Read Online The Final Four by Paul Volponi - Free Book Online

you want, I’ll get you a ring you can be proud of,” he conceded. “I’ll buy you one with the biggest diamond you ever saw.”
    “That’s not the point. It doesn’t have to be huge,” Hope said with an attitude, as if she was looking to pick a fight with Crispin. “It just has to show people that we’re committed to each other.”
    Crispin was completely thrown.
    What’s up with her?
he wondered.
    He was giving Hope what she wanted, but she still wasn’t happy.
    Later that day, they checked out a downtown jewelry store together.
    Hope didn’t see a ring she liked that cost less than five thousand dollars. And Crispin got pissed off at the salesman, who kept trying to steer Hope towards even more expensive rings.
    “It’s going to take me at least five or six months to save up that kind of money,” Crispin told her when the salesman moved away to help another customer. “You really want to wait that long?”
    “If I’m going to wear a ring for the rest of my life, I want it to be the right one,” said Hope. “I don’t want to look at it every day wishing it was something else.”
    Crispin had already been delivering Flying Sushi for a few months. At the end of every shift, he’d bring Hope her favorite—an order of eel rolls with seaweed and wasabi on the side. But tonight, Hope told him not to bother—that she’d be grabbing a quick dinner with friends.
    And as tired as Crispin was from the basketball, celebrating, and schoolwork, he was out making deliveries to buy Hope that ring.
    “Hey, Flying Sushi! Win the tournament!” somebody screamed at him from a passing car. “Go Troy! Woo-hoo!”
    Crispin hit his horn in response—
beep, beep, beep
.
    He usually had to explain to customers why a nearly seven-foot-tall white kid was delivering Chinese and Japanese food, instead of an Asian.
    “Why the hell not?” was his standard answer. “One of the chefs in our kitchen is short and Mexican.”
    Most people would howl at that response, thinking it was a joke.
    Only Crispin knew it was absolutely true.
    But at his first stop, the talk wasn’t about any of that.
    It was all about the NCAA Tournament and the Trojans’ winning streak.
    “Think we can keep winning, C-Rice?” asked the man who answered the door. “It’s like a dream come true for this city. My wife and I graduated from Troy almost ten years ago. But the team was never this good. That fiancée of yours, Hope of Troy, is our good luck charm. Give her a big kiss for me, will you?”
    Before Crispin left, he posed for a photo with the man’s wife and three kids, all holding up their fingers in the V sign for victory.
    Crispin loved every second of it, and his tip was twice what he’d expected.
    His second stop that afternoon was at a downtown apartment building, next to a leather boutique where Hope had once dragged him so she could shop for Italian boots.
    He chained his moped to a parking meter and climbed the stoop.
    “Flying Sushi,” Crispin said into the intercom, before the customer buzzed him inside.
    By the time he reached the third floor, the tiny elevator that took him upstairs smelled like a combination platter of beef andbroccoli and spicy string beans in garlic sauce.
    The older woman who answered the door looked up at him with her eyes rolling higher and higher. But she didn’t seem to know anything about Troy basketball, so there wasn’t much conversation.
    As Crispin waited for the elevator back down, counting his tip, he heard a guy and girl laughing from inside another apartment.
    He stood there frozen for an instant, confused, like his body and mind were suddenly in two different places. Then he moved closer to that apartment door.
    The next time Crispin heard them—
hee, hee, hee, hee
—he was positive the girl’s high-pitched laugh belonged to Hope.

“I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant.”
    —Kobe Bryant, five-time NBA Champion who made the leap from high school