High School Graduation

High School Graduation is the ceremony at which Lara Jean Covey and Peter Kavinsky are declared graduates, a milestone that makes the change in their lives official without making it simple. Lara Jean feels both the pull of home and excitement about leaving, while Peter’s father’s last-minute absence exposes a hurt that the celebration cannot contain. The day’s diploma, family gathering, and gifts mark a passage into adulthood; its losses and unfinished plans keep that passage open-ended.

The morning and the threshold

On graduation morning, Lara Jean wakes early and listens to the Covey house coming to life: Dan Covey makes coffee downstairs, Margot Song showers, and Kitty Song is probably still asleep. These ordinary sounds sharpen the meaning of departure. Lara Jean already feels homesick for them, yet she is also excited to take the next step, despite the disappointment of not ending up where she had hoped. Graduation is not a clean break from home so much as the moment she realizes she is attached to it even as she prepares to leave.

The ceremony gathers family around that transition. Trina Rothschild drives with Margot and Kitty, while Dan travels separately to collect Lara Jean’s grandmother. Dan’s mother, Nana, cannot attend because she is in Florida with her boyfriend, and Lara Jean wishes her own mother could be present. She imagines that her mother somehow sees the occasion, but that hope does not erase the desire for a hug. The day makes absence part of the family portrait, alongside the relatives who have come to celebrate.

Before the ceremony, Lara Jean smooths her dress and checks that her cap is in her bag, registering that graduation has arrived before she feels fully prepared for growing up. During the valedictorian speech, she scans the crowd for Peter’s family and repeatedly finds her own, whose enthusiastic waving makes them easy to spot. Trina’s wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat is conspicuous enough to block the view of the row behind her; although Margot and Kitty think it is too much, Lara Jean has told Trina she likes it. The comic detail belongs to the same gathering as the ceremony’s more serious rituals: this is a family event with its own familiar differences and affections.

The ceremony and its absences

When the principal calls her name, he pronounces Lara Jean Song Covey as “Laura.” Lara Jean accepts her diploma and corrects him quietly: “It’s Lara, not Laura.” The small correction gives her a moment of self-assertion within a formal rite that names her among the graduates. She had planned to blow her family a kiss while crossing the stage, but nerves make her forget. She hears Kitty’s whoop and Dan’s whistle instead, and the family’s voices carry the affection her planned gesture would have returned.

Peter’s turn brings another kind of communal recognition. Lara Jean claps and screams for him, and so do the people around her; even the teachers applaud especially loudly. After the graduates throw their caps, Peter crosses the crowd smiling, joking, and greeting people, but Lara Jean notices a blankness in his eyes when he reaches her. He hugs and swiftly kisses her, calling them college kids now. His outward ease and inward distress coexist in the middle of a public celebration.

Lara Jean asks whether Peter’s mother, Owen, his father, and his half brothers are in the stands, and whether she should join them before or after taking family pictures. Peter shakes his head and says his father could not come at the last minute because of some kind of emergency. Lara Jean is stunned: she had taken Peter’s father’s apparent sincerity at a lacrosse game as a reason to hope, and now she wishes the emergency had been serious enough to justify missing his own son’s graduation. Peter shrugs and says it is fine, but his tightly set jaw contradicts the dismissal. The ceremony’s public declaration of a new beginning therefore coincides with a private disappointment Peter cannot simply shrug away.

Lara Jean wants time to comfort him, takes his hand, and says she is sorry. Before she can say more, her family arrives; Peter greets her grandmother and takes photographs with them, then leaves to find his mother and brother. Lara Jean calls after him, but he is too far away and does not turn around. The moment leaves her caught between two legitimate claims on her attention: her own family’s graduation celebration and her instinct to remain beside Peter when he has been hurt.

Family celebration and remembered futures

The family goes to a Japanese restaurant for lunch, ordering plates of sashimi and sushi. Lara Jean wears a napkin bib to protect her white dress from soy sauce. Trina sits beside the grandmother and keeps up conversation, making an effort even though the grandmother may find her talkative. Lara Jean tries to be festive and appreciative at a lunch held in her honor, but her thoughts keep returning to Peter. The ceremony’s crowd disperses into a family meal, yet the emotional consequences of the day travel with her.

Over mochi ice cream, the grandmother describes places she wants to take the sisters in Korea, from Buddhist temples and outdoor food markets to the skin clinic where she has moles lasered. The trip becomes concrete when Dan announces that he is sending the three girls to Korea with their grandmother that summer. The family has talked for years about going; their mother had wanted to take them. Kitty screams and Margot beams, while Lara Jean is stunned. Trina adds that the sisters will leave next month, as she and Dan go on their honeymoon. The gift turns graduation into a beginning shared by the sisters, and gives the long-postponed journey a place in the near future.

The drive home with Dan makes the mother’s absence more intimate. Looking at Lara Jean with misty eyes, he tells her that her mother would have been proud of her and cared deeply about her education, wanting her to have every opportunity. Lara Jean wonders whether her mother regretted never earning a master’s degree, while carefully distinguishing that question from any regret about having Kitty. Dan says Kitty was a happy surprise and explains that their mother planned to return to school once Kitty was in preschool full-time. She had not abandoned the plan: she meant to take a class that fall, but “ran out of time.” Dan’s voice chokes as he recalls that he and Lara Jean had eighteen years with her. The graduation celebration thus opens onto a future her mother intended to pursue, as well as the loss that prevented it.

Lara Jean fingers the tassel in her lap and asks to stop at a drugstore for photo paper. She and Peter had taken a picture together in caps and gowns that morning, and she wants it for the last page of his scrapbook, the final page of their high-school chapter. The photograph is a keepsake, but also a marker: graduation separates one period from the next even as Lara Jean tries to preserve what the two of them have shared.

Different routes into adulthood

The conversations surrounding graduation make clear that leaving high school does not put everyone on the same schedule. Chris plans to take a year off, work on farms in exchange for room and board, and consider other possibilities such as a surfing school in New Zealand or learning winemaking in Italy. She is excited by the freedom to go somewhere new, but also worries that she may be missing out by not beginning college alongside everyone else. Lara Jean reassures her that college will still be there next year or later. Chris, in turn, can picture Lara Jean at the University of North Carolina, while Lara Jean explains her own plan: a year at William and Mary, then an application to transfer to the University of Virginia.

That plan has itself emerged from disappointment and negotiation. Peter, who has earned his place at the University of Virginia through his work at lacrosse, tells Lara Jean that she deserves to go there too. He remembers Toney Lewis, a former senior who attended PVCC for two years before transferring, and imagines that Lara Jean could transfer even sooner because she will start at a four-year college. Lara Jean has not yet grown accustomed to the idea of not going directly to the University of Virginia, but Peter’s proposal gives her a possible route rather than a final verdict. Graduation confirms that she is leaving high school; it does not settle where she will ultimately belong.

The family also negotiates adulthood in practical terms. When Lara Jean’s plans for Beach Week involve staying at a boy’s house the day after graduation, Dan objects to the lack of adult supervision. Trina reminds him that Lara Jean is not a child and will soon live on her own, calling the trip practice. Dan accepts the point without liking it. Once he and Kitty leave the table, Trina offers Lara Jean advice for college and Beach Week: arrange a buddy system so that one friend stays sober enough to look after the other. The exchange recognizes Lara Jean’s growing independence while making care, rather than mere permission, part of the transition.

Meaning of the passage

The ceremony is a threshold, not a tidy resolution. A diploma and a corrected name publicly identify Lara Jean as a graduate, but the day also contains her wish for her mother, Peter’s unspoken hurt, and uncertainty about which college path she will take. The surrounding family rituals—the loud cheers, photographs, shared meal, and trip to Korea—make change something experienced in company, not something she enters alone.

Graduation also brings distinct futures into view without pretending they are interchangeable. Chris can defer college and travel; Lara Jean can begin at one school while keeping transfer to the University of Virginia in mind; Peter faces a family absence that his academic achievement cannot repair. The day’s emotional force comes from that unevenness: growing up is happening to all of them, but not in the same way or at the same pace. Lara Jean leaves the ceremony with both a new identity and attachments she intends to carry forward.