Lara Jean Covey and Margot Covey

Lara Jean Covey and Margot Covey’s sisterhood gives Lara Jean both a living connection to family memory and a steady guide through the changes of her final year of high school. Margot does not simply tell her what to choose: she urges her to trust her own judgment, make room for new friendships, and meet the future with curiosity. In turn, Lara Jean looks to Margot as a confidante whose presence makes grief more bearable and leaving home imaginable. Their bond joins practical advice to shared rituals, and independence to the reassurance of being known.

Shared Memory and Loss

Lara Jean’s sense of sisterhood is rooted in a family past that includes the loss of their mother. She remembers sitting cross-legged after a bath while their mother combed the tangles from her hair; Margot, unlike Lara Jean, used to hate sitting still for it. Another remembered routine took place in the McDonald’s parking lot while Margot was at piano lessons: mother and daughter shared secret ice cream sundaes, with caramel and strawberry sauce, and their mother gave Lara Jean her peanuts. These are not grand family milestones but blurred, tender moments whose emotional force lies in their ordinary repetition. Margot belongs to the same history, even when the sisters remember its details differently.

The sisters’ shared experience of loss becomes newly present when Stormy dies. Lara Jean cannot attend the funeral in Rhode Island, and the news brings back the family’s first funeral: Lara Jean was nine, Margot eleven, and Kitty two when their mother died. Lara Jean’s clearest image is of their father silently crying beside her while he held Kitty, who kept telling him not to cry. The memory’s return connects Lara Jean’s grief for Stormy with an older fear that nothing was safe anymore. Margot, who also knew Stormy, is the person Lara Jean most wants to speak to, though it is the middle of the night in Scotland.

When Lara Jean calls the next morning, Margot cries with her and helps turn sorrow into a way to remember Stormy. She proposes a memorial at Belleview for Stormy’s friends who cannot travel to the funeral, suggesting that Lara Jean say a few words, serve cookies, and invite people to share memories. Margot cannot be there herself, and the sisters acknowledge that absence; Lara Jean says she always feels stronger with Margot beside her. Even at a distance, Margot’s response helps Lara Jean make a place for other people’s memories alongside her own.

Encouragement and Independent Choices

Margot’s support is most evident when Lara Jean is thinking about college and how to make a life of her own. After Lara Jean worries that she will not know what to do when the time comes, Margot trusts her to decide what is best. Her reassurance helps Lara Jean recognize that she, too, can trust herself. Margot’s advice is not to organize college life around Peter: she tells Lara Jean that Peter will make friends through lacrosse, urges her to find her own people, and recommends joining an Asian association. Margot frames college as a place where students may discover their racial identity, reflecting on how she missed having an Asian-American group while studying in another country.

Margot also helps Lara Jean imagine a future at William & Mary when excitement does not come easily. Lara Jean tries to picture working in Colonial Williamsburg, wearing period clothes and churning butter, but wonders whether historical accuracy might keep an Asian person from being hired. Margot answers by pointing to Phillipa Soo’s casting as Eliza Hamilton and insists that Lara Jean could do the job; if the employer refused her, Margot says, they could use social media to challenge the decision. Her encouragement does not dismiss Lara Jean’s concern about representation. It meets that concern with an example and a promise of solidarity, then invites her to notice what might be exciting about the future.

When a place at UNC opens a path Lara Jean had not considered, her sense of the future changes. She sees the offer as a door that could lead anywhere, rather than a second choice, and feels excited despite having been afraid of change. She turns to Margot on FaceTime to share the news. Margot asks what the campus is like, compares Chapel Hill and its liberal college-town atmosphere with UVA, and suggests that Lara Jean talk with Maggie Cohen, who loves the university. Her response makes the choice feel not only possible but open to anticipation: she tells Lara Jean that this is when everything begins.

Family Milestones and Everyday Counsel

On graduation day, Lara Jean listens to the house waking around her: her father making coffee downstairs, Margot showering, and Kitty still likely asleep. She already feels a measure of homesickness for these familiar sounds, even as she is excited to take the next step. Margot’s graduation present is a carefully assembled college kit: a pink satin eye mask embroidered with Lara Jean’s name, a lipstick-shaped USB drive, circus-peanut-looking earplugs, fuzzy pink slippers, and a makeup bag decorated with bow sketches. Its practical contents make the coming transition tangible, while its personal details show how closely Margot knows her sister.

After graduation, Margot helps Lara Jean pack for Beach Week. They sit together on Lara Jean’s bedroom floor, with Lara Jean arranging the suitcase and Margot handing her piles of clothes. Margot says that in her mind Lara Jean is still the age she was when Margot left, teasing her as forever sixteen. Their joking exchange about Lara Jean’s height and Margot’s earlier departure gives way to a question about what she missed most when she first went to college. Margot first answers that she missed her family; when Lara Jean asks about the less obvious things, the conversation recognizes that leaving home involves discovering attachments that may only become clear at a distance.

That practical conversation also makes room for intimate advice. Margot tells Lara Jean to pack condoms just in case, although Lara Jean says she is not planning to have sex at Beach Week. Margot explains that she is glad her first time was with Josh and says it should be with someone who really knows and loves her. Lara Jean later packs the condoms deep in her suitcase, along with an unworn pale-pink bra and underwear edged in electric-blue lace. The details leave her intention open, but show that Margot’s advice has become part of how Lara Jean prepares: not a prediction of what will happen, but counsel she chooses to carry with her.

A Bond That Makes Room for Change

Margot’s influence on Lara Jean is supportive without making the younger sister’s choices a copy of her own. She encourages Lara Jean to build friendships independently, to consider the social experience of Asian-American students, and to take seriously the possibility of a college she had not planned on attending. When Lara Jean is grieving, Margot offers a shared act of remembrance; when Lara Jean is packing, she offers both practical help and personal counsel. Across these different moments, care takes the form of attention to what Lara Jean is facing now rather than a demand that she remain the same.

The sisters’ relationship also gives departure a double meaning. Lara Jean anticipates missing the sounds of home and takes Margot’s handmade college kit with her, yet she can feel genuine excitement about choosing what comes next. Their earlier memories of their mother, their shared mourning for Stormy, and Margot’s guidance at moments of transition connect Lara Jean’s growing independence to a family life that continues to accompany her. Sisterhood here is neither a barrier to change nor something change leaves behind: it is one of the ways Lara Jean becomes able to move toward a future of her own.