jean questions Chris’s description of her late mother as “another woman.”

Diverging Routes After High School

The friends’ different ideas of what comes next become especially clear after Lara Jean visits Chapel Hill with Chris. The drive is spontaneous: Lara Jean packs dried wasabi peas, Pocky sticks, and bottled water, and halfway there realizes that her phone is dying and she has forgotten her charger. She has said she will not attend the University of North Carolina, but wants to see the place. At the venue that night, Chris introduces her to girls in line as her best friend who has just been accepted to UNC. The announcement turns the still-new possibility into shared good news. Lara Jean feels reassured that they still matter to each other despite Chris’s work friends and Lara Jean’s relationship with Peter.

Before leaving Chapel Hill, Lara Jean hesitates on a bench facing one of the brick buildings. She has not yet made the final decision to attend UNC, and the possibility that she may never return makes leaving difficult. Chris says she wishes she could come there too, then admits that the thought of missing college at the same time as everyone else troubles her despite her excitement about Costa Rica. Lara Jean offers reassurance without claiming to settle the matter for her: college will remain available whenever Chris wants it. Chris, in turn, can picture Lara Jean at UNC, while Lara Jean explains that she has a plan to spend a year at William & Mary and then transfer to UVA. Their exchange holds two uncertain futures side by side: Lara Jean’s proposed sequence of institutions and Chris’s open-ended year abroad.

The two friends return home after three in the morning, with Lara Jean’s phone dead and every light on at the house. Chris declines Lara Jean’s plea to come inside, saying she has to go home and deal with her own mother. Their goodbye in the car is affectionate, but Lara Jean must face the consequences of her late return on her own. Chris’s willingness to accompany her on an impulsive trip does not erase the separate responsibilities waiting for each of them at home.

Departure and a Keepsake

Chris is the first of Lara Jean’s friends to leave. In the week before Dan Covey’s wedding, she arrives at the house and announces that she cannot attend because she is leaving the next day for the Dominican Republic. An opening has come up for her at an eco-hotel, and she cannot pass it up. Her broad grin conveys excitement more clearly than her apology conveys regret. The departure is sudden in its timing, even though it fits the adventurous direction she had already imagined through possible farm work and travel.

Chris describes the move as temporary, but Lara Jean privately senses that it may be permanent in practice: she cannot picture Chris returning a year later to enroll at Piedmont Virginia Community College. The image of Chris as a stray cat, coming and going as she pleases and always landing on her feet, gives shape to both her independence and the difficulty of expecting her to follow a fixed route home. Chris tells Lara Jean that she will be fine without her and points to Peter, not knowing that Lara Jean and Peter have broken up. Lara Jean does not make Chris’s departure about that loss; she is glad Chris is leaving for an adventure rather than staying behind, and asks if she can help her pack.

Before Chris goes, Lara Jean gives her a photograph of the two of them at the beach, wearing matching bathing suits and about twelve or thirteen years old, in a heart-shaped frame no bigger than a Christmas-tree ornament. She asks Chris to hang it wherever she goes so that people will know someone is waiting for her back home. Chris’s eyes fill with tears as she brushes them away. The gift turns the friendship’s history into something portable: not a guarantee that the friends will live near each other, but a reminder of where they belong to one another.

Narrative Significance

Chris’s importance lies in the way her independent choices make the transition out of high school feel multiple rather than uniform. Her plans move through possible farm work, travel, and an eco-hotel job, while Lara Jean considers colleges, a possible transfer, and eventually UNC. Neither friend’s path simply cancels the other’s. At Chapel Hill, Chris can publicly celebrate Lara Jean’s acceptance and still confess that she wishes she could share the college experience; Lara Jean can encourage Chris to go when she wants without treating their different timing as the end of their friendship.

The novel repeatedly gives that bond material forms: a shared road trip, the childhood photograph, and the heart-shaped frame that travels with Chris. The final keepsake answers the uncertainty of departure in a deliberately modest way. Chris may not come back on the schedule Lara Jean once imagines, and the friends are moving into different lives, but the photograph declares that their connection has a past worth carrying and a home to return to in memory.