Annabel Andrews, a willful, disorganized teenage girl, wakes up one Friday morning to find herself in the body of her mother, with whom she had argued the previous night. The jolt of the switch lands her in charge of the New York family’s daily affairs, and she must suddenly navigate a real grown-up life she hadn’t planned for. She takes on caretaker duties for her younger brother Ben, who she affectionately (and hilariously) nicknames “Ape Face,” describing him as “so neat, it’s revolting!” as he fusses over every little detail.
In this new, dizzying day, Annabel grows increasingly anxious about the disappearance of “Annabel” herself—the morning self she woke up as—who seems to have vanished after leaving the Andrews’ home. Desperate for help, she turns to her neighbor and childhood friend, Boris, though she keeps the truth of her identity crisis hidden from him. The day spirals into a string of bizarre, frustrating, and sometimes comic misadventures as Annabel wrestles with mom-life she never understood and the strange pressures of being inside someone else’s skin.
As the hours unfold, she begins to appreciate just how difficult her mother’s life can be. She sees, perhaps for the first time, the quiet burdens of responsibility, the small acts of care, and the ways a parent holds a family together. She also discovers a surprising detail: Ben idolizes her, which complicates her feelings and her sense of authority. Meanwhile, Boris—who isn’t really Boris at all but Morris, a neighbor with a chronic congestion problem that makes his consonants slip—speaks with a nasal lilt and reveals that the world they’re navigating is stranger than it seems. Ben’s loyalty remains strong, even as the day takes a turn toward the uncanny, with Ben vanishing at one point in the company of a gorgeous girl that Boris doesn’t recognize, testing Annabel’s resolve and leaving her anxious about the boy’s safety.
The climax and denouement pile on the emotional weight as Annabel endures the mounting pressures: the mystery of the missing mother, the loss of the children, and the growing question of how and why this body swap occurred in the first place. In a poignant twist, the truth comes to light: Annabel’s mother engineered the switch through some unspecified means. The mysterious teen beauty who appeared to have taken Ben is, in fact, Mrs. Andrews inhabiting Annabel’s body. When the body swap is resolved, Annabel is restored to her own self, and the makeover that had been done to the borrowed body is revealed to have included the removal of Annabel’s braces—an appointment Annabel herself had forgotten about and would have missed entirely had she remained in her mother’s body. The revelation brings a new appreciation for family, responsibility, and the quiet acts that keep a household together, leaving both Annabel and the family with a deeper understanding of love, sacrifice, and the luck of returning home.
