“So… wait, dividing by one a’ these… it works like multiplying?!” Ninten asked, eyes widening as he stared at the notebook Lloyd was pointing at.
“Yeah! I’m surprised you picked up on that so quickly. Dividing by one-tenth is like multiplying by ten.”
Ninten hummed, leaning in closer to scan over the fresh page of the notebook. They’d been scribbling all over the previous pages over the past few unofficial math lessons, but Lloyd had flipped to a blank page to start working on problems--Ninten tended to get distracted by too much writing in his way, and the noisy environment of the train to Halloween didn’t quite help.
“And one-tenth, that’s zero-point-one. Ten percent. Right?” Ninten asked.
“That’s correct.”
“...Huh. Okay. I think I’m ready to give this one a shot.”
Lloyd nodded and pushed the notebook further into Ninten’s lap. Ninten squinted down at the numbers and idly started to chew on the end of the pencil in his hand.
“All right. Well, seven divided by two-tenths… and if that’s really multiplication in disguise…”
Ninten scrawled out a multiplication problem, then finished it up by circling his messy ‘140’. Lloyd winced.
“Oh. Um. No, actually, this is one of those times when it’s kind of hard to work out how the rules work.”
“Aw, I thought I had it! Darn it!”
“Deep breath, Ninten.”
Ninten drew in a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “Right. It’s just like school, I’m not gonna get it right away. So where’d I go wrong?”
“It might be easier to write it out as a fraction,” Lloyd explained, scratching out ‘0.2’ and replacing it with ‘2/10’. “See, two tenths. And before we do anything else..?”
“Simplify!” Ninten finished, crossing out ‘2/10’ and writing ‘1/5’.
“There you go. See, we barely talked about that once, and you’ve already mastered it!”
Ninten shrugged with a grin. “It ain’t that hard, ya know.”
“Neither is the rest of this problem. Once you understand how it works, you’ll be solving these problems in a flash.”
“Awesome!” Ninten tapped the fraction with the tip of his pencil. “One fifth. Seven divided by one fifth…”
“Here’s the most important part,” Lloyd said. “Can I see the notebook for a minute?”
Ninten handed the notebook and pencil over, and Lloyd wrote out the problem one more time with a couple of arrows dictating how Ninten could convert the problem to multiplication.
“If you flip the numerator and denominator, just like that… and--”
“And then we gotta simplify five over one,” Ninten interjected, snatching the pencil and correcting Lloyd’s improper fraction. “‘Cause that’s a regular old number!”
“You’re exactly right.”
“Which means… Aw, I know that! That’s straight off the multiplication tables!”
Ninten scribbled ‘35’ and then circled that, too.
“There we go!” Lloyd said. “Who needs school?”
“I might be the first kid in history to get his math lessons from another kid on a train!”
Ninten paused with the pencil above the page, then broke into his crooked grin and skipped a line down.
YOU ARE READING
That's What Bein' A Friend Is About
Fanfiction[cover art courtesy of _moonrise_art on twitter] Lloyd's partway through growing up in the suburban town of Thanksgiving. He doesn't have friends. The other kids at Twinkle Elementary bully him, and he's perfectly content to devote all of his free t...
