It was the twenty-third day of March, which was the day I'd picked to be my birthday while I was on Earth. I couldn't absolutely swear that it was my birthday – the irregularity of my native planetoid's orbit, plus certain relativistic complications, made it impossible to exactly fix the date by Earth's calendar – but it was the most likely choice, and not more than a day or two off at the worst.

So it was my birthday – my first on Earth, in fact: a real milestone. And it began just the way a birthday should: I woke up in my own bed, in the home of two people who had loved me as an adoptive daughter before they even knew about my powers, with a special breakfast being prepared for me downstairs (you haven't known real pleasure until you've had super-smell in a house where bacon is frying), and, on top of everything else, my one real friend from my first half-year on Earth nuzzling at my forehead and purring like a dynamo.

"Hey, Streaky," I murmured sleepily, and reached up to stroke his ginger fur. Streaky, sensitive as ever, responded by grabbing my index finger in his mouth and doing his best to chew through my super-skin; I giggled, curled up the rest of my fingers, and lifted him into the air and started bouncing him back and forth like a pendulum. It was one of the little games we liked to play now and then; I don't suppose most cats would have enjoyed it – or most girls, either, for that matter – but it suited Streaky and me right down to the ground.

We didn't spend long on it that morning, though. It was only a couple minutes later that Mama Edna called up to me that my breakfast was ready, and I detached Streaky gently from my hand, gave him a little kiss on the top of his head, and went over to my bureau to pick out a suitable dress for the day.

That sounds as though it should have been easy, I guess, and probably it would have been if I'd been Linda Danvers all my life. But when you've spent your first thirteen years on a barren meteor where all the cloth is just resynthesized space gas, and then another half-year in the toughest orphanage in Georgia because Superman had to make sure you weren't a duplicitous fugitive from the Phantom Zone, a closet full of brightly colored wool and cotton frocks looks like the treasure chamber of Zar-Hyan, and it's hard not to linger over it for a few minutes, lovingly fingering the soft fabrics and feeling torn about which of them is the nicest of all for such a special day. I eventually settled on a pretty green one with a Peter Pan collar and tiny embroidered flowers, but as I changed I whispered to all the others that I loved them, too.

Then I flew out my bedroom door and down to the breakfast nook – literally flew, because why waste time with stairs when there's bacon on the line? Besides, my foster parents liked to see me fly; they felt it as the luckiest and proudest thing there was to have Supergirl for their daughter, and anything that reminded them of it just lifted their spirits all over again. (Not to mention, they probably just felt happy to see a person flying at all, the way I always did when I watched Kal in action. Who doesn't love it when someone does in his body what we all long to do in our hearts?)

Certainly, the two of them both smiled like daisy fields when they saw me swoop down the stairway. "Well, now," said Papa Fred, "somebody looks happy this morning. You'd almost think it was her birthday or something."

I giggled as I righted myself in the air, and skidded to a running stop in front of the breakfast table. (Kal could just have dropped himself right out of the air onto his feet, but I wasn't that coordinated yet – and, even if I had been, I wouldn't have wanted to give my skirt an excuse to pull a Marilyn Monroe on me.) "I know," I teased back. "Crazy, right? Why, the odds against that are 364 to 1."

"365," said Papa Fred. "This is a leap year."

"Touchée."

"Well, then," Mama Edna said, "I'd say that such an extraordinary coincidence deserves some extra-special recognition. Coming through." And she emerged from the kitchen with a platter in each hand; on the left was the bacon I'd smelled upstairs, and on the right a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes that I'd completely overlooked (oversniffed?), but that now struck my eager nose with all the luscious sweetness at their disposal.

I took a deep breath, and tried not to cry from sheer happiness. "You're too good to me, Mama."

"Oh, nonsense," said Mama Edna. "Do you hear this child, Fred? This is the girl who just last week pulled my car out of a skid with her bare hands, and she thinks I'm too good to her."

I felt my cheeks get hot. "Well, anyone would have done that, if he could," I murmured. "And, anyway, I wasn't as careful as I could have been; there's that dent on the rear fender now where I grabbed it…"

"Yes, yes," said Mama Edna. "And I'm sure Thomas Jefferson woke up on the fifth of July wishing he'd phrased some line of the Declaration better. Come on, sweetie, put the silly modesty away and fix yourself a plate before it gets cold."

I didn't need a second invitation. I'd already picked out the pieces of bacon I wanted (three lean, skinny slices cooked just shy of a crisp), and the flapjacks on top of the stack were so soft and gooey and scrumptious-looking that I couldn't see any reason to bypass them, so within seconds I had my plate ready, and was busy trying to pick what to mention in my grace among so many things I was thankful for. (And if you're the kind of person who thinks that hyper-advanced aliens shouldn't be doing things like saying prayers, all I can say is that I'm a hyper-advanced alien, and I've been saying prayers ever since Father O'Keefe and I had our little talk after the Klan attacked his church.)

"Dear God," I said slowly, "thank You for… for making me be born, and…"

I trailed off, then, because, really, what more was there to say? It was being alive at all that was the truly wonderful thing; all the superpowers and loving step-parents and chocolate-chip pancakes in the world could only make that easier to see. Even if I'd died with my parents in the meteor swarm, or been adopted by Lex Luthor like Nastassja (who, knowing her, probably thought she was the lucky one, not me) – even then, it would have been worth it just to have taken a single breath, to have woken up just once and seen the morning sky… to have been, however briefly and miserably, me. But how do you squeeze all that into a sentence or two before you burst into tears or the bacon gets cold?

Papa Fred came to my rescue. "And not a Wasn't," he finished matter-of-factly.

It was so perfect that I could barely gasp an Amen in between my sudden fit of giggles. When Mama Edna had been expecting her own baby a few years before, she'd bought a whole collection of Dr. Seuss books – not just the famous ones like Green Eggs and Ham, but Thidwick and McElligot's Pool and If I Ran the Zoo and all down the line. Even after the miscarriage, she'd held on to them, always hoping to someday have someone to read them to – so, when she'd adopted what she thought was a war-traumatized orphan from behind the Iron Curtain, of course she'd taken the opportunity to rectify that particular deficiency of my childhood. Which was fine with me, because there's nothing nicer, when you can't get to sleep for thinking of all your friends whose flesh was seared away by naked Kryptonite rays, than to have your adoptive mother's sweet Georgia drawl sing-songing over your head about how glikk is for Glikker, who lives in wild weeds and spends his time juggling fresh cinnamon seeds. So the Seuss corpus had become a kind of embodiment for me of everything bright and lovely and hopeful about my new life on Earth, and its silly-wise nonsense rhymes were a major part of the private language my new parents and I spoke to each other – and so, when Papa Fred pulled the exact phrase I was looking for out of Happy Birthday to You, there wasn't much I could do except dissolve in laughter.

Mama Edna smiled at me as I slowly regained control of myself. "Yes, you'd make a pretty poor Wasn't, wouldn't you?" she said. "I'm sure we're all terribly pleased that you're you."

"Thanks, Mama," I said, still beaming. "So am I."

"Yes," said Mama Edna. "And, arising out of that, did you ever fully decide on your plans for your Day-of-All-Days? The zoo in the morning, of course, and then lunch at Hubbell's – but after that? I know you were hoping Superman would get in touch with you and invite you up for cake and ice cream in that Fortress of his; did that ever come to anything?"

I shook my head. "No, I never heard from him," I said. "I guess he's still pretty busy; the Atomic Skull really messed up Metropolis last time, you know. So even if he does call, it'll probably be too late in the day to do anything; most likely we'll have to arrange something special next weekend or something."

"What, then?" said Mama Edna. "I know you love us as dearly as we do, sweetheart, but that doesn't mean you ought to go your whole birthday without taking a swimming trip to Europa or riding bumper cars at Mach 6. If we're setting aside a day to celebrate a Supergirl, she ought to have some super-fun at some point, that's what I say."

I would have giggled, if my mouth hadn't been full of pancake. "Well, maybe I will this afternoon, then," I said once I'd swallowed. "If nothing else, I can always drop by the ranch and see if Comet wants to go on a round-the-world canter. But I'll worry about that later. There's plenty of time in the day to be Supergirl; right now, I'm just happy to be a girl like any other."

You know how sometimes you'll look back on your life before something enormous happened, remember some little thing you said or did, and just marvel at how little you knew of what was coming? I've looked back that way at that last sentence a lot, these last few months. I'm glad I was so innocent, though; it would have been a shame to spoil that morning by knowing what the afternoon was going to bring.

"Well, nothing wrong with that, I'm sure," said Mama Edna. "And now, if the girl like any other would maybe think about wiping her chin? I'm raising a proper Southern lady and a daughter of the House of El, not a savage who can't eat without smearing chocolate all over herself."