Where Is My Mind

“Where Is My Mind?” is the Pixies song Peter plays as he and Lara Jean walk through the senior hallway in their Fight Club costumes. The music gives their entrance a public flourish: people clap, and no one mistakes Lara Jean for a manga character. In this small but decisive moment, a song helps transform her concern about how she will be seen into a shared performance on her own terms.

The Song and the Costumes

For Characters Day, Lara Jean and Peter consider several couples’ costumes. She argues for Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler but drops the idea when colonial outfits prove too expensive to rent at short notice. Peter proposes Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson, partly because he already has the costume. They eventually choose Tyler Durden and Marla Singer from Fight Club, following Lara Jean’s best friend Chris’s suggestion that the pairing would have shock value.

Lara Jean initially hesitates because Marla is not Asian, and she has a policy of choosing costumes based on Asian people. The decision comes together when Peter’s mother finds him a red leather jacket at an estate sale. Trina lends Lara Jean clothes from her own wardrobe, including a black slip dress, a fake mohair jacket, and high black platform heels. Kitty tousles Lara Jean’s wig to create Marla’s bedhead look, treating the costume’s disheveled appearance as an essential part of getting it right.

A Public Entrance

Lara Jean worries that people at school may not recognize who she is dressed as. Peter assures her that he has the problem covered. As they walk down the senior hallway, he plays the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” loudly on his phone. People clap for the pair, and nobody asks whether Lara Jean is a manga character. The song functions less as background than as an introduction: Peter’s cue makes their chosen identities legible to the hallway and lends their entrance the theatrical confidence Lara Jean had been seeking.

The song’s effect depends on the contrast between Lara Jean’s private concern and the public response. The costume carries a risk of misrecognition, sharpened by her earlier hesitation about representing a character who is not Asian. The music does not erase that tension; instead, it frames the couple’s arrival as a deliberate shared act. The applause and the absence of the question she feared provide a concrete answer to her worry about being misunderstood.

Identity and Belonging

The costume episode sits alongside other conversations in which Asian identity is explicitly considered. Margot advises Lara Jean to join the Asian association at college, describing how studying in another country has left her feeling she missed the chance to find an Asian-American group and explore racial identity. In another discussion, Lara Jean imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg but wonders whether the historic site would hire Asian people; Margot counters that Lara Jean should be able to take part, invoking Phillipa Soo’s casting as Eliza Hamilton.

At a separate family conversation about wedding traditions, Margot objects to the idea of Trina incorporating Asian culture simply because the Covey sisters are Asian, while Lara Jean says Trina wants them to feel included and has considered acknowledging their mother. These scenes do not make the song itself a statement about race. They do, however, clarify the social world around Lara Jean’s costume choice: decisions about characters, cultural representation, and belonging recur in ordinary conversations, while “Where Is My Mind?” marks one moment when her and Peter’s chosen performance meets the school’s approving gaze.