Ever since Garry and I became buddies at La Plata High, every day was an adventure. But the real intrigue began when rumors swirled around Mr. Kenney, our school’s janitor. Whispers echoed that Kenney once walked the halls of esteemed physics laboratories before an experiment gone awry saw him wielding a mop instead of equations.

Out of sheer curiosity, Garry and I decided to break into the high school lab one night, hoping to get a peek at Kenney’s experiments. We expected peculiar, but what we found was downright bizarre: a tent. It wasn’t just any tent. It was dotted with multicolored patches, weird antennas sticking out, and what looked like a doormat labeled “Step Here for Yesterday.”

Before we could decipher this oddity, a voice rang out. “Planning a camping trip to the past?” Kenney grinned, making his entrance.

Laughing off the idea, we played along, stepping onto the doormat. With a flash, the world changed. La Plata morphed before our eyes. Contemporary homes gave way to rustic architecture and dirt roads.

“Did we just… time travel?” Garry stammered.

The tent had delivered us to La Plata’s founding days. Our astonishment was short-lived when we noticed a gathering of curious townsfolk approaching, led by a young man bearing a striking resemblance to Garry.

Kenney, realizing the gravity of our situation, tried to whisk us back to the tent, but it seemed we were stuck. We were dragged into the town, mistaken for outsiders with possibly bad intentions.

In our confinement, we learned the Garry lookalike was an ancestor and had a natural flair for inventing. As days turned into nights, we collaborated with him, using Kenney’s knowledge to repair our temporal tent and fix the inadvertent ripples we caused in time.

The process was a mix of trial and error. We aimed to guide the love stories, friendships, and feuds of the past back to their original trajectories. Kenney’s quips, like “Time’s tentative, isn’t it?”, lightened our heavy task.

When we believed everything was set right, we sprinted to our peculiar time-traveling tent. Stepping onto the doormat, there was another blinding flash, and we found ourselves back in modern La Plata.

Relief washed over us as the familiar surroundings embraced us. Kenney, dusting off his janitor uniform, remarked, “You know, time’s a funny thing. And tents? Even funnier.”

And while to the school, Kenney remained the quirky janitor with a love for odd jokes, to Garry and me, he was the man who introduced us to the canvas folds of history.