Yet Greg and Rachel do come of age as they're both forced to deal with the reality that her cancer is terminal. That’s a rare thing onscreen these days in coming of age tales. And, as he notes repeatedly, it's a platonic one, too. As time passes, Greg and Rachel develop a deep friendship, whether Greg will call it that or not. Though the central conflict here is ostensibly Rachel's encroaching cancer, the narrative really centers on how her tragic illness forces Greg to come to grips with his own selfishness. But as Greg keeps coming back to visit the increasingly sick classmate, a kindred connection is born, and an unlikely, yes, friendship begins to grow. In fact, it's not even friendship at first sight. But to placate his well-meaning-but-obviously-manipulative mom, he goes to visit Rachel at her house. Greg's mom says Rachel's mother, Denise, "feels you might be someone who could make her feel better." Greg's plot to drift anonymously through his senior year (and maybe even his whole life) gets tossed into a tizzy the day his mother tells him a fellow classmate-whom Greg knows but doesn't really know-named Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia. Instead, Greg tells us in the opening moments of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl that he prefers to think of Earl as his "co-worker," a term he's appropriated to describe their longstanding partnership making animated, Super 8 parodies of classic movies (with titles like A Sockwork Orange and My Dinner With Andre the Giant). But Greg can't quite commit to that term, friend. Greg's known his friend from the mean streets across the tracks since they were in kindergarten. In other words, Greg lurks quite intentionally at the periphery of everything, familiar to everyone, known by no one. "People's Republic of Theater Dorks" and "Boring Jewish Senior Girls Subgroup 2A," among many others. That means carefully cultivating acquaintances in each of his Pittsburgh high school's "nations," as he dubs them: "Jock Nation," "Kingdom of Stoners," How does a self-conscious loner survive high school? For an affable-but-aloof senior named Greg, the answer is to become something of an everyman.
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