Chris’s Departure for the Dominican Republic

Chris’s departure for the Dominican Republic is a turning point in Lara Jean’s long friendship with Chris: an impulsive opportunity takes Chris away sooner than expected, while Lara Jean senses that even a future reunion cannot restore the shape of their life together. Their goodbye, marked by a small framed photograph from childhood, holds two truths at once: Chris is leaving for what comes next, and the friendship remains a tie to home.

An unexpected opportunity

Chris comes to the Covey house the week of Dan’s wedding to say she cannot attend. She is leaving for the Dominican Republic the next day, and her excitement is unmistakable: an opening has come up at an eco-hotel, and she has decided she cannot pass it up. She asks whether Spanish is spoken there, then explains that this opportunity has displaced her earlier plan to go to Costa Rica. The change is characteristic of Chris as Lara Jean understands her: she sees a new possibility and pounces rather than waiting for the route she had expected to follow.

The speed of the decision catches Lara Jean off guard. She had thought Chris would leave in August, not immediately, and asks when she will come back. Chris cannot give her a date. She might stay six months, or another opportunity might take her somewhere else. That open-endedness is part of the appeal for Chris, but for Lara Jean it makes the departure feel larger than a trip with a known return.

Temporary words and a lasting goodbye

When Lara Jean asks if Chris is leaving for good, Chris answers that she is not leaving for good, just for now. Lara Jean does not fully accept the reassurance. She imagines that Chris will not return a year later to attend Piedmont Virginia Community College; to her, Chris is like a stray cat who comes and goes as she pleases, always landing on her feet. The comparison captures both the freedom Lara Jean admires and the difficulty of holding on to someone whose next destination is never settled.

Chris tries to comfort her by pointing out that Lara Jean has Peter, but hearing his name hurts: the mention lands like a dagger in Lara Jean’s heart. Chris adds that everyone will be leaving soon enough and says she is glad not to be left behind. Her departure therefore arrives amid several impending changes, but it is not merely one more item on a calendar. Lara Jean’s reaction reveals how the prospect of change can make a familiar friendship feel newly precarious.

The night before the wedding, while Lara Jean’s cakes cool on the kitchen counter and the household sets up lawn chairs outside, Lara Jean drives to Chris’s home to say goodbye. Chris warns her that she will not let her in if she cries. Lara Jean cries anyway, saying she feels this may be the last time she ever sees Chris. She recognizes a finality in the moment: even if they meet again, their friendship will not be quite as it has been, because Chris is already catapulting toward whatever comes next.

Chris jokes that she may fly straight back home the following week, but Lara Jean hears a trace of nervousness beneath the bravado. She tells Chris that she is just getting started and embraces her, insisting that life is happening now. The exchange turns the departure from a purely cheerful adventure into a shared threshold: Chris is eager to leave, yet nervous, while Lara Jean is grieving and trying to encourage her forward.

A keepsake that points home

Lara Jean gives Chris a small picture frame shaped like a heart. Inside is a photograph of the two of them at the beach in matching bathing suits, when they were twelve or thirteen. She tells 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, and she brushes them away.

The gift makes the friendship tangible without pretending it can keep Chris in place. Its childhood image carries their shared past into an uncertain future, while Lara Jean’s message gives Chris a continuing point of return even as she sets out without a fixed timetable. The goodbye therefore does not resolve the tension between staying connected and moving on; it gives that tension an object the two friends can keep.

Departures within a season of change

Chris’s departure falls among a series of transitions that make leaving an immediate part of Lara Jean’s life. At the high-school graduation ceremony, Lara Jean looks through the crowd for Peter’s family while her own family waves; Trina’s wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat makes them especially easy to spot. Her mother is absent from the ceremony, a loss Lara Jean feels alongside the pride and uncertainty of graduating. The contrast makes departure more than a matter of travel: growing up also means carrying absences and changes in family life.

Other occasions give change a more ceremonial form. On prom night Lara Jean wears Stormy’s ring and thinks of Stormy as watching happily, with the ring honoring the dances Stormy attended. At Dan and Trina’s backyard wedding, beneath Christmas lights and white paper lanterns, the family gathers for the ceremony and cries through the vows. Trina has proposed that Dan’s daughters share the father-daughter dance rather than have a separate dance with her; they practiced on a rented dance floor, and Margot, Lara Jean, and Kitty are to cut in one after another to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.” These rituals mark people moving into new roles together, whereas Chris’s departure has no planned return date or formal rite. Its measure is instead Lara Jean’s sense that even a reunion may not bring back the friendship exactly as it was.

The night before Lara Jean leaves for college, she and Peter plan to watch the Perseids meteor shower at the lake. Kitty wants to join them but cannot bring herself to ask; Lara Jean sees her disappointment and feels guilty for keeping this time with Peter to herself. That scene echoes the goodbye to Chris without making the two departures identical: Lara Jean is now also on the brink of leaving, and those who remain must reckon with the changing shape of their closeness. Chris’s choice to go first makes the season’s larger pattern visible: people move toward their next lives at different speeds, while photographs, rings, dances, and remembered friendships carry connection across the change.