A/N: Being the Charlie Epps of my family (meaning that I love math, not that I'm super brilliant at it), I thought I'd write this light-hearted Charlie-centered fic. I hope that ya'll like it, being my first Numb3rs fic, so please R&R. And before you ask, yes, I too had a notebook full of long division, but it was from the summer between third and fourth grade, I wasn't that brilliant. Although I was reading in kindergarten because of pre-school … I'm rambling. Anyway, enjoy! Oh, and I don't own the Epps family or anyone else from the show, although I wish I did … happy sigh
Charlie Epps was walking around in circles. Ok, so he had worked on some things on his chalkboards in the basement of his house, but now he was done with those things and wanted to move on. The problem? He lost his eraser. Now, under normal circumstances, Charlie would just use his shirt sleeve or whatever was handy, but his shirt was in the dryer and Charlie had just showered. So, he was looking for his eraser.
"Where's my eraser?" He kept muttered to himself, over and over again before digging back into the many boxes scattered across the room. There were old toys, and even his first Rubik's cube; but, no eraser.
Charlie was upset now, because he had an idea for the solution to a problem from school in his head, and he wanted to get it out, but with all the boards around the room taken up with several seemingly meaningless equations, proportions, and what not, Charlie was getting frustrated.
Another box's contents were spread across the dirty floor as the empty box flew across the room. There was no point in throwing things, but it felt good for Charlie to get out some of the upset that was currently festering in his system. All over an eraser? If Don was down here, he would just shake his head at his little brother and perhaps help him find it. With his luck, Don would go right to it.
But, his big brother wasn't there right now, no, it was just Charlie, alone in the house again. School was out for the weekend, and Charlie had finished grading papers early, which was unusual for him, but most of his students still were working on a large class project, so the load was smaller this time around.
Yet another box flew to the growing pile in the corner of the room. Where could it have gone? One eraser for all these boards, and it was gone? Now Charlie thought he was loosing it or something. But no, he couldn't be. Was it leaning on the ladder?
Just as he was going to walk up the ladder, Charlie saw another brown box out of the corner of his eye. It was covered in dust and has his mother's handwriting on it. It made Charlie stop dead in his tracks and go to investigate its contents. There were old notebooks inside it, and several of them seemed to belong to Charlie, even the one from when he was in about kindergarten or first grade.
Opening it and blowing the dust off of its pages, Charlie started looking over what was written inside in his old handwriting. It was a little hard to read because he had written it so fast, but it was obviously long division, the kind of stuff 'normal' kids don't really get into until third or fourth grade, and here was proof that a first grader could do it. Charlie had gotten bored that summer and decided to learn long division to go along with his two-digit multiplying and dividing.
Smiling, Charlie held the notebook and went to the top of the ladder to find the eraser. There it was, on the very top, beside a piece of chalk. Charlie – having forgotten why he was looking for the eraser in the first place – started erasing the board above him to work on some of his old long division. This was the type of stuff that Don could do – well, now that he was older, anyway – but it was still fascinating to Charlie to know that the younger brother was doing it when he could barely tie his shoelaces.
He didn't know how long he was at it, but he already discovered a few minor miss-calculations in his old notebook. So, he went about setting them right once more and triple checking his work to be sure he didn't make the same mistake twice, which of course, he never did. Charlie even had to move over to another board on the ceiling and was back at it, loosing track of time completely. It's funny how math can do that to him.