Vada (Anna Chlumsky), an eleven-year-old hypochondriac, spends the summer with her best friend Thomas (Macaulay Culkin). She relies on him when her undertaker father (Dan Aykroyd) starts dating a make-up artist (Jamie Lee Curtis), feeling that her parental relationship is now under threat. However, she soon has even more problems to come to terms with in this coming-of-age story.