In a town where the closing of the ice cream factory, its main industry, has plunged it into ruin, the local kids are already at a disadvantage: while the preps have closets full of clothes, for the locals, every button is precious. They create a war chest, stocked with every surplus button they can find, and hide it at the old ice cream factory for emergencies. And that’s not all that’s hiding at the ice cream factory: Charlie’s parents have abandoned him and left town to look for work. The other kids take turns bringing him food and keep the secret from the adults, because they know if Charlie’s found out he’ll be sent away.
As the start of school looms ever closer, the town kids seem to have it made: they’re winning the war—mostly—and the adults are none the wiser about Charlie’s predicament. But everything changes when Charlie and Hugo, his best friend, have a falling out. Hugo runs away, and the preps ambush him and force him to reveal that the location of “headquarters” is the ice cream factory. They catch Charlie alone there, cutting his buttons and stealing the entire war chest.
With school starting the next day, Charlie leads a daring late-night raid to recapture the buttons in time. It works, but there are “casualties”: Hugo, whose last-minute intervention saves the raid, has been seen. If Hugo gets caught, his father, a janitor at the prep, could lose his job. Charlie can’t let that happen, even if giving himself up in Hugo’s place means being sent away.
But before Charlie departs, hope is reborn in the form of his prep school counterpart, Walker, bearing an ice cream cone. Walker is leaving too, kicked out of school—more fallout from the raid—but he brings news that the ice cream factory is reopening. As the two fallen leaders exit, Walker gives Charlie his cone, and the two congratulate each other on “a good war.”
