Mattia, an almost eighteen-year-old boy, just out of the reformatory, is with his mother, Gabriella with the principal of the it.i.s. G. Armellini, the school the boy attends. Mattia was caught by some plainclothes policemen with a large quantity of drugs that he also used to sell at school. The principal, out of pity for his mother, an honest woman, managed through his old acquaintances to leave the boy with a clean criminal record and to convert Mattia's sentence into social services: cleaning both at the school, where he studies, and in a cancer hospital whose patients are his peers who are fighting against cancer. In the hospital he will discover love with Alessia, a terminally ill girl. Unfortunately for him and Francesco, his dirty partner and business partner, the troubles aren't over: the boss wants back the drug money that was seized from Mattia. So the two friends, Mattia and Francesco, frightened, look for a solution to be able to scrape together some money to pay off the debt, and the only solution they can find is to snatch Ilary, a classmate of theirs who they have discovered is a baby call. The story is set in a school in the Roman suburbs where some students, not having solid families, live by their wits and in order to scrape together some money to survive, they enter into larger circles than themselves, putting themselves at the service of local gangs who use them to drug dealing and prostitution. The street will be their teacher of life, often cruel because it easily deceives them with money.