It becomes quickly apparent that El is too far behind the rest of the class to succeed in public school. Hawkins Lab taught her a little bit—how to read and write and do basic arithmetic—but when she jumps into Will's class after they move to Sullivan, she can't convert fractions to decimals and has never heard of the Revolutionary War or Robert Frost or the cells that make up the human body. The year that Dr. Owens gave Hopper for things to settle down before El could fully enter society is almost up, and Jonathan's mom thought it would be nice to let her join Will in school at the same time as they moved—to make a fresh start together in Sullivan. But El can't follow along at all in her classes, and her grades suffer dismally, for the three weeks that she tries to attend Sullivan High.
No way can the Byerses afford a private tutor, so it becomes Jonathan's task to tutor El at home whenever he's not working at the restaurant. It leaves him absolutely no free time, but he only resents his life a little, wishing he were off at NYU studying photography instead of taking a gap year to save up for community college. In lieu of spending his time on his own schooling, he pours his efforts into El's, slowly and patiently walking her through mathematics and science, history and reading, penmanship and writing.
El is not easy to teach. She gets frustrated easily, and when she buries her face in her hands and groans, Jonathan can almost feel the lights going out and the windows shattering around them, as if El had her powers back and were losing control of them. She doesn't, of course, and her meltdowns don't extend to the realm of the metaphysical.
When she's not working with Jonathan, El keeps mostly to her room, only emerging to use the bathroom and to join Jonathan's family for dinner. Jonathan assumes that she just doesn't want to talk to them, or at least, he does until she looks up from her math homework one day and says shyly, "Why does Will hate me?"
"What are you talking about? Will doesn't hate you," says Jonathan, furrowing his brow.
"He doesn't talk… to me," El explains earnestly in her halting way. "Not in Hawkins. Not here."
Jonathan thinks about the way Will and El pointedly look away from each other at mealtimes and wonders whether it's as much Will's fault as it is El's. "I'm sure he doesn't hate you," he says again. "Will's just a tough kid to get to know. It was probably easier for him to be around you back in Hawkins when he had Mike and Dustin and Lucas as a buffer."
"A buffer?" El echoes, eyes wide.
"Yeah, you know, like he was able to talk to you through them, but you never really got to know each other for yourselves. Now you're suddenly in a new place, and everyone else is gone, and you don't know what to say to each other."
"He doesn't know," she repeats dubiously.
It stays on his mind the rest of the evening, enough so that Will actually asks him what's got him so distracted as they're lying in their beds opposite each other that night. "Just thinking about El," says Jonathan vaguely. "I just thought you would have been better friends by now than you are, that's all."
Will hesitates, and Jonathan hears his sheets rustling in the darkness. "I didn't think she needed me. She has Mike, doesn't she?"
There's a note of bitterness in his voice, and something clicks in Jonathan's mind. "Mike hasn't really stayed in touch with you very well since we moved, has he?"
"No," says Will shortly.
"But that isn't El's fault, Will," Jonathan reminds him gently.
Will doesn't answer.