by Keith Manos
“HedgehogCalcite” Photo by Manfred Hauben
Mr. Miller, my physics teacher, set the yellow tennis ball on top of the black table in front of the classroom and gazed mischievously at us, a new look for him. “Time this, someone.” His aqua blue eyes swept the classroom in a slow, patient circle before ending on me in the front row. “Dexter?”
He didn’t want one of my classmates to time this experiment. The eye scan was a pretense. The way he pulled back his broad shoulders and how his eyes shimmered when he looked at me, I could tell he didn’t want any of them, only me. The future valedictorian of the senior class of 1974. A student he could count on. He handed me a digital stopwatch, the kind they used at track meets.
I grasped it carefully, as if it was a crystal glass, and examined its settings. Then I dangled my index finger over the green button.
“Ready, Mr. Miller.” Of course I was ready. I never missed a word when he lectured. My notebook was full of them.
“Now.”
He tapped the ball on its side, and I tapped the green button. The ball rolled across the table as Mr. Miller followed it, sliding his feet to his right behind the table, until he stopped the ball just before it fell off the other end of the table. “Stop!”
I did as he commanded, tapping the red button, and, discovering that I had been holding my breath, I abruptly inhaled. I stared at the ball. I stared at him. I waited desperately for him to ask. My forehead felt slick because our classroom—Room 129—didn’t have air conditioning. It was the first week of May, and the open windows only let in humid air on this Friday morning. What the heck was wrong with this school?
“Well, Dex?”
My heart throbbed for a moment. He had called me Dex for the first time, not my attendance name Dexter. Finally! “Five point three seconds, Mr. Miller,” I breathed.
I didn’t know the point of this demonstration. No one did. We’d been covering oscillations and waves this past week, and suddenly he was rolling a tennis ball? My senior classmates glanced at the ball, now in Mr. Miller’s right hand, with confused looks on their faces. Or, because of their indifference, they glanced outside. Only skinny Amy Peplin had her notebook open, her pencil perched on an open page, ready to take notes. So did I. This was my toughest course. I felt proud I was earning an A. My goal, however, was an A+. That would affirm my status as valedictorian when the semester concluded at the end of the month.
“Five point three seconds,” Mr. Miller repeated, his face brightening. “Did you see that, everyone? The ball was there.” He pointed at the other end of the table. “And after five point three seconds, it was here.”
Amy’s eyes went to her notebook, her pencil frantically scratching across a blue line of her paper. Without looking I knew she had written something about the tennis ball and 5.3 seconds. I waited, however. The way Mr. Miller smiled, the way he casually tossed the ball from hand to hand—I knew there was more. He’d pulled his white shirt sleeves up, and little brown hairs bristled on his forearms.
Mr. Miller’s eyes swept the classroom again. “Everyone, what if . . . what if you could travel that same distance in one second?” He grinned. “Or a half a second?” His smile broadened as if we should expect a punchline. “Or a millisecond?” His face glowed with faux surprise. “But not change in age.”
“Is this on a quiz?” Randy Foster blurted out from the back. He never had a pencil or a pen. He never had his notebook. He was always borrowing a pencil, a piece of paper, asking what time it was, arriving late for class. But I knew why he was taking physics. Mr. Miller never failed anyone. Every kid in school knew that.
Mr. Miller’s grin faded, and his energy level seemed to deflate like air out of a balloon. “No, Randy, it’s not. I’m only trying to explain . . .” His eyes went to the ceiling. He took a deep breath. “I’m trying to explain that time and space are related. They go together. It’s a spectrum. Albert Einstein first identified this in 1905. He published . . .” He trailed off, and I knew why. This new information would be lost on Randy. Mr. Miller set the ball back on the table and arched both eyebrows. “It’s not just a theory.”
Amy Peplin leaned forward across her desk, her blond curls bouncing on her forehead. I leaned, too, and clicked my pen, ready to take notes now. Time and distance. Ah, that was it. I wrote those words—time, space, spectrum—in my notebook. Quiz or no quiz, I was going to master this. I was going to master all my courses. I would do the same at Dartmouth next year. Just like my sister. Maybe better than my sister.
Amy asked before I did. “What do you mean a spectrum, Mr. Miller?”
Phil, the boy sitting next to me, rolled his eyes. Bored, he doodled in his notebook, no longer worried if Mr. Miller noticed.
Mr. Miller regained his enthusiasm. He started pacing in the front of the room, gesturing with his hands. “Good question, Amy. Time exists across a continuum much like inches exist across a ruler. Both are absolutes, right?”
Amy nodded. So did I. No one else did, the rhetorical question lost on them. Seconds ticked away the same here as they did everywhere. Whether in inches, meters, or miles, distances could be measured. Like Mr. Miller had to be six feet tall; his ruffled brown hair fell an inch over his back collar; his clear, angular face and white teeth suggested he was in his twenties. Yes, all this made sense.
I pointed at the screen of the stopwatch. Five point three seconds still glowed in white numerals. “But time can’t be manipulated, can it?” I asked, congratulating myself inwardly that I was a step ahead of Amy this time. She slumped back in her seat, the creaking desk moaning for her.
Mr. Miller stopped pacing and faced me. His face brightened again. “Maybe it can, Dex. Have you ever gone on a long car ride, I mean, like hours and hours of being on the road?”
I nodded, thrilled he’d called me Dex again. “With my family when I was a kid to Niagara Falls.” I smiled at the memory of leaving Ohio and traveling to Niagara Falls, seeing the water crashing into the basin relentlessly, the sound like continuous explosions.
Mr. Miller smiled. He winked. “Did you fall asleep in the car?”
I paused, recalling the day we left. Dad angry at Mom for forgetting to mail some bills (which meant late fees, he complained), Dad refusing to use the car’s air conditioning because he believed we’d get better gas mileage, and the warm air slamming into my ten-year-old face in the backseat through the open windows.
My face heated up. “Yes.”
Three or four classmates snickered. I didn’t care. Mr. Miller was talking to me. We were in our own little bubble. Time right now stood still for me. For us.
“And when you woke up, to you it felt like only minutes, maybe seconds, but probably hours had passed. Am I right?”
I gulped, the memory solid in my brain now. The warm car, my head almost swallowed by the cushy pillow Mom had told me to bring, my sister sleeping on the other side, her long black hair draped over one side of her pale face. “Yes, you’re right.” My voice came out as a squeak, and now almost all the students laughed, even Amy. The bubble burst.
“Quiet, everyone!” Mr. Miller ordered. His body went erect, his eyes darkening as they slowly scanned the classroom—his way of classroom management—until the last snicker faded away.
Once again, his circular gaze ended up on me. “What if, Dex, you could travel those hundreds of miles, not in hours, but in seconds, maybe milliseconds. You would have aged only a second but be three hours into the future.”
“I, uh, that would . . .” I paused. I wanted my response to be cogent, an answer that would not sound childish or ignorant. An answer that would invite a compliment. Thoughts swirled in my brain—the ball, time, the continuum—until they finally coalesced into a clear understanding. I perked up at my desk. “You mean like time travel.” I didn’t want Mr. Miller to hear it as a question. “But wouldn’t I have to travel faster than the speed of light?” Last semester I read an article about Einstein. The whole E=mc² thing.
I heard Amy squirm at her desk. “But that’s impossible,” she muttered. She crossed her arms and glared at Mr. Miller, then me.
Mr. Miller spoke to Amy but gave me a knowing look as if we shared a secret. “Maybe, Amy. Maybe.”
Some of my classmates’ eyes drifted to the clock on the wall. They groaned. It was 8:18. Class ended at 8:22.
“So no quiz?” Randy Foster asked loudly. He wanted confirmation.
Mr. Miller’s face clouded over, and his shoulders slumped a little. He rolled the ball across the table and this time let it fall off the edge. His eyes never left the ball as it bounced towards the wall, finally stopping underneath the radiator by the windows. Although he hadn’t asked, I timed it. Nine point six seconds from his hand to the radiator.
“No, Randy. No quiz.”
Amy slammed shut her notebook. I kept mine open. I knew there’d be more.
Mr. Miller leaned a hip against the black table. He raked a hand through his hair. “It’s not always about speed—going faster than the speed of light, for example. You have to ignore the absolutes. Take gravity, for example. Mass is lighter on the moon than the Earth because it has different gravity. There, the 200-pound man is only 34 pounds. It’s about viewing time in a different way,” he explained, his eyes on the floor, “. . . of cutting it, of taking away the hours, the days, the years and splicing them off and . . .” His eyes locked on mine. He smiled warmly, “. . . and waking up in Niagara Falls.”
The bell rang, and my classmates swept their notebooks and textbooks off their desks and into their book bags. They popped to their feet and hustled to the door, eager to escape the warm classroom and the possibility of Mr. Miller announcing any homework. Even Amy Peplin joined the crowd.
I was the last out, but I stopped in the hallway, crowded now with students heading in both directions. I stood, clutching my books to my chest, just outside the classroom doorway. I had more questions—like how can we cut time, was he serious about time travel, why did he even talk about all that?
But I didn’t want to be late for my next class. I’d never been tardy to any class, even after gym. In a panic, I turned and sped back into Mr. Miller’s classroom.
“Time travel is possible?” I croaked out. “Really, Mr. Miller?”
He still faced the rows of desks and only tilted his head towards me. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “I was only trying to make class interesting, Dexter. You know, try something different to get everyone’s attention.” He shrugged.
My insides slumped. My books seemed to gain weight. I was Dexter again. “You made it up, you . . .?” I didn’t want to finish my question. I didn’t want to say, you lied?
He turned towards me. “I’m sorry, Dexter.” He raised both arms in apology. “You can’t . . . we can’t time travel.” Then he peered at the clock on the wall. “You better get to class, buddy. You have less than a minute before the next bell rings.”
I backed reluctantly out of the room. The time travel lecture was a sham, and now I was buddy. My stomach clenched.
“We can’t?” I tried before I moved out into the stuffy hallway, but he had moved over to sit at his desk, his eyes now on his gradebook, ignoring me. He was done talking. “Bye, Mr. Miller,” I said, hoping he might crack a smile.
Without looking at me, he gave a sluggish wave. Then he closed his gradebook and tossed it into a trashcan.
There weren’t many of us at the 50-year reunion of our class—maybe fifty. It seemed more like forty, however. I got stuck at a dinner table with Kevin Brewer who sat on my right. He kept complaining about his recent knee surgery, how long it was taking him to recover, how slightly embarrassed he felt using a cane. He lifted it above the table.
“Grandkids got this for me,” he announced proudly. Then I listened politely to his stories about Noelle, Sarah, and Timmy. One of them played softball, another had sung a solo in the school choir, the third had read every Harry Potter novel. I didn’t have children. Nor a wife.
I was grateful, therefore, when Amy Peplin put down her wine glass on the white tablecloth and gently nudged my shoulder, diverting my attention away from Kevin. She still had delicate curls over her forehead, but her attempt at coloring her gray hair back to blond made those curls look steel pipe silver. She was still thin, however, and dressed in a green, sleeveless dress. Green, of course—our school colors.
“We had physics together, right, Dexter?”
“Yeah.” I pushed away my plate of half-eaten chicken and green beans and sipped some more water. I recalled the A— in physics on my final transcript. It caused me to be salutatorian instead of valedictorian. “That was my hardest class in high school.”
Amy sniggered. “That Miller guy was pretty messed up, wasn’t he?”
I wanted to defend him, but I couldn’t. “He was okay.”
“Whatever happened to him? Do you know?” She brought her wine glass halfway to her lips but paused, eyeing me over the rim. “I mean, what the hell. A month left in the school year, and he disappears? Who does that?” Then she took a drink.
“I don’t know. I was as surprised as you were.” But I wasn’t surprised, I was angry. He left. No warning. He just disappeared. We came to class that Monday in the second week of May and had substitutes the rest of my senior year. None of them knew Ohm’s law or the rate isotopes decay or the differences between refraction and diffraction. We needed Mr. Miller, and he left us. The last sub gave me the A—.
“You were really good at physics. You probably are a professor somewhere, right?”
I nodded slowly. “I was a teacher at an academy in Indiana, uh, not a professor. I’m retired now.” I blinked, waiting for the expected follow-up question.
Instead, both of her eyebrows went up. Her eyes became question marks. She waited.
“Science,” I told her. “Biology, to be specific.”
Which made me think of my Dad who thought there was no ambition or future in being a teacher. He believed, “If you can, do; if you can’t, teach.” I ignored the insult because I liked the rules in academia, the absolutes like the bells announcing when classes begin and end, the classroom desks in neat rows, the scores on tests. Everything always added up.
“Are you going to tour the school tomorrow?”
I cleared my throat and shrugged. “I don’t know . . . maybe.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “I’m so glad they’re tearing that old school down . . . finally!” She laughed and raised her glass as if for a toast. The others at the table heard her last words and raised their glasses too. We all drank.
Amy arched an eyebrow lined with dark eyelashes at me. “One last look? C’mon, Dexter.”
I forced a smile. “Okay, yeah. What time do we need to be there?”
The next morning, the high school hallways were as stifling warm and dimly lit as they were fifty years ago. The building deserved to be bulldozed. Although this was July, the school still smelled of sweat and old textbooks. All the classroom doors were open for the tour, and when I stopped outside Room 129, others continued ahead of me, laughing and reminiscing about the teachers, their lockers, the pranks.
I peeked inside the empty classroom and waited for a wave of nostalgia to hit me. None did.
The technology had been removed from Mr. Miller’s classroom, so room 129 mostly looked the same. Pale green walls. The black desk in the front. A plastic trash barrel by the doorway. It had tables and chairs now, however, instead of individual desks, and whiteboards had replaced the chalkboards. I sauntered inside and looked around, eventually stopping by the back wall where a poster declared, AMAZING THINGS HAPPEN HERE!
Sure they did.
“It’s still warm as hell in here, isn’t it?”
I turned and discovered he hadn’t changed. His thick brown hair was still draped over his collar. His handsome face was wrinkle free, his teeth white, and he had the same broad shoulders. Even as he stood just inside the doorway, I could tell he hadn’t aged. His blue eyes sparkled across the room at me.
“Mr. Miller?” I choked out. Saying it now as I neared seventy years of age felt awkward, but I had never called him anything else.
He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “Do we know each other?”
“You . . . you taught physics . . . You were . . . Wait . . .” I dug the heels of my hands into my closed eyes. I took deep breaths before I opened them again. I wanted to scream for my former classmates but held back. He and I were back in the bubble. I didn’t want them here. “I’m Dexter Mathews.”
He gave me a close-mouthed smile; the kind you give a stranger when you open a door for them and then ambled into the room. “Dexter Mathews? Yes, I remember.”
“You left, you—”
He laughed. “I’m right here, Dex. I wanted to see my old classroom before it’s turned into rubble.”
He remembered to call me Dex. My mouth dried up. My heart pushed against my ribs, and my lungs seemed to stop working. “But how . . . You haven’t aged. You look the same. You . . .”
He smiled and crossed his arms, tilting his head again, a pose that did make me feel nostalgic. “Dex, I had you pegged to be an engineer one day. Are you?”
Embarrassment heated up my cheeks as I realized I had let him down, the same way I had disappointed Dad. I lowered my eyes and shook my head. “No, I was a teacher.” A beat later, I lifted my face to look at him. “Science—like you.” I wanted to tell him about my career, my school, my students. I wanted him to be proud of me. I opened my mouth but closed it when he shuffled from the doorway to the windows.
He saw something. He bent over and laughed. “Look at this.” Grinning, he lifted the yellow tennis ball off the floor. “I used this once, I think.”
“You did, you did, Mr. Miller. You told us about time travel, and Einstein, but then you told me we can’t,” I stammered. “We were alone in the room, you said we can’t—”
His knowing look stopped me. His eyes glistened. He lifted his shoulders and held them there for several moments.
And then I understood. I understood what had happened. Why he left. What he did. I walked over to him. We were the same height now. I looked him in the eyes. My heart thumped. “I want to go back.”
Go back and figure out how to be popular, go to a different college, become an engineer.
He placed a hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way, despite the fact I was the older man, by nearly fifty years. “You can’t. No one can.”
I put a hand on his shoulder and blinked hard. “Then take me with you,” I begged. “Please.”
His hand fell off, and he paused, his face becoming etched with sorrow as he gathered his thoughts. “I’m sorry, Dex. I’ve learned that’s not how it works.”
The oxygen left my body so abruptly I had to step back, remove my hand from his shoulder, and use it to lean on one of the tables. My legs wobbled. My organs felt squeezed.
“Then tell me how, Mr. Miller,” I gasped. “Please.”
But he was on his way out, walking briskly and with purpose. Before he left, he flipped me the yellow tennis ball. His blue eyes danced as if jolted by electricity. “You were one of the best and brightest, Dex,” he declared. “You can figure it out.”
And then he was gone, his steps growing fainter in the hallway. No one would believe I had seen him. That I had seen him as the young man we remembered. I collapsed onto a nearby chair and gazed at the fuzzy tennis ball in my hand. It hadn’t changed either.
© 2025 Keith Manos All rights reserved.
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