Jada Versailles and Ayano Ilanescu
Collection One
Book One of Cheshire Trilogy
by valucia carter-clarke
CHESHIRE
Jada Versailles was an easy woman to hate. Her hair looked like she got up early to wash, blow dry, and curl it. Her nails weren't chipped. Her clothes looked expensive. How could she walk in heels that high all day? She appeared, to most people in Gotham City, like a beautiful, professional woman of exotic ancestry who had never suffered any hardship in her entire life and never would.
Her father had been Japanese and her mother was Brazilian. Jada's skin was a light tan color, which darkened during many trips to the beach in the summer. She had long black hair that she liked to wear down in waves. People asked her if she was Filipina or Native American all the time. It was probably her eyes. Her eyes looked sort of Asian but they were green. Yes, she'd say, latinas can have green eyes. In 1997, people in the States were more politically correct and culturally aware than in the 80s, but she still got a lot of strange questions about latin culture and Brazil. Gisele Bundchen was emerging as a popular model, inadvertently helping to spread the existing stereotype over time that all Brazilian women were sex objects.
Parts of her appearance couldn't be helped, or at least, weren't meant to inspire envy. Without shoes, she was 5' 9". She was fit because she actually liked the exercise she did. She had been doing capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, from an early age, having found the dance groups too catty and the sports groups too teamwork oriented for her taste. The expensive ensemble, though? Part of her knew that expensive things were just things and that money should be spent on necessities because of all the poverty in the world. She knew this better than most, growing up in Brazil. But another part knew that beautiful people were treated better and she had had enough maltreatment in her lifetime.
When she was younger and saved up enough to buy the right shoes and the right clothes, the tourists, police officers, store owners-- everyone-- treated her like a person. If she tried to take a shortcut home through the grounds of a nice hotel while wearing her work clothes, someone would invariably shoo her away. Out-of-towners would give her that simpering smile while thinking "poor thing." Her mother spent her spending money on nice clothes, too. Even when they could use a new stove or it was the second notice for the electric bill. Jada and her mother knew that a new stove might make cooking easier, but they would still be in their social caste- the working poor who were scraping by. Brand name clothes, purses, and jewelry, that was how to make it feel like they weren't constantly struggling living in their neighborhood.
Jada had discovered clothes as a status symbol by fashion show photos in Vogue Magazine. She considered her life at home with her mom in their cramped apartment to be behind the scenes, like backstage at a fashion show. When she left, she had to project an image to the world that she was happy, confident, and not poor. Some people in her life would be able to see the goings-on backstage, but most would not.
And television! Television was also an effective way to be taken out of the neighborhood. It sucked having to plan her walk home from school to avoid things like gang members, drug addicts, or thieves. She loved to escape into romantic telenovelas or joyful singers on the stage. This is where she learned how to behave around people. Her mother wasn't exactly negligent, but she was very interested in finding a husband most of the time, leaving Jada to develop her own ideas about men and sexuality and everything else. But the example was clear- men are important. Do everything for them so they don't run away, like her father had.
Her father used to swear up and down that he was going to marry her mother. That was, until the Japanese members of his family threatened to cut him off financially if he married "the latina." Apparently, when given the choice, a child out of wedlock was preferable to a latina in the family. A combination of her mother's emotional distance and her father's guilt got her sent to the best boarding school in Brazil at age 14. She got into a reputable art school in Gotham City, in
os Estados Unidos
. All these environments and factors were what constructed Jada's idea about how to look, act, and date.
Sometimes, Jada wanted a boyfriend so badly, above all else. Other times, she sort of stumbled into these things. She vamped because you were supposed to vamp. She wore risque outfits because that's what starlets wore. And if a man wanted to fool around with her, she may as well go along with it. She could say no sometimes, but she had hooked up with guys that she had no interest in. How she felt about the guy wasn't as important as the innate masculine authority he possessed. Jada was so accustomed to having her feelings ignored that she often didn't take them into account when making decisions.
As an adult, she ran a successful art gallery. She could tell you how much most paintings in the gallery were worth off the top of her head, or what the latest Van Gogh sold for at auction. When she was bored on the subway, she would guess how much people's shoes and purses cost. She knew the value of a lot of things, but she gave herself away too often because of the exchange rate: the right kind of love and affection from a man was so valuable to her that she would pay almost anything offered in exchange. If she had to deal with her partner's difficult family, their financial problems, advice on what to wear-- anything like that, it was worth it. Love was the only thing she wanted, the rest was gravy.
Women disliked women that looked like her, but her disadvantage was that she had no idea what was acceptable behavior from a loved one. Men got away with a lot. She had intimacy problems with her friends, too. In art school, her closest friend was her roommate, Grace. Grace walked in on Jada naked with another woman. They had been dating for months. Why hadn't she told Grace? For Jada, everything was on a need-to-know basis. Her guest star father off in Japan was so secretive, it made Jada secretive, and assume everyone else was being secretive as well. Maybe sneaking around was thrilling, or just a guarded practice of not putting all her eggs in one basket. No one person should know everything about her, right?
There were more secrets. Being the boss at the gallery gave her a lot of flexibility in her schedule. Sometimes, by night, she was known as Cheshire. She wore a mask and cowl, green armor, and advanced weaponry. The alias Cheshire referred to the green smoke she could summon from devices on her wrists and disappear like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. The smoke was always a different kind of poison and almost never fatal. When gangs in her neighborhood talked about gunshot wounds, Jada had always heard about trying to scare a guy and shooting him dead by accident or an enemy escaping with just a slug in the arm. Guns were clearly too unreliable. Poisons, when well studied, were predictable.
At her father's funeral, an uncle she had only met in passing approached her about looking after her now that her father was gone. This uncle was always referred to as a chemist, and maybe he was, but it was also apparent that he was involved with organized crime. It was only after her gallery was struggling that she took her uncle up on his offer. He helped her to create Cheshire.
