In Iran I had these exact 2 books. I never understood why Tom was spelled Toom and why Huck who was a homeless street boy looked so polished and innocent. I was given the Huckleberry Finn book first and later the Tom Sawyer one.

 Just prior to the school year I received a book in Persian, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. On the cover, it pictured him sitting on a river bank with light wavy hair and a straw hat on. He looked much different than I had pictured him. He seemed too feminine as opposed to the street thug that I had envisioned him as. I tried reading the book a few times and while each time that I started from scratch I made progress, going beyond my last quitting point, it would be a few years before I managed to finish it beginning to end, all 403 pages. One thing I noticed during my many attempts at reading it was that as I flipped through the pages while the odd pages were on the left and the even ones on the right, however, they would gradually switch and then switch back. I carefully went through the pages and located the two faulty spots where a page was followed by a page with the same page number and labeled duplicate.

 In one of our get-togethers I had shown Ahmad my Huckleberry Finn book and he had expressed interest in it. He had further researched the subject and told me there was also a Tom Sawyer book that in a way was the first part to the Huckleberry Finn book. On his own he had tracked down the book to the bookstore on Shariati Street and confirmed the price of 40 tomans. One day after having our Italian ices and upon his insistence we walked down to view it together. It was a thick yellow book (although only 285 pages compared to Huckleberry Finn’s 403 pages) with the back a blurry image of a group of people painting a white fence. From that point forward almost on a daily basis I claimed I would be going to the bookstore to buy the book which in turn would ensure that he would accompany me. While each time he would initially question if I really had 40 tomans on me (and I would insist I did without showing any evidence of it) by the time we got to the bookstore I would come up with some excuse as to why I couldn’t buy the book that day and then promptly hail a cab. After a few times undoubtedly he knew I had no intention and/or means to buy the book yet we still continued our rerouting of our normal paths to spend time together as we walked along Shariati Street.

And a year later....

My first day back was in fact a Thursday which meant I would have the following day off. That day there weren’t even any classes but instead the entire school was taken to a war exhibition. With me in the 8th grade, Ahmad in the 7th and Hooman in the 6th, I now had both of my outside friends in the same building as me. With me being the oldest, they tended to look up to me as their leader at school. That night Ahmad and his family came to see us and Ahmad also brought me a gift. While I spent most of that night talking to him about what I had seen and done in the US, it wasn’t until he had left that I opened up his present. It was the yellow Tom Sawyer book. 

..... And here I spotted both books next to each other in the lower shelf of my bookshelf.