Ayako quietly moves 'ask Yanli what the hell is going on with her brothers' forward a few days on her mental calendar and starts working on flashcard quizzing. 

Wen Ning stutters and fails to answer any of Ayako's questions.

She doesn't, visibly, react to that in any particular way. Just moves on and asks Jiang Cheng. But if this happens more than once she's going to stop asking Wen Ning things entirely, still doing her best not to call attention to why. 

Oh, she thinks he's a disappointment too. That makes sense.

He curls up into himself.

And when the study session is done she says "I can explain the math to you if you want me to? Or I can figure out a way for us to study where nobody's looking at you." 

"The... second thing would be nice?"

"You should probably just do his homework for him, he's not going to get it."

"I mean, if he winds up needing me to do his homework, I will wind up doing that, I have no objections to doing this homework twice. But I hate studying alone and explaining things helps me learn them and Mei isn't in this class, so." 

"I mean, Wen Ning, you know I like you, but you're not going to understand any of this."

Wen Ning nods furiously.

"Well, regardless, I'll be better off for having explained it, so it's not like it matters much either way." 

Shrug.

"I guess that's what she's paying you for."

"Yeah. Anyway, I think we're done for today?" 

"Yeah. See you at dinner?"

"See you at dinner!" 

And she leads Wen Ning to... hm. She didn't actually think this through. How about her room, which is more alone than the library. 

He obediently goes where he's led to.

Ayako's room isn't nearly as spartan as Jiang Cheng's, but she hasn't really put time or effort into it yet; she has a poster up of the outer senshi from Sailor Moon along with a few others of city lights and stage productions Wen Ning doesn't recognize, a dreamcatcher inherited from one of last year's seniors hanging on the wall above her bed, a few yards of patterned fabric folded neatly on the desk, a set of tuning forks on top of the fabric.

"Sorry. I-- wasn't sure whether it would help, if we were basically ignoring you? But it seems like it didn't, so." 

"I don't mind. I know I'm just holding everyone back."

"...well, I still don't want to scare you. And I meant what I said to Jiang Cheng, explaining things to you is only going to help me learn the material better." 

"I can try not to be scared, ma'am?"

"That's not--"

Whyyy this.

...you know, she reminds herself, there is in fact a solution to the thing where everything you do to avoid freaking out Wen Ning just freaks him out more, and it is to stop trying so hard. 

"...you don't have to do that," she says. "In the meantime, I would like to try to explain math to you, because if I can't explain something to someone else then I don't actually understand it myself." 

"Okay, I can do that. I do it for my sister all the time."

"Right! Cool. So, the Fibonacci sequence is this set of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and..."

Her recounting of the concept of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio involves fewer pictures than the textbook used, because she's speaking out loud, but a much higher percentage of them are squares drawn on graph paper as opposed to works of art with a spiral overlaid on top. 

Wen Ning pays very close attention and hopes that there's not going to be a test.

There will not be a test, but when she gets to the end of a section, she says, "So did that make any sense, I can slow down or go in a different order or something if it'd help."