Legacy – The Diaries (Part 1)
By Shadar
An alternate Earth’s story line…
Diary - Part One
I guess everyone’s story has to start with being born. In my case, that happened on December 25, 2011 at 12:03am in Themystica, California.
Yeah... a Christmas baby. Barely.
I was named after my aunt Kara and dad’s mom, Alura. My parents are Lois and Clark Kent. Just a couple of reporters at the Planet.
I was different from the other kids right from the start, or so mom says. It all started with my kicking my crib so hard I broke it into pieces. That and crushing my formula bottles in my eagerness. I wasn't breast fed, for reasons that will become obvious later.
The weirdness continued with my learning to crawl at two months. I was walking by four months. I still have vivid memories of the trials and tribulations of learning how to, although I’m told kids aren’t supposed to remember things that far back. I've more or less got a photographic memory.
The weirdness continued with my carrying on conversations by the age of one. Soon after, I learned my numbers and letters. By two I was reciting the license plate numbers of all the cars that parked on my street, along with every car we passed on the way to nursery school. I’d be reciting them by the hundreds as mom took me inside to drop me off.
It wasn’t a very useful skill, but one that my teachers thought was both charming and astounding given my age. Everyone said I’d grow up to be something special. Gifted. Genius. Whatever.
Little did they know that the really special parts of me had nothing to do with my brain.
Of course I had all the usual mishaps of a young child – falling down stairs, touching hot things, etc – but I never got hurt. In fact, I thought it was fun to ride on my tummy down the long stairs in our house, going bumpity bump bump until I hit the wall at the bottom with a big crash. I think I wore a groove in those hardwood stairs with my chest.
Mom would get mad at me when I did that, especially if we had company, but the real problem started when I developed this insatiable curiosity about bugs. I’d pick up beetles and biting ants and stinging bees with my fingers, but they never hurt me. Things got really weird the day I found this really cool bug under the back of mom’s Volvo while we were at the park. I slowly lifted the back of the car and then turned it on its side to check it out.
Mom turned white and grabbed me, dragging me over to sit on a park bench next to her. Thankfully, nobody else had been in the parking lot. But then a police cruiser came by and saw the overturned car. Mom tried to explain that she’d tried to dodge a dog and the car had tipped over, but the cop gave her a ticket for reckless driving anyway. A wrecker had to come and tilt the car back on its wheels.
Mom and dad both talked to me a long time that night. They said I had to play a game called, Normal. The rules were simple: I couldn’t do anything that I hadn’t seen another kid do.
I really like games, so I played it. Well, most of the time.
It was around that time when I started having these really vivid dreams of flying, and when I was three, I started waking up outside in the backyard or on the roof of the garage. Mom called it sleep walking, although it didn’t make sense that I’d always climb on top of the highest thing around.
I just thought it was kind of fun as I wasn’t afraid of heights.
The fun went away the morning I woke up on top of the water tower near the edge of town. It was raining and the wind was blowing and the top of the water tank was rounded and slippery. Lightning was flashing around me, the thunder deafening. I tried to walk over to the ladder, but I slipped and almost fell off. I quickly retreated to the top and clung to the lightning rod, shaking with fear.
As usual, dad wasn’t anywhere around, so mom came to get me. She had to climb a long ladder to reach the bottom of the tank, and then up another ladder that curved up and across the top of the tank. It was starting to hail by then. Mom was almost to the top when I was blinded by this huge flash of light that made me feel like I was on fire inside. My arms and legs started to shake as sparks leaped in all directions. I couldn’t hold on anymore and started to slide down the tank.
Mom leaped up the last steps and dove to grab for me, scrambling across the curving top of the tank to catch my wet pajamas with one hand just before I fell. There was no ladder on that side, only steep, wet metal plates. Mom tried to get a grip on them, but there was nothing to hold on to. I screamed as we slid down the side, holding on really tightly to mom, knowing she'd find a way to stop us. But we fell, and the ground started to rush up. I closed my eyes and wished that I was back on top of the tank.
And then, before I knew what was happening, we were back on top. Like magic!
Mom was bleeding and one arm didn't work, I guess I’d held onto her too tightly. It took her a while to convince me to release my death grip on the lightning rod, but finally we climbed down, her holding on with one hand while sheltering me between her body and the ladder. We were as wet as drowned rats when we got back in the car, and mom was shivering, but she acted so brave. Like she'd had everything under control.
That is, until dad got home that night. She started yelling and crying and telling him how she’d nearly been killed when the lightning hit me. That I'd held onto her so hard I'd broken her arm (it was in a cast now), and that we’d both fallen off the tower in a way that anyone could have seen, but that somehow I’d flown us both back to the top of the tower.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Lightning had hit me? I'd broken her arm? I’d flown both of us back to the top of the tower? I thought it was just magic. Or some kind of dream.
Mom went on by telling dad how terrified she’d been after she saw me get hit, by the fall, and then by having to climb down all the way to the ground. That didn’t make sense either. She’d seemed so brave up there. I was the one who was scared.
He hugged mom like he always did, she looked so small wrapped in his huge arms, and said: “It’s her nature, Lois. The bolt gave her enough energy to fly. I’ll spend some time with her. It’s time.”
I didn’t understand any of that. Energy to fly? And time for what?
Dad stayed home from work the next morning as promised, and mom went to work at the Planet. He cooked me breakfast (waffles and blueberry syrup, my favorite) and we just talked about normal stuff while we ate. My pet tarantula (Harry) and the rabbits in the backyard.
Halfway through breakfast, he pointed to the picture on the front of the Cheerios box and asked me what I knew about Superman. I recited the things every kid knew about Superman. I mean, you couldn’t watch TV for an hour without seeing his picture somewhere or hearing about some new rescue he’d done. Plus there were McDonald’s toys, Superman Happy Meals, the cereal boxes, you name it. His picture was everywhere.
Dad just smiled when I was done, and asked me what I thought it would be like to be Superman?
I gave him a weird look and told him that I was a girl, not a boy. He laughed and sent me upstairs to get my bath. Then he got me dressed and brushed my hair. The stuff my mom usually did.
But instead of taking me to my nursery school, he drove over to the old rock quarry outside town.
That was the first time I ever remember him spending a whole day with me. Just me. No emergencies, no appointments, no phone calls. He even turned off his cell phone. It was wonderful. I thought we were going swimming; there was a place in the quarry where big kids went.
Nobody was around when we got there, so we climbed down this steep path to the quarry floor. Once we got there, dad asked me to concentrate on some really silly things: like holding my breath for a long time. I was good at that, but I was more than a little surprised when it felt as if I could hold it forever. Dad told me I could stop after I’d counted to a thousand.
I’d never been able to do that before.
Then he said to try really hard to lift both feet off the ground at the same time. I thought that was a cool game; I’d always been able to jump really high.
But he said, no, I couldn’t jump. I was supposed to pretend I was a balloon and just float in the air.
After the magic back at the water tower, that didn’t seem as silly as it would have the day before. So I filled my lungs with air and puffed up my cheeks and pretended to float.
Of course, nothing happened.
Dad said to try again. To really imagine I was a balloon.
I took an even bigger breath and closed my eyes and concentrated really hard. Suddenly, my feet started to feel really light. I wiggled my toes and felt nothing but thin air under them!
Even weirder, my dad started to float even higher -- without puffing his cheeks. We both just hung there, floating on air.
That's when I remembered all those questions he’d asked about Superman. I was a smart kid, so it took about ten seconds for everything to fall into place.
“Dad… you’re…you’re Superman?”
He laughed, his eyes sparkling in a way I’d never seen before, and nodded.
I was so shocked that I fell out of the air to splash into the lake. I was choking on water that had gone down the wrong way as I crawled up on the shore, dripping wet and covered in dirt.
I didn’t care. I just stared up at him in awe.
Wow! My dad!
It took a few more minutes for the second thing to hit me. Not just the fact that my dad was the most famous man in the world and the strongest too, which was totally cool, but if he was Superman, and I could float off the ground too, then that made me… Supergirl?
I laughed and started to dance around barefoot in the dirt, asking dad questions faster than he could answer them. A hundred questions. Maybe a thousand. He just laughed at my exuberance and looked the happiest I’ve ever seen him. Like he was really proud of me.
Even better, he didn’t just stay home that day, but the next day and then the whole weekend. He spent all that time with me. Those wonderful days were a blur and I don’t think I slept more than a few hours each night, but I was learning to fly. Really fly… how many kids could say that?
It wasn’t easy. Not like in Harry Potter. I kept losing control when I tried to fly fast and then I’d start to spin around and everything became a blur and I couldn’t tell up from down. One time I hit the wall of the quarry so hard it collapsed to bury me under a pile of big rocks.
Dad dug me out.
Then I landed on our car and made a big dent in the roof.
Dad just laughed and bent it back.
But mostly I crashed into the water and had to swim back to shore. The water was really cold, freezing even, but it didn’t make me cold.
Once I kind of had it figured out, we played a game called WaterWalk. I had to walk all the way across the quarry pond, keeping the bottom of my feet wet and the tops dry. That was really hard. I spent almost a day practicing that, but in the end, I did it.
Then, late on the third day of what dad called my "training’", he wrapped me up in his cape and flew really high. He said we were at the edge of space. I had to hold my breath. I saw the Earth curving away and lots of stars, even though it was daytime. Then we came down really fast, the air screaming around my head, the air in front of us glowing it was so hot. We were in the desert now, more than 2000 miles from home.
We landed on the very edge of a deep canyon. There was a tiny sliver of water at the bottom, way, way down there. He said we were in Utah, whatever that was.
Butterflies filled my stomach and I stepped back from the edge. It was weird. When we were dozens of miles high, I felt safe. But standing at the edge of that cliff, I was shaking. I guess I'd grown up like a normal girl in some ways. Dad held my hand and encouraged me to move closer again, even to hang my toes over the edge. My heart was racing. It looked like a mile down to the bottom.
Then he asked me if I wanted to go swimming. Like I had in the quarry.
I nodded. Sure. Anything to get away from that scary edge.
He just smiled and held my hand tighter, and then dove off the edge with me in tow.
I screamed and flailed around, trying to hold onto him, but he peeled my fingers from his arm and pushed me away. He said to pretend I was diving into the lake at the quarry.
This was WAY different than that. I'd been dozens of feet high then, not thousands. We were racing down the vertical cliff. I was so afraid that I couldn’t get my flying thing going.
Dad shouted to just imagine what I wanted to do and then I could do it. I remembered that much. Mental imaging overcame my walking reflex.
I closed my eyes and imagined I was skimming just above the water, and then I extended my arms and tightened my legs and whoosh -- suddenly I was.
It was totally cool!
He flew closer to hold my waist from behind as he showed me how to tilt my fingers and toes up and down so I could control my direction.
We raced over the white-water rapids at fantastic speed.
Now he let me really fly, and I soared up and down the canyon, climbing miles high as I flapped my arms like a bird. I even tried soaring in a thermal with some hawks, but they dove down to tear at my hair with their talons and sharp beaks while keening really loudly. I got so disoriented that I lost control and tumbled to the ground a thousand feet below.
Dad picked me up and dusted me off as he chuckled that “a couple of hawks had beaten Supergirl up.”
Supergirl? The word was magic. I’d seen movies and shows about her, but she’d died long before I was born. Dad told me she’d been his cousin, which made her my Aunt Kara.
He said I’d been named for her and that he hoped I would follow in her footsteps.
That was a laugh. She’d been blonde and tall and beautiful. My hair was black and my eyes were dark gray. I was really little.
Dad winked and handed me this purplish looking comb and asked me to try it out.
Amazingly, the comb turned my hair to blonde when I combed it one way and then back to black if I combed it the other way. He said it had something to do with unstable molecules that he’d used to coat my hair.
I pranced around admiring my new blonde hair, and Dad said I’d have made Aunt Kara proud if she was still alive. He hoped that when I was older that I’d join him in saving the world from the Supremis.
Not that I understood who the Supremis were back then, but I knew that dad fought bad guys and nothing could hurt him. Not even bullets. He said bullets wouldn’t be able to hurt me either, once I was grown up.
As cool as that was, it was the flying that I loved. I felt as if I’d gone to Never Never Land to live with Peter Pan.
I told dad that I couldn’t wait to tell the kids at my nursery school.
That’s when he took all the fun out of it by making me promise to keep my feet on the ground when we weren’t training and never, ever, EVER tell anyone about any of this. To play the Normal game. To always keep my hair black. To appear to be weak, frail even. Otherwise bad people would come and hurt mom.
That was a really heavy burden to lay on a three year old, even if my mental age was probably double that. But dad turned it all into a kind of game like mom had. The same game he played. He made people think he was weak when he was really the strongest man in the universe.
He was really good at it.
I would be too.
From that point on, life was different. It was also a little lonely, especially when mom and dad were gone as much as they were.
Mom was a reporter at the Daily Planet. But unlike dad, she didn’t have a secret second job, which I suppose is why she got those Pulitzer prizes. She said dad was the least appreciated reporter on the Daily Planet because he preferred to cover human-interest stories. Soft news, she called it.
In contrast, mom was their top investigative reporter.
Whenever she got an award, I’d give dad a hug and tell him he’d get one someday, but he just said there were far more important things in life.
He was right. Being Superman was way cooler than getting prizes.
Back home, inside the safety of my bedroom, my dreams soared. I imagined I was going to grow up to be the strongest girl in the universe. In both my day dreams and my night dreams, I captured bad guys and saved cats from trees and even sent bad aliens away. I saved falling airplanes and lifted leaking oil tankers out of the water and flew them to the moon so I could save the environment. Anything and everything that a young girl’s imagination could come up with.
Except my parents never let me do any of that stuff. Especially mom, who was really worried about my goofing up and making a mistake that would let people know I was special. Whenever I got excited and started to float around in the house, she’d yell at me to “get my feet back on the ground”. When we went out to play, she’d hold my hand really tightly to make sure I didn’t start to float away.
I made a game out of that too. I’d run down a long flight of stairs just a bit faster than any other kids. Nobody knew that I was mostly flying. I’d jump off things that were just a bit higher than the other kids would dare and land so lightly. I was the quickest kid on the school monkey bars by far. Nobody could catch me. When we went to the park with other kids and played soccer or just tumbled around on the grass, the other mothers would always tell mom that I was destined to be a dancer. Or maybe an athlete. Probably a gymnast.
Mom would just smile and give me a dirty look for showing off.
But I couldn’t keep my feet on the ground all the time. I secretly made a little costume out of a pair of blue pajamas – the kind that had feet in them. I drew a big yellow ‘S’ on the front and made a cape out of a red blanket. I used that comb to turn my hair blonde and pranced around in front of the mirror while imagining I was catching bad guys.
I loved that little costume so much that I started to sneak out at night to fly over the town, watching for the kind of criminals I’d seen on TV. But I never found any. Silverdale was a very peaceful town. But still, I was on patrol over my town, just like dad patrolled the sky over Metropolis.
Then one night I saw a big tank truck going way too fast down Quarry Road. Smoke was coming from its brakes as it raced faster and faster. I just knew it wasn’t going to be able to stop before it got to the houses as the bottom of the hill.
Without thinking of the consequences, I dropped down and landed right in front of the truck and braced myself, putting my arms out in front of me, convinced that Supergirl was going to save the day. After all, I’d seen old videos of my Aunt Kara doing stuff like this.
The driver started to honk his horn wildly when he saw me in the road, and when I didn’t move he tried to swerve into the other lane. The wheels started to skid. I jumped over to that lane and threw all thirty pounds of myself at the bumper, trying to grab hold of it to stop the truck.
The bumper hit me so hard that everything went black.
When I woke up, I was back in my bed and mom was kneeling beside me, crying softly. When I asked her what had happened to the truck driver, she wiped away the tears and gave me her mean look. She said dad was cleaning up the “terrible mess” and the truck driver was lucky to be alive given my “stupid stunt”. She told me I could never, EVER do that again. That I could not wear a costume like that, that I couldn’t go out at night, that I could never show myself in public… she went on and on.
I started to cry too because I didn’t know why mom was so mad at me. I mean, I’d just saved that driver and maybe those people in the houses. Yet mom was blaming me for the whole problem. Like I’d made that truck’s brakes fail.
That wasn’t fair.
I got out of bed to float in mid-air, telling mom I was going to go find dad. He’d be proud of me even if she wasn’t.
Before she could grab me, I crashed through the window, glass flying everywhere, and flew straight up into the sky. I saw a big column of smoke where the truck had crashed, with fire engines all around it. The tank part of the truck had gone down the side of the hill and burned. I guess it was carrying gasoline.
The front of the truck was still on the road, but it looked as if it had been torn apart. The engine and transmission along with the wheels were sitting fifty feet behind the rest of the cab. It was like the bottom half of the truck had hit an immovable object.
Me?
I flew higher to look for dad, circling as I climbed. Soon the Earth started to curve and the sky grew dark even though it was early morning. That scared me enough that I dropped down toward the city, hoping I’d find dad there. I came down so fast that my clothes started to smoke, and then burst into flames as I reached the thicker air.
I didn't worry about that. Instead, I circled the tall buildings for a while looking for dad, moving faster than epople could see. I even stopped by his office window at the Daily Planet. No dad. A couple of people waved at me from a distance when I did that, and one of them stared at me through a pair of binoculars. I quickly zipped away before they could get a good look. Mom would really be mad if she knew anyone had seen me.
Not that it made any difference. I was going to be grounded for life when I got home.
I circled for hours before finally giving up and headed back home. I was barely back in my bedroom when mom yelled up the stairs to say I was grounded. For good.
I threw a tantrum, telling her she couldn’t stop me from going out and flying if I wanted to and I’d wear what I wanted and do what I wanted. I kicked the door of my room so hard it shattered, and then threw myself on my bed and it broke in half too. I even started a fire in my trashcan with my eyes, but mom came in to spray it out with a fire extinguisher.
I curled up on my bed and ignored her, but she snapped this gold choker around my neck that was decorated with tiny green stones. I suddenly felt weak and tingly and a bit sick. Then I started to throw up like I’d seen lots of other kids do. It was yucky.
After I was done vomiting, mom cleaned me up and carried me back to bed to tuck me int. She said we’d talk more when dad got home.
I felt too sick to sleep. My stomach kept coming up into my throat and I gagged.
Dad didn't come home that night. Not the next night either. Mom said he was saving Earth from some new threat from Lex Luther. Somehow his having to deal with my mess had given Lex an opportunity to rob this place where they kept some really dangerous weapons.
I naturally wanted to go look for him, but mom said I didn’t have any powers now. Not until she decided to give them back, and she’d only do that if I promised not to use them.
That made no sense. Even worse, she’d poisoned me. I completely freaked out and started screaming at her while trying to undo the choker. It wouldn’t come off. I got so mad that I told her that if I couldn’t have my costume and couldn’t be Supergirl then I didn’t want to even be a girl anymore. I staggered out of bed to half run and half fall down the stairs into the basement. I ran into the special room that I wasn’t supposed to go into, and locked the door behind me.
Searching the drawers, I found the purple scissors that I’d seen dad use to cut his hair. He wore a different kind of poison band around his neck when he did it. It had more green in it than mine.
I quickly chopped off most of my long hair, leaving what was left looking ragged and boyish. I was kneeling in a sea of blonde hair when mom finally found a key and came in. She took one look at me and collapsed to her knees as well, crying as she picked up the long strands of my hair. She looked so sad, telling me that I’d always been such a cute little girl.
I just smiled, knowing this was going to be great. Mom wanted a daughter, but now, from this day on, I was going to be a boy. She was really going to be sorry she’d grounded me.
Mom and dad had a really big fight when he finally came home. I mean, mom was hitting Superman and bruising her hands. How dumb is that? But it made me happy to see her so unhappy, especially after dad told her she mustn’t ever fasten that choker around me again.
He said the green-K would interrupt my growth. I guess that was the small stones. He said it was dangerous to someone as small as me.
They yelled at each other for a while, and then dad came to my room and took the choker off me. It felt as if abeam of pure sunlight had hit me, warming me up. I felt all my strength returning in this huge rush, filling me with bubbling energy again.
I wanted to really fly now, but he made me sit and listen, telling me how unhappy I’d made mom. Yet instead of yelling at me like mom had, he made me promise to stay in my room at night and to never wear that costume outside the house unless he was with me.
Yeah. As if I still had that silly costume… it had burned up.
But I promised him anyway.
Even at that age, I knew I’d never break a promise to my dad.
Life after the “gas truck” continued more or less normally for a while. Well, normal if I’d been a boy. I refused to do or wear anything that I thought was girlish. I called myself Kerry Kent. I was so good at pretending to be a boy that when I started kindergarten, I convinced my teacher, Miss Adams, that they’d misspelled my name in the school records. Kara obviously wasn’t a boy’s name. Kerry was.
But Miss Adams eventually figured it out after I’d spilled some stuff on myself and she helped me change in the bathroom. She just winked at me and said if I wanted to be a boy, well, there was nothing wrong with that. At least for a while.
I really liked Miss Adams.
I was still in kindergarten when I met the boys who would become my lifelong best friends: Jeremy and Robert. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers because we were always off on some kind of adventure, even on the school playground. The world was a vast wilderness to be explored, and we were determined to travel to the far corners of it.
I’d gotten really good at holding myself back by then, and I used Jeremy and Robert as my example of what a boy could do. I’d do anything they did, but nothing more. Or less. Given they were the biggest and strongest boys in our class, that made me one of the toughest boys too. And even though I was really skinny compared to them, I’d fight anyone, and I always won. Just like Jeremy and Robert did.
We were the baddest kids in school for the next few years. When we weren’t fighting with other kids, we wrestled each other.
“Training” I called it.
And of course, given our adventurous streaks, we were always in trouble with our parents. Especially when it came to “The Tracks”.
A high-speed rail line that skirted the edge of town, and then ran across a long, narrow bridge over Cooper’s Creek. That bridge was the stuff of every parent’s nightmares, and every kid in the neighborhood had been threatened with being grounded for life if they went near it. The trains came by at more than a hundred and fifty miles per hour and the bridge was more than two-hundred yards across and so narrow that the slipstream would suck you under the wheels – or so our parents told us.
Halfway through third grade, I decided to put my future superheroine skills to work to figure out how to beat the train. Naturally, I enlisted Jeremy and Robert in my escapade.
I got a stopwatch and timed the two of them to see how fast they could run across the bridge.
Then I timed the train to see how long it took to get from the hill south of town (the first place we could hear the whistle) to the bridge.
Math was really easy for me, and I found a high school algebra book in the library that showed me how to figure it out. According to the scribbles on my sheet of paper, we had just enough time to beat the train.
All of which made "Beating the Train" the ultimate challenge for the Three Musketeers. We practiced running across the bridge when the train wasn’t coming, stepping only on the ties.
Then, when we thought we were ready, we invited the neighborhood kids to come and watch the show. If they paid us ten dollars, that is.
Somehow, every kid in the neighborhood managed to come up with the money.
I stuffed the huge wad of bills in my jeans pocket and led the way out onto the bridge. Robert and Jeremy looked really nervous as we stood in the exact middle of the span, high above the water below. Our audience sat on a grassy hill near the bridge, sipping Koolaide and eating popcorn and for all the world acting like the circus had just come to town.
Some of them were probably thinking we were going to get ourselves killed. But the mere fact that none of them told their parents about the event says a lot about how our neighborhood worked.
We kids were tight.
We waited for nearly half an hour, but no train came. I quickly realized that I should have kept track of the train times. They always seemed to be roaring by on other days.
Robert got bored and started goofing around where the rails were doubled near the middle of the bridge, and his right foot slipped between them. He tried to get his foot out, but only managed to twist his ankle.
I tried to help him, but the more I pulled on his leg, the bigger his ankle got and the tighter his foot jammed between the rails. He started to yelp when I pulled on his leg, so I stopped trying.
Then, like the trumpets of doom, we heard the horn of a train coming.
Jeremy turned and started to run for the far end of the bridge, just like we’d practiced. He was halfway there when he paused to look back at Robert and then me, screaming for us to run.
Robert just stared up at me with eyes as big as saucers, and then, in an act of incredible bravery, he pushed me away, telling me to save myself.
Instead of panicking, I suddenly felt very calm. Even weirder, everything seemed to shift into slow motion. I shouted for Jeremy to run faster and then bent down to grab the heavy rails that were trapping Robert’s foot.
I tried to pull them apart with my hands, but they wouldn’t budge. I sat down on the gravel and braced my feet against one rail and grabbed the other with both hands, gritting my teeth as I tried to straighten my legs. My jeans got so tight that the stitches started to pop, but nothing happened.
The train was halfway to the bridge now, horn blowing constantly. I could hear the brakes squealing, but it wasn’t slowing down very fast.
I gritted my teeth as I made one last, desperate attempt, straining harder than I ever had before, and suddenly this weird sensation came over me. Sort of like that lightning thing, but this time I felt really strong. I pushed my feet against the rail one more time, and my jeans ripped as steel rail gave off an ear-splitting squeal. Shockingly, I twisted the two rails apart like they were limp spaghetti.
The train was upon us now. I barely had time to pick Robert up and shoved him through the railing before a wall of steel hit me, sending me cart wheeling face first into one of the huge girders that held the bridge up. I closed my eyes, felt a little blow as I hit the steel. When I opened them, I was floating inside a cloud of red and green confetti.
Below me, I saw Robert falling in slow motion toward the deadly rocks. Strangely, it seemed as if I had all the time in the world to stretch my arms out and dive after him, catching him just before he reached the water. I concentrated on not stopping too fast, dad had warned me that I could really hurt someone that way, and the water slowly came closer. I knew we were still falling pretty fast, so I wrapped myself around Robert and spun around to hold him tightly as my back hit the water.
The slow motion thing ended, and the next thing I knew, I was back on the surface, the spray from our impact still falling around us. I more or less walked across the water to set Robert down between two large boulders. o
He just stared up at me with a look I’d later come to know so well: disbelief, amazement, wonder and gratitude, all mixed together and confused. Then he turned his back and vomited into the stream.
That’s when I looked down to see that I was only wearing a few scraps of my jeans. My red shirt was totally gone. That must have been the red confetti. I checked my pockets, only to find the money was gone to. Obviously the green confetti.
I quickly tied together what was left of my jeans, but didn’t worry about my top. At that age, I often went bare-chested anyway. I was supposed to be a boy, after all.
Jeremy climbed down the cliff, and found us huddling between the boulders. Robert was shivering. He’d apparently witnessed the whole thing as he lay in the gravel at the end of the bridge.
He tried to be cool about it as he reached down to hold my hands, and then lifted them, studying my dirty fingers. Then he ran his fingers over my chest, poking my chest muscles. I was still pumped up, so my body was as hard as steel. Then he ran his fingers through the tears in my jeans and down my legs. More steel.
I could see the light coming on behind his eyes. Clearly, it was too late to make up any stories now. I just stood there, deciding it felt really good to have saved Robert’s life.
Then reality crashed in on me. I’d just broken my solemn promise to my dad to never show off. I couldn’t fix that, so I decided to cut them in on the game. I just blurted it all out. About how Superman was my dad.
They just stared at me for a long moment. I was worried that they’d get all weird on me, only to have them start dancing around me, laughing as they imagined all the new things we could do together.
In the end, our near death experience bound us together even closer than ever before. Even better, I was now the coolest boy on the planet, at least in their eyes. It felt really neat to not have to have any secrets from them.
Well, except for the one about my really being a girl.
As you might expect, they bugged me to show them some more super stuff until I finally gave in. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I could do, but it felt really good to walk around bare-chested, letting the sun work on me. It made me feel all warm inside. They pulled their shirts off as well and we ran through the woods, pretending we were Indians. Once we were far enough inside to be invisible, I wrapped my arms around both of them and started to fly. I twisted from side to side, dodging the tree trunks, the whole thing reminding me of those scooters on the Ewok planet in Return of the Jedi.
We were miles from home when I stopped in a sunlit clearing. There was no sign that anyone else had ever been here. Robert declared that this was Superboy Meadow, and it would forever more be our special place.
Jeremy decided he wanted to arm wrestle me (I’d always let them win after a long struggle – they had bigger muscles), but it was like, “you and what army?”
Instead, I lifted a boulder the size of a small car over my head, and then began to dance around with it. Naturally, being a bit of a klutz, I stumbled and the rock fell on top of me. I just laid there, listening to them freaking out. I guess my feet were the only things sticking out from under the rock.
Robert started to dig in the dirt with his hands, so I floated upward, balancing the rock over my head before setting it down carefully this time. I told them I was bulletproof too, which really fired up their imagination.
Too soon, it started getting dark. I flew them back to the creek, but the bridge was covered by cars with flashing lights and search teams were going up and down the stream. Divers too. We snuck along behind the bushes until we hit the trail going back to the neighborhood, neatly dodging all the searchers.
That’s where mom found us. She took one look at me, standing there half naked and covered in dirt, and then turned to the boys. She used her sternest voice as she told them that they’d never see me again if they said one word about this to anyone. She sounded so angry that she scared me. Then she grabbed my hand and dragged me home where she tossed me into a soapy bath tub.
She didn’t say another word to me until dad got home, but I could tell she was REALLY mad this time. She gets quiet when she’s really upset.
Dad did his usual thing -- asked questions. Nothing seemed to get him upset. Then he sat me down and asked me to describe everything. He was especially interested in the slow motion thing. And the fact that I’d barely felt the train or the girder when it hit me.
Once I was done, he called
Jeremy and Robert and asked them to come to our house for a talk. He wore his
red and blues when he met them in the living room. The boys stared at him with
bugged out eyes as they sat down on the couch.
Dad took advantage of their shock and awe by having them swear to never tell
anyone about me. He said it was a matter of life and death. For our family. For
them. Even for me. He talked about the bad men who'd try to take me away. I
listened from up in my bedroom, and he scared the heck out of me.
What was cool was that he still played along with my being a boy, telling them that I would someday be the new Superman. Sometimes, dad can be really cool.
Unfortunately, mom was not cool at all. She thought dad should do more, maybe use something she called “Lana’s amnesia drug”, whatever that was, but dad said it was too dangerous to use on kids. Mom didn't sound like she liked Lana, whoever she was.
By then, panicked parents had started calling our house, but mom sounded so mellow, even laughed, as she told them I was just fine. She said the neighborhood kids had just gotten scared when we disappeared behind the train. And yes, I was being punished for starting such a scare.
By morning, the parental anxiety about the bridge had risen to a new high, but at least the story of us getting run down was dismissed as a hoax to collect money. Fraud one angry parent called it. Mom made me go to everyone’s house and give them the money back. Money she took out of her savings account given my money had been turned into confetti by the hundred mile per hour collision. I got more than a few lectures from angry parents along the way.
The train people came out to the bridge the next day and declared that the damaged bridge girder and the dent on the front of the train engine were due to debris on the tracks.
Yeah… debris like me.
They closed the bridge for a week while they fixed it. It was even in the news. Dad wrote the story.
It wasn’t until much later that I found out that LuthorCorp had bought the steel plates from the front of the train engine and had them delivered to some warehouse. Apparently there was a near perfect impression of my body in those plates. It looked like a snow angel or something. Lex Luthor managed to get a piece of the rail with the impressions of my fingers in it.
From that day forward, LuthorCorp people were always sniffing around Silverdale. I had to be especially careful not to do anything unusual. Which was easy given I was grounded for two months. By that time, Luthor's goons were gone.
Once Jeremy, Robert and I were reunited, we were tighter than ever. And naturally, now that they knew the truth about me, or thought they did, they kept pushing me to do even crazier things.
We climbed the vertical walls of the quarry, hanging on with just our fingertips. I had to catch Jeremy a couple of times when he fell – fortunately my flying was getting better all the time. They had me bend steel bars, even a piece of railroad rail that was left behind after they fixed the bridge. The last was still hard at first, but now I knew how to make myself stronger when I needed to. There was some kind of energy release thing that I had to push through. Hard to explain... kind of like getting turned on, but not exactly the same. A rush either way.
I tried juggling Jeremy’s dad’s BMW over my head once (at his encouragement). I wasn’t concentrating very hard and I wound up dropping it. The air bags went off to blow the windows out. I stuck the car back in the garage and Jeremy locked the door and we ran for it. Jeremy's dad never did figure out how his car got wrecked in his locked garage. Jeremy’s mom blamed his dad for drinking and driving. Apparently he had some history there.
That’s when Jeremy came up with the Sonic Boom Project. I’d never been able to fly supersonically as the shock waves sent me spinning around helplessly. The human body isn’t streamlined in the right ways, maintaining laminar flow along my skin was hard. My body shape was different than dad's, so I had to find my own way. I eventually discovered a way to arch my back a bit, tuck my hands along my sides and hold my legs tightly together and then use my toes as my flight controls. The shockwave moved down my legs until it finally tickled the soles of my feet. That's when I knew I was going supersonic.
I flew just over the guy's heads, and the shockwave knocked them down and made their ears ring for days.
Mom would have really grounded me if she’d seen or heard that. But Jeremy and Robert just pushed me to fly faster yet. Soon I mastered Mach 2, except that my clothes would tear off. That called for a quick dash home and a change before I reappeared.
The guys kept escalating the dares until they reached the ultimate challenge – grab the wires of the high-tension towers near town. I was gutsy enough (or maybe just dumb enough) to do it, but when I grabbed the wires, a flash of current froze my fingers around the wire. Even worse, my legs tensed up and wrapped so tightly around the steel girders that the steel started folding around my legs, tangling them. My body was shaking, my teeth clenched, and these heat beams came out of my eyes to start a grass fire, but I couldn’t let go. I felt this warmth growing in my chest. It wasn’t a bad feeling, even when my heard started to beat so fast that it hurt. The good feeling marched down my boy until it was met with this explosion of incredible tingly goodness that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
That’s when the power went off (I learned later that the short from my body had crashed the entire county electrical grid) and I fell to the snowy ground. I lay there in a crumpled heap, snow melting around me from the heat, all curled up, wishing that wonderful feeling would never go away. But, of course, it did.
The boys covered me with snow to put my burning clothes out, but when I tried to stand my legs were so shaky that I couldn’t even get to my knees. I was so jittery and confused that I wasn’t aware at first that my hair had turned blonde.
Jeremy and Robert helped me stand up, and then stared down at me, gasping in unison and said the fateful words: “You’re a girl?”
I clasped my hands over my private self, but it was far too late for that. My shameful secret was out. My big lie. I closed my eyes and knew it was all over. I’d lied to them all those years. They'd hate me.
They just stared at each other for a long moment and then started to laugh, slapping each other on the back, telling each other they’d known it for a long time. I just stood there, feeling really embarrassed, wishing I could just die and get it over with.
But instead of making fun of me, Robert gave me his shirt to wear. Then Jeremy gave me his coat, which I zipped tightly around me. Then they helped me walk home, draping my arms over their shoulders to support my weight.
I’m really glad mom didn’t me coming down the street, dressed in their clothes with my blonde hair sticking out in all directions and all shaky. But that’s when I learned that a true friend really WILL give you the shirt off their back.
After dad got home that night, he stared into my eyes for a long time. I thought that was weird, so I went and looked at myself in the mirror. Shockingly, my gray eyes had turned a brilliant shade of light blue, and they’ve been that way ever since.
He said I was now fully empowered. Whatever that meant. Then he asked a bunch of questions about what I’d been doing that summer.
I told him about the bridge diving, the sonic boom thing and, of course, the 300,000 volts. Also the fact that I couldn't pretend to be a boy anymore.
He just nodded and hugged me really tight, saying I was finally coming into the fullness of my legacy. He wasn’t even mad at me.
For once, mom wasn’t mad either. She happily rushed out to start buying me girl’s clothing, relieved that I’d gotten past my “boy” phase.
Dad took me to work with him the next few days while mom’s nerves calmed down. It was the first time I’d worn a dress since I’d been three, and it felt really weird to have my legs bared that way. But everyone said I was “just so darn cute”.
They’d never said that about me when they thought I was a boy. I kind of liked it.
But when they didn’t think I could hear them, they whispered to each other that it was weird that the Kent’s had pretended to have a son and not a daughter all those years. Some people wondered if maybe I was going to grow up and be gay, saying I was gender confused.
They were right, at least about the confused part. But I was only eight. What did I know?
I watched dad work at his desk for a while, but that was really boring. Like he was doing a book report for school or something. So I went over to mom’s desk, but she was always on the phone, talking really fast, often to several people at the same time. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I went and found Jimmy Olsen. He was the Planet’s chief photographer, and he let me play around with one of his digital cameras. That was fun, trying to capture what a normal day was like inside the Daily Planet.
That eventually got old too. As far as I could see, nothing went on in that place. Just phone calls and lots of people typing on their keyboards. I started looking through the walls to spy on people in the bathrooms. That was funny… people make weird faces when they don’t think anyone could see them. Then I saw this one couple who went into a closet and had sex. That was even funnier to watch, especially when they came out and tried to act like they hardly knew each other.
I finally gave up on finding anything fun to do and opened the homework assignment that my teacher had emailed over. Then we went home and watched TV for a bit before playing video games. Then I went to bed.
Just like any other kid, I guess.
When I got back to school on Monday, the kids were all laughing at me as they saw me wearing a dress. They called me a homo, and I got into a couple of fights over that, but I quickly realized how awkward it was to wrestle with a dress on.
Unfortunately, dresses for girls was the dress code at my grade school – no jeans. It was part of an experiment by some religious do-gooders on the school board.
Then there was the bathrooms. I never have to go at school (I could hold it for days), but I knew it would be weird if I didn’t. So I went in there once a day. Always before to the boys bathroom. The girls bathroom was an entirely different place, what with the other girls acting catty and making fun of me. I really missed the joking around that went on in the boys bathroom. The fart contests. Cool stuff like that.
But I was a girl now. Damn it.
Jeremy and Robert pretended everything was totally cool, and they were the local heroes, so everyone else went along with them eventually.
Well, almost.
A week later I opened my locker and found a drawing of myself taped inside. I gasped and slammed the locker shut. The drawing showed me wearing a red and blue uniform kind of like the one my Aunt Kara used to wear. My hair was blonde too. Embarrassingly, the artist had made me look older and had even given me little boobs, which I most certainly didn’t have.
I spun around to see Jeremy blushing bright red. Of course… he’d always been the artist in our group. I wasn’t sure if I should thank him or punch him, and the latter impulse won out. I gave him a bloody nose and we both wound up in detention for fighting.
Robert finally made us shake hands and Jeremy promised not to get so “creative” with his drawings. But from that day forward, I was his favorite subject. And he was always creative.
I showed the drawing to mom when I got home, and she showed it to dad. She was upset about the “maturity” of it, but dad thought it was cute, even if my eyes were kind of weird looking.
He went upstairs and got a small package. I opened it, and was thrilled to find that it contained a red skirt and boots and a blue leotard. There was a big ‘S’ on the front just like dad’s. Also a red cape. He said this was the very costume my Aunt Kara used to wear. The difference was that the middle was bared now. He hadn’t had any Kryptonian fabric to replace the stuff that had been vaporized when the Anti-Monitor had shot her in the stomach with that death beam.
As morbid as that was, I loved that uniform. (I still do.) I spent the next day standing in front of the mirror admiring myself. I was really tall for my age, but I didn’t have any of the curves that Jeremy had imagined in his drawing, so the uniform hung straight off me, all wrinkly and loose. But I could already imagine what I would look like when I grew into it.
Mom was actually acting mellow for once. She kept taking me out shopping for clothes, but all the things I liked had bare midriffs, short skirts and tight tops. She said they were too mature for my age.
We argued, and in the end, we compromised. I got some hip hugger jeans and short tops. But no short skirts.
That didn’t slow me down. I borrowed copies of Vogue and Cosmo and even Jeremy’s old brother’s Maxim magazine and studied every photo. I decided I wanted to look just like those girls when I grew up. I wanted to be sexy.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Aunt Kara’s uniform didn’t have an S on my panties.
I’m glad mom never saw that picture. She was already freaking out about my wearing Aunt Kara’s costume at my age. But since dad had said I needed invulnerable clothing, she helped me tighten up the yellow belt to hold the skirt in place. The red panties were way too big, so she made me wear some of my own. I learned later that they just burn off at high speed.
Of course, given dad only let me fly at night, nobody could see me anyway.
The good news was that since I now had invulnerable clothing, dad could start sharing the really cool part of his life. We started by going up and checking out some of the old military satellites. I held my breath at first, but then he told me to just empty my lungs and not try to hold it in. He said I didn’t need air.
That was really hard at first, and I kept gasping like a fish out of water before panicking and diving back down into the air to get a breath. But I kept at it, and eventually managed to overcome the breathing reflex.
Once I got the hang of that, he took me to some old military satellites that had nuclear reactors in them. We used the sign language we’d made up so we could ‘talk’ in space. He said he didn’t want those satellites coming down in the wrong place, so we pushed a couple of them into higher orbits. Then he asked me to try to push a really big one toward the Moon. He said it had a bomb in it -- some kind of old Soviet EMP doomsday thing.
I knew that meant it had a very big hydrogen bomb inside. That was scary, so I pushed it up and away as gently as I could. Dad had to help me aim it, and after hours and hours of work, I finally managed to get it on a trajectory that took it into the moon a week later. It just made a small crater and scattered debris for miles across the lunar surface. No explosion.
Then we took a longer trip -- to the caverns of Mars. It was scary at first to fly that far into space, especially while watching the Earth shrink away behind me, eventually looking like a small blue gem floating in a sea of stars. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
It took us two days to get to Mars, but time doesn’t mean much when there isn’t any day or night. What I did discover was that nothing is duller than floating soundlessly in vacuum listening to your own heartbeat. But at least I finally got used to the empty lung feeling.
Our approach to Mars was awesome. The planet was so red and it grew huge as we flew just ahead of it. Dad said to lead it like I was throwing a baseball to someone running between the bases. That seemed easy enough.
We finally dove into the atmosphere, streaking across the sky at half a million miles per hour, our bodies glowing white-hot as we aero-braked. My blonde hair (it was long again by now) looked red on Mars.
Dad led me down into a deep canyon and then into some caverns that descended miles under ground. The caverns ended at the shore of a clear lake of perfectly blue water. The rocks all around I were glowing with almost the same light as the sun. Dad made me swear not to tell anyone about the lake, saying that people had to figure these things out on their own.
We went to the polar caps next. Lots of frozen water, even frozen carbon dioxide there.
The rest of the planet was a red, dusty desert.
When we finished exploring Mars, I tried to race dad back to Earth, but he was way faster than me. Still, it took only a day to get back. Once there, I discovered my favorite part of flying in space: diving back into the atmosphere. It was like the ultimate amusement park ride, blazing across the sky inside a ball of superheated plasma, making twists and turns and loop-de-loops that no meteor ever could. I secretly hoped Robert and Jeremy could see me. I wanted to be their own personal shooting star so they could make some wishes.
It worked, but I didn’t learn until later what kind of wishes they were making.
Life was good during the next few years. Nobody on Earth knew I existed except mom, dad, Jeremy and Robert.
Like most kids, an iPod soon grew out of my ear, and when I wanted something to listen to in space other than my heartbeat, I wrapped my iPod up in my cape and took it with me. That worked until I got too close to the sun’s hard radiation and it fried the iPod.
When dad mentioned that to the nice folks at Sandia Labs (the guys who make nukes), claiming he liked to listen to music in space (as if!), they worked with Apple to make a hardened military-grade iPod with a nice ‘S’ symbol on one side and a radiation hazard symbol on the other. That limited edition cost twenty times as much as the normal iPod, but as soon as kids saw dad wearing it, Apple couldn’t keep them in stock.
That was my first introduction to a super power I didn’t know we had – marketing power. That and the crazies and the cults who figured dad was either going to save the world or destroy it. He was either a new god or the anti-Christ.
He ignored the crazies, but it was hard to ignore the way every kid my age seemed to own something with an ‘S’ on it. Clothing, iPods, bikes, soft drinks, McDonald’s Happy Meals, you name it. Yet other than the iPod thing, which he’d really done for me, dad refused to endorse any product. Not for lack of offers. Marketing shills were always chasing him.
I finally started to put on a little weight, including the curves that Jeremy had fantasized about so long ago. I was maturing faster than the other girls. To compensate, mom made me wear these dumpy clothes -- I called them my Ugly Betty. It was part of my disguise, she said.
When I got to middle school, the guys made fun of my goofy clothing, but I already knew the joke was going to be on them. The shift from Ugly Betty to Supergirl in my micro-skirted costume was really getting dramatic now, especially since my legs had grown so long. My spirits lifted whenever that ugly clothing came off.
Mom saw the change in my attitude too, and asked me if I wanted her to try to design a more “conservative” uniform. I wanted no part of that. I liked the way Aunt Kara’s uniform made me look: older and sexier, especially the bared midriff and that tiny skirt. Thankfully, dad said there wasn’t any other invulnerable fabric around, so I had to make do with that two-piece outfit. The only difference was that I refused to wear any boots. I thought they were silly. Instead, I always went barefoot.
All in all, I thought my life was becoming absolutely perfect, and then my mom ruined it all.
She sat me down on a Saturday afternoon and told me that she wasn’t really my mom!
Well, not my birth mom. She said she loved me very much, and said I was her special little girl, but I had to go away and live with my birth mother for a while. Her name was Diana Prince.
My jaw dropped. Most people knew Diana by her other name: Wonder Woman. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t look anything like Diana, and she wasn’t even Kryptonian. I’d seen WW on TV hundreds of times like everyone else, but she’d always looked weird to me, dressed in that goofy bit of nothing yet acting like nobody noticed that her big boobs were hanging out. I guess I saw Wonder Woman as some kind of female competitor to my dad. I didn’t like her.
Also, given that Amazons were supposed to all be lesbians, the gay rights people had adopted WW as their spokesperson. A lesbian group named Sisters of Amazonia started to show up everywhere. They claimed that Diana had proven that men were both weaker than women and were unnecessary. Strangely, they never mentioned dad.
Diana went on TV and claimed she didn’t buy into that, but she did talk a lot about reproductive rights. She said she was working to wipe out sexual slavery in Asia. She was an advocate for helpless African women too. She said it was wrong for any man to take advantage of a woman.
Mom didn’t like her either, which was weird because she was into female empowerment and all that jazz.
Mostly, it was the lesbian thing that bothered me. I had no idea if I was going to wind up gay or straight now, given I was part Amazon. I’d read that sexual preference was in the genes. Even worse, I wasn’t sure which way I wanted to be. I mean, Jeremy and Robert didn’t seem sexy to me. Some of those supermodels were really cute. So maybe I was gay. Not that it really mattered right now.
What pissed me off the most was that my parents had lied to me for all those years. Mom and I had a big fight about that, and I flew away to hide on Venus.
But even the sulfurous hell of that planet couldn’t put a damper on my anger. I left there and went to Mercury and drowned my sorrows by lying on the bottom of a lake of molten lead. That got real old after a day. So I flew over to the sun to melt all the lead away (it gets everywhere, if you know what I mean) and hung out there, dodging solar flares, wondering what would happen if I just dove into one.
Dad found me before I did anything stupid and brought me back to Earth and took me through the dimensional portal to Themyscira, a place that men were not allowed to visit. He wasn't allowed to even touch his feet to the sacred ground.
I hated it there at first, mostly because Jeremy and Robert couldn’t visit me but also because I’d grown up in the US and Diana publicly opposed many of the policies of the US government. I wasn’t sure who was right, but I figured out pretty fast that Diana didn’t have a clue how to raise a girl from “man’s world” as the Amazons called it.
Despite all my fights with my mother, I really missed her now, and I refused to call Diana ‘mom’. I ended up throwing a lot of attitude her way, but Diana just smiled that silly sweet smile of hers and sent me over to live with the other girls my age, all of who were being trained as warriors.
Forget all that sisterhood stuff you read about Amazons. Those girls were really mean to me. They made me feel like a freak. Calling me a Krypt-shit and man-bait. Even though I was stronger than any one of them, they ganged up to hold me down. I bloodied a few of their lips in the process. Then they called me what they thought were even worse names. Things like dick-lover.
I ran away a few times, but each time Diana would find me and bring me back. I finally asked her why Lois Lane couldn’t have been my real mother and why they had to hide the truth from me all those years.
To her credit, Diana didn’t pull any punches. She just said that Clark and Lois had wanted a child more than anything, but it was impossible for them to have one on their own. Humans and Kryptonians weren’t compatible that way.
That didn’t make any sense to me. Mom was healthy and dad was… well, he was Superman.
Diana explained that was actually the problem. She said dad was thousands of times stronger than a human man. In every way. She emphasized that last point a couple of times, as if I knew what she was talking about.
Diana wouldn’t explain further except to say that since she was nearly as strong as my dad, Lois had asked her to be her surrogate. The reason they’d kept it secret was that Lois was afraid I’d reject her as my mother if I knew I was really half Amazon.
Boy, she had that wrong, but at least I understood things a little better now, especially after the older girls started to tease me about being a “man child”. They said my dad had to have sex with Princess Diana a hundred times to make me, even teasing me that he’d experienced good sex for the first time in his life. In their eyes, Amazons did everything better than humans.
I thought I knew a fair bit about sex at that age, what with being able to see through things, but of course, that didn’t extend to actually having any. I’d never spied on my parents – it just hadn’t occurred to me that they even had sex. I mean, that was just something other people did. And because my sex education had started so early, watching through walls and all, it had become kind of boring. It’s always more or less the same as far as I could tell. Other than maybe the stuff some people did that was kind of disgusting, even dirty. Switching ends. I mean, that’s where people pee from.
Diana told me that the whole surrogate thing had really been hard on Lois (she never called her my mom) despite the fact that it was all Lois’ idea. She said that human women can become jealous of the descendents of gods.
That sounded weird, but at least I understood why mom had always acted so strange when I brought Wonder Woman’s name up. And why hadn't let me wear a WW costume last Halloween.
One of my classmates summed up the Amazon sentiment by telling me that Diana was the most beautiful, strongest and most desirable woman who had ever walked the Earth, and my mom was just another frail human woman, destined to wither and die in less than a century. Dust to dust. And since my mom was now too old to give birth, she was just rotting fruit, taking up space.
I knocked that girl silly for saying that, but I had no idea at that age that living many human life spans isn’t as good a deal as it first sounds.
I wound up staying on Themyscira for a few more miserable months, and then came home to continue my life.
Such as it was.
