1988, Art Barbara is a painfully shy/socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and suffering from scoliosis when he starts the Pallbearers' Club. Members volunteer as mourners for the homeless and lonely, those with no one else to bury them. Art recruits his former bully, Eddie Patrick, a fellow slacker Cayla, and the mysterious Mercy Brown. Art and Mercy quickly form an intense friendship, but one day Art takes a photo of Mercy, and captures a strange parasitic creature wrapped around her.