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Martha’s sort of freaking out about being Ruby Roundhouse.
Ruby is literally only wearing short shorts and around half of a shirt, which is something Martha would never be caught dead in, and it seems like to complete the quest they’re going to have to tour the whole fucking jungle. The whole place is crawling with deadly beasts and armed men trying to shoot them, and Martha is supposed to beat them with karate or something, even though she’s like the antithesis to physical activity and also, she looks fucking ridiculous.
So she’s super grateful when Bethany gives her the khaki jacket off her back. The cloth doesn’t really cover much ground, but she immediately feels better once she has the jacket tied around her waist. She doesn’t even flinch when Bethany Walker, the girl who only talks to Lucinda and her phone, starts making casual conversation with her. She figures that talking normally with the school’s head cheerleader about her boyfriend is about as likely as falling into a video game whose main feature seems to be violent death. She clutches at the jacket like a lifeline.
Then Bethany says her showing skin is the key to her relationship with Noah, and Martha says “ew” on reflex.
She sees Bethany’s eyes flash in annoyance, but honestly, Martha doesn’t really care. At this point, being sick of the objectification of women is not really something anyone can blame her for. So she grits her teeth for the catfight.
But Bethany catches her off guard. “Wow, judgy much? Seriously, I can’t even open my mouth around you. You don’t even know me, but you like, decided you hate me.”
Martha has to pause to swallow back the second wave feminist rhetoric she was going to deploy in response. Bethany’s right, she did judge her without even having spoken to her before. So Martha corrects the only part of the statement she can. “I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t?” asks Bethany sceptically, and at this point Martha’s so flustered that she just sort of goes into a far too honest rant about “the hot popular girl bubble” and Bethany being “self-absorbed”. She kind of blacks out in the middle and it’s entirely too much for a first conversation. Martha thinks that her filter might just be totally gone due to shock.
There’s a long pointed pause where Bethany stares at her, her face inscrutable, and Martha’s almost certain that she’s going to have to spend the rest of her time in Jumanji avoiding all contact with the other girl and nursing scratch scars. At least in this world she (supposedly) knows karate.
Instead, Bethany says “That’s fair,” and Martha’s even more thrown. “But do you think maybe, the reason that you’re so judgy is because you’re like afraid that people aren’t going to like you, so you decide not to like them first?”
And that’s a really fucking good point. Maybe if she wasn’t so deathly afraid of other people, she wouldn’t be so stupid about being Ruby Roundhouse. Maybe aggressively rejecting Instagram is in itself like being on Instagram. Martha’s captain of the debate team and all she can say to that is variations on the intonation of “maybe”.
Then Bethany calls her a babe and tells her to “own it”, and this conversation is officially going to take her several months to process.