Leaving home and growing through change

Leaving home and growing through change is a central coming-of-age concept in Lara Jean Covey’s story: departure means losing the everyday role of being close at hand, but it also means discovering that family bonds and future choices can survive distance and change. The novel frames growing up not as one synchronized threshold, but as a series of departures, adjustments, and returns that each family member experiences on a different timetable.

The ordinary moments left behind

When Lara Jean learns she will not attend the University of Virginia nearby, she imagines the small family milestones she may miss rather than treating college as an abstract destination. She has been waiting to give Kitty Song a speech about womanhood when Kitty gets her first period. Lara Jean remembers how Margot Song made her own first period less frightening by explaining tampons and cramps, and how that guidance made growing up feel like joining a secret club. She wonders whether Kitty will instead turn to Trina Rothschild, who lives across the street and has become securely attached to her. Even if Trina and Dan Covey were ever to break up, Lara Jean believes Trina would not abandon Kitty.

Kitty’s birthday is another first Lara Jean may miss: she has never been away from home for it and wants Dan to keep up the family tradition of birthday signs. Those rituals give shape to a more unsettling realization. For the first time, all three Song sisters will truly live apart, and they may never again share one house. They will come home for holidays and school breaks, but those visits will not restore the household as it was. Margot’s earlier departure for college has already begun that change. Lara Jean recognizes that people grow accustomed to altered circumstances before they fully notice that they have done so; Kitty, too, will eventually adapt.

At breakfast, that awareness takes the form of attention. Lara Jean studies Kitty’s gangly legs, knobby knees, and half-smile while she watches television, trying to memorize a version of her sister that will not last. She decides she should do more things with Kitty alone before leaving. Yet the sisters meet change differently: Lara Jean dreads it, while Kitty leans into it. Kitty wants Lara Jean’s room for its better light and proximity to the bathroom, and jokes that she has wondered what it would be like to be an only child. Lara Jean feels a small hurt at the thought of losing the companionship of a sister who warms her feet on cold nights. The exchange makes departure tangible as a change in rooms, habits, and access to one another—not simply a future date on a college calendar.

Different timetables, possible routes

Leaving home does not mean every young person follows the same institutional path. Chris considers taking a year off, working on farms in exchange for room and board, and perhaps trying a surfing school in New Zealand or learning to make wine in Italy. She knows little about farming but trusts that she can learn on the job. Her plans make open-ended movement seem exhilarating, while also bringing out her worry, later, that she may miss out by not starting college alongside everyone else. Lara Jean reassures her that college will still be available next year or later. The reassurance treats a delayed transition not as a closed door but as a choice that can remain open.

Lara Jean’s own college disappointment also becomes less final when Peter Kavinsky suggests a transfer route. After he says she deserves to attend the University of Virginia, he recalls a former student who went to PVCC and transferred to UVA as a junior. Peter imagines Lara Jean beginning at William & Mary, the University of Richmond, or another college, visiting him, and applying to transfer the following year. She has not considered transferring before; she is still adjusting to the fact that UVA will not be her immediate destination. His proposal gives her a provisional plan, though it does not erase the disappointment or make the route certain. Education and belonging remain connected in her mind, but the path toward them can be revised.

That provisional quality persists when Chris visits the University of North Carolina. She can picture Lara Jean there, while Lara Jean describes a plan to attend William & Mary for a year and then transfer to UVA. The plan gives her something to hold on to, but its existence does not mean her future is settled. Across these conversations, the book distinguishes a goal from a guaranteed outcome: young people can defer college, begin elsewhere, or imagine transferring, and each possibility carries its own mixture of freedom and uncertainty.

A household that keeps changing

Lara Jean’s departure takes place amid changes at home that are already teaching the family how to make room for absence and arrival. When Dan tells his daughters over pizza that he wants to ask Trina to marry him, the announcement reshapes the household’s future even before Lara Jean leaves. Later, when Margot returns with her suitcases for her first visit since Trina moved in, she silently takes in the accumulated evidence of a home no longer arranged as she remembers it: Trina’s abstract shoreline painting on the mantel, embroidered pillows, a photograph of Trina and Dan after his proposal, a different armchair, and many small ornaments. Lara Jean has moved her parents’ wedding portrait into her own room. The shoe closet is crowded, too, and Margot shifts Trina’s cycling shoes to make room for her booties. Home remains recognizable, but its objects show that life has continued and that belonging now has to accommodate someone new.

Margot eventually names the harder feeling beneath her quiet observations: she has returned to find a whole new family that she was not part of. Lara Jean cannot honestly tell her that nothing has changed. Life at home went on while Margot was away, just as it will go on without Lara Jean when she leaves in the fall. Margot cries and says that she misses their mother. The scene links the ache of growing apart to grief: a changed household is not merely a practical rearrangement but a reminder that the family’s earlier shape cannot be recovered. At the same time, the sisters’ recognition of that truth gives their unease a shared language rather than disguising it with reassurance.

Change also unsettles Kitty’s sense of her place in the family. When Lara Jean imagines that Dan and Trina might have a baby, Kitty’s cheeks flush and she says she does not want a new baby because she would be in the middle and become nothing. Lara Jean replies that she is already the middle sister. Kitty counters that Margot is the oldest and smartest, Lara Jean the prettiest, and Kitty only the youngest—an identity she fears losing. The conversation shows that children experience family expansion not simply as good news but as a possible reordering of attention and status. Leaving home and growing through change involves learning that roles can shift without making a person disappear from the family.

Thresholds, support, and what endures

The transition to independence is marked by practical negotiation as well as emotion. When Lara Jean plans to go to a party at a boy’s house the day after graduation, Dan worries that there will be no adult supervision. Trina argues that Lara Jean will soon be living on her own and that the party can serve as practice. Dan agrees while admitting he does not like it. Once he and Kitty leave the table, Trina gives Lara Jean advice for Beach Week and college: use a buddy system, taking turns so that one friend remains sober enough to care for the other. The moment makes adult guidance neither an absolute prohibition nor a withdrawal of care; it becomes counsel intended to travel with Lara Jean beyond the house.

At prom, another threshold is carried in an object. Before going downstairs, Lara Jean puts on Stormy’s pink diamond ring and thinks of Stormy’s happiness that she is wearing it for the occasion, in honor of the dances Stormy attended. The ring lets a deceased friend accompany Lara Jean into a milestone Stormy cannot share in person. In that way, departure does not sever every attachment: memory and keepsakes can give the absent a continuing place in new experiences.

High-school graduation brings the family together at the ceremony while making absence especially visible. Lara Jean wishes her mother could hug her and reflects on all the major moments her mother will continue to miss. She hopes that her mother somehow knows and sees, but the hope does not replace the wish for physical comfort. In the crowd, Lara Jean spots her family waving; Trina’s wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat is conspicuous enough that someone behind her probably cannot see. The principal mispronounces Lara Jean’s name as Laura when calling her to receive her diploma, and she quietly corrects him: “It’s Lara, not Laura.” The small correction gives the ceremony an individual claim within a public rite of passage: she steps into what comes next under her own name.

That graduation is also the occasion for Dan’s gift to the three sisters: a trip to Korea with their grandmother the following month, a journey they have discussed for years because their mother wanted to take them. Dan and Trina will go on their honeymoon while the daughters travel with their grandmother. The trip does not undo the separations already underway, but it turns a shared family wish into a future experience the sisters can have together. Across college plans, household rearrangements, graduation, and travel, growing up emerges as neither a clean break nor a return to an unchanged home. It is a continuing negotiation between leaving and remaining connected, with each new stage requiring the family to make room for who has gone, who has arrived, and who is still becoming.