This is “Bettyann” by Kris Neville (1951). A great story. It is frequently anthologized (see:
Title: Bettyann) and was turned into a novel with the same name.
As OP describes it is about an alien child left behind on Earth and adopted as a human.
“Neville's best known story is probably "Bettyann" (in
New Tales of Space and Time, anth
1951, ed Raymond J
Healy) which, with its immediate sequel, "Overture" (in
9 Tales of Space and Time, anth
1954, ed Raymond J
Healy), eventually comprised
Bettyann (fixup
1970). More powerfully than in most of his work, the two tales combine a clearly-felt elegiac sense of how lives can best be lived, in terms familiar through the work of Ray
Bradbury and Clifford D
Simak, along with a more radical and passionate sense of the primacy of love, in terms reminiscent of Theodore
Sturgeon; but these indications of influence mark a conversation, not a dependency. An
Alien lost in infancy on Earth, Bettyann grows into a deep rapport with the humans she learns to know, though the arrival her fellow beings from the stars to "rescue" her forces her to recognize her
Superman abilities, including
Shapeshifting,
Telepathy and the power to heal. Her decision not to leave with her essentially touristic fellows, and to devote her life to humans, hints of
Uplift but within a complex presentation of the complex fate of being human.”
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