Alicia

Alicia is a participant in Belleview’s social gatherings and a practical-minded presence whose attention to others extends from party planning to heartbreak. In the preparation for a World War II-themed dance, she insists that Japanese American history belong in the room alongside festive decoration; later, after Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky break up, Alicia offers a quieter kind of help, speaking candidly about love, memory, and the time it takes to live through loss.

Identity and Role at Belleview

At Belleview’s Friday cocktail hour, Alicia is among the small group gathered with Stormy Sinclair and Mr. Morales. The event has drawn only a handful of people, and Lara Jean worries that poor attendance could put future social events at risk. Alicia appears within this setting not as a background presence but as someone willing to contribute ideas and labor to the community’s activities.

Her practical streak surfaces in the planning for a USO party. When Mr. Morales proposes using war bonds as tokens for refreshments, pins, or dances, Alicia points out that women will outnumber men and therefore have greater say in who dances. The remark is comic and matter-of-fact, but it also makes her alert to how a party’s arrangements distribute choice and authority.

Party Planning and Historical Memory

The group Scrapbooking to the Oldies becomes a de facto committee for the dance. Alicia prepares a table of her own, making a garland of paper cranes from lilac, peach, turquoise, and floral papers. Stormy objects that these colors depart from the party’s red, white, and blue scheme, but Alicia holds her ground, with Lara Jean supporting her. Her display also includes photographs of Japanese Americans in internment camps, set in elaborate silver frames.

The photographs complicate the party’s nostalgic wartime theme. The event is being planned as entertainment, with period music, decorations, and war-bond tickets, but Alicia’s contribution keeps a painful part of the era’s history visible. Stormy worries that the pictures will dampen the mood. Their disagreement is therefore more than a question of color or décor: it concerns whether historical remembrance should be made comfortable for a celebration. Alicia does not remove the images to preserve a uniformly cheerful atmosphere.

The dispute becomes physical when Stormy sweeps Alicia’s paper cranes onto the floor. Alicia screams, and Lara Jean bends down to pick up the scattered decorations, insisting that she is not taking sides. Alicia argues that Stormy should be the one receiving support, describing her as a child throwing a tantrum over a party. The scene shows Alicia as outspoken under pressure, while also exposing the cost of her insistence: a shared planning activity turns into a personal confrontation. Her position is not simply that the party should follow her taste; the framed photographs give her objection a historical weight that the dispute over the color scheme cannot contain.

Counsel to Lara Jean

Alicia’s most intimate role comes after Lara Jean tells the women at Belleview that she and Peter have broken up. It is the first time Lara Jean has said the words aloud. Stormy and Alicia sit with her and invite her to explain what is wrong; Alicia listens as Lara Jean describes the pain of no longer being Peter’s girlfriend and wonders what life will be like without him.

Alicia answers from experience rather than promising an immediate remedy. She tells Lara Jean that she will continue with her days, miss Peter at first, and gradually feel the loss ease. She touches Lara Jean’s cheek with her papery hand and urges her to give time its work. The advice is tender but not dismissive: Alicia acknowledges that missing someone is real while refusing to treat the present intensity of grief as permanent.

Lara Jean cannot fully accept this reassurance. Each minute without Peter feels interminably long, and her heart has not caught up with what she knows about the breakup. The difference between Alicia’s long perspective and Lara Jean’s immediate pain gives their exchange its shape. Alicia offers a possible future, not a quick cure; Lara Jean can hear the comfort in it without yet believing it.

First Love, Marriage, and Memory

When Lara Jean asks whether Alicia remembers her first love, Alicia says that it was Albert, her older brother’s best friend. She once imagined that she would marry him, but that did not happen. She later met Phillip, whom she identifies as the love of her life, while also admitting that she never forgot Albert. Her account allows first love and lasting partnership to occupy different places in one life: remembering Albert does not diminish her love for Phillip.

Alicia’s recollection prompts a shared reflection with Stormy Sinclair on youth and the persistence of old feelings. Stormy recalls Garrett O’Leary, with whom she had only a dance, and Alicia and Stormy echo each other’s sense that the past can feel at once remote and present. Alicia’s memory is not presented as a claim that youthful romance should be recovered. Instead, it gives Lara Jean a wider emotional frame: a first love can remain part of a person’s story even when life takes another course.

Family Bonds and Narrative Significance

Alicia also speaks about the enduring importance of sisters. In a conversation with Lara Jean, she says that a girl’s closest female relationship may be with her mother or her sisters, and stresses that sisters remain family through life’s changes. She describes visiting her older sister, Jeanie, when she misses their mother; Jeanie increasingly resembles their mother, so the visit brings back a familiar face. The account links memory to ordinary companionship: the past is not only recalled in stories but encountered through a living family bond.

Across the party dispute and Lara Jean’s breakup, Alicia represents a form of care that combines practical judgment with emotional perspective. She helps shape a communal event, defends the place of difficult history within its celebration, and later responds to Lara Jean’s heartbreak without denying its force. Her own stories hold together choices and losses that do not cancel one another: Albert remains a remembered first love, Phillip remains the love of her life, and time can soften grief without erasing attachment. Through Alicia, the novel places teenage romantic uncertainty beside an older woman’s accumulated experience, offering perspective without pretending that one person’s timeline can simply be imposed on another.