I Am Eller

By DeNeece Butler

This is the sequel to DeNeece Butler's first book, A Winter Song.

One of the main characters was five years old at the end of that book and cried for a continuation of the story of her life as a clone, and as a member of the new family created by her mother's marriage to a man who had two little boys.

This is a love story, a mystery, and delves into controversial issues. It gives pause for readers to confront their own opinions about these issues.

Being futuristic up until 2040, many subjects in the book are the result of lots of research alongside the writer's own imagination.

DeNeece Butler was eighty-one years old when this book was published. She hopes she will be an inspiration for others to fulfi ll their dreams and not let even advancing old age deter them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DeNeece Butler
• Release date: Apr 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215504024

Book preview

Cover of I Am Eller by DeNeece Butler

Copyright 2023 by DeNeece Butler

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First published 2023

Ebook published 2024

ISBN-13: 979-8-218-17831-4 (hbk)

ISBN-13: 979-8-218-17832-1 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 979-8-215-50402-4 (ebk)

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover photograph by Jaime Johnson

I was given the time and lifestyle by my husband to write this book, as well as its prequel, A Winter Song. It is dedicated to my husband, Vic Butler. as was my first novel. Without him, neither of these books could have been written. Thank you, Honey.

Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Two

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Part One

Chapter One

Rape is a horrible thing to happen to anyone, woman or man. Gang rape is unspeakably cruel and traumatic. So it was that Eller and her friend Ronnie, short for Veronica, were almost at Eller’s car in the parking lot of the movie theater they had just left when they were grabbed by three young men and dragged into an adjacent wooded lot. Eller and Ronnie were sixteen years old. Ronnie was a particularly beautiful young woman, with raven black hair and huge, dark brown eyes. Eller, like her mother, Winter, had the Lassiter auburn hair and brown eyes.

Her name was actually Lilly Rose Blanchard. But when her step-brother was still learning to talk, the sequence of ls was difficult for him to say. So, it was determined that there would be only one l, as in her initials, L.R., which soon morphed into Eller and became the nickname by which she was called by family and friends, and then by everyone.

While one of the boys was holding Eller down and the other was raping her, the third one was trying to rape Ronnie. When he got her clothes off, he discovered she had male genitalia. Looka here, boys, it’s a ‘he/she.’ You don wanna be a dude, huh? Okay, let me help you with that. With that, he pulled out a knife, grabbed Ronnie’s penis, cut it off, and tossed it to the ground. The three rapists left, laughing uproariously.

Eller pulled herself over to Ronnie, who was bleeding profusely from her crotch. It took her a moment to understand until she noticed the penis on the ground beside Ronnie. She pulled off her jacket, put it in Ronnie’s crotch, and applied pressure to try to control the bleeding. From the pocket of her jacket, she got her cell phone and called for help. When the EMTs arrived, Eller retrieved the cut-off penis and handed it to them to take along with Ronnie to the hospital.

Normally, male-to-female transgender surgery is very complicated, multistaged, and fraught with the danger of complications. Transgender people who subject themselves to it are determined to live their lives completely as the gender with which they identify, felt they truly are.

There were three specialty hospitals in Anchorage. One of the EMTs knew about the one that specialized in the surgery Ronnie would need to have her penis reattached, and he presumed Ronnie would be undergoing transgender surgery. Having had her penis removed would make the transgender surgery even more complicated, if it could even be done, and he knew she would need the very best of care.

Eller was taken to the emergency room, where she underwent the rape victim protocol: she was given a pill to eliminate any chance of pregnancy and a medication for the possibility of STDs; had a rape kit examination performed, involving six hours of forensic samples of skin, semen, and DNA; and was treated for several minor injuries. Hospital personnel wanted to call Winter, Eller’s mom, but Eller insisted that she be the one to call to assure her she was okay and would be home soon.

Eller had fought her attackers with a vengeance, biting, scratching, trying to wriggle away. She had scrapes and bruises where she had been hit and they had tried to hold her down. It was only when she heard Ronnie’s gut-wrenching scream, and then silence, that she stopped struggling and let it be over. Ronnie had passed out.

Ronnie was in surgery when Eller was released from the emergency room. It would be hours before she could see her. She’d had no idea that her friend Ronnie was a transgender person, undergoing the year’s requirement of living as a female, and she was shocked to have learned that about her friend in that horrible way. It was unusual for someone so young to convince a transgender surgeon even to consider allowing the procedure to be done. Immediately after Ronnie and her mom moved to Alaska, she consulted a transgender surgical specialist, who had happened to be on call at the specialty hospital where the EMTs took her that night. She had already been living as a female for ten of the required twelve months. Now, that time would be extended for a period of healing, if the surgery was still even possible.

When gender dysphoria first became an issue in the early 2000s, children as young as eight years old could announce they were not the gender their bodies indicated but rather the opposite and wanted their bodies to be made to conform to the gender they thought they were. Teenagers were undergoing the hormonal protocol required for the requested change, with minimal therapy and surgery performed all within a couple months. Then, regret for the decision began to abound, and the patients went through what was called detrans to return themselves to their original gender, to the degree they could. The outcry over this approach to the matter resulted in the requirement for hormonal and psychological therapy to be a yearlong process including living in all ways possible as the preferred gender. This was what Ronnie was pursuing. She and her mother, divorced from her husband, had moved to Alaska from Alabama for the purpose of being strangers to hide Ronnie’s secret. Alaska was full of people who had moved there to hide something or other. Years later, legislation banned the transgender protocol until age eighteen.

Ronnie and Eller had become very close, and Eller wondered why Ronnie didn’t have enough confidence in their relationship to tell her. But that was beside the point, then. Eller’s only concern was that, first, Ronnie’s life could be saved and, second, that the transgender surgery she so desperately wanted could be done. There was nothing Eller could do for her until after she was admitted to a hospital room, so she just went home, to her shower and to Winter and Joel.

Chapter Two

As Eller got into her car, she was grateful that she had been able to get a self-driving car, which had pretty much taken over the automobile industry. All she had to do was engage the self-driving option, press the button on the GPS menu, and say go home. She could just lean back and relax with only the interruption of a female voice advising her of a left turn, a right turn, a stop sign, the distance to her designated location, and so on. It was almost midnight by the time she got home. Lights were still on in the den, and she tried to quietly go to her bathroom. Winter, Eller’s mom, rarely ever went to bed until all the children were safely at home, if one of them had gone out. Eller’s attempt to slip into the house without anyone being aware failed. Her mom had her ear acutely tuned to hear her children returning home. Winter tapped lightly on the bathroom door, then walked in. Eller was undressed and about to step into the shower.

Winter took one look at Eller’s bruised face and body, gasped, and asked, What in the world has happened to you? Was there an automobile accident? With that, Eller went to her mother and, for the first time since the rape had occurred, let go a torrent of tears, there in her mother’s arms.

When Eller calmed down enough to be able to speak, in response to the question on Winter’s face, she simply said, Momma, I was raped, but please just let me get a shower, and then we’ll talk. The first thing Winter wanted to know was whether Eller had been to the emergency room to have a rape kit done. Eller assured her that she had. Winter took a deep breath, nodded okay, and sat down on the toilet lid with a clean nightgown in her hands for Eller as soon as she had dried off, and softly cried for her daughter and the trauma she had just experienced. Racing through her mind were all the traumas she had been through: the untimely death of both her parents in an auto accident on their way to her wedding, the murder of her new husband, learning that her grandmother was still alive after seventeen years, when she had been told that her grandmother had died from a major heart attack. She tried to think how she could help Eller through her own trauma.

After Eller had finished telling Winter about everything that had happened, including about Ronnie, she asked, Momma, why? Why is there such hatred towards people like Ronnie, who are just different, but thinking, feeling people just the same as anyone else?

Winter wished for her grandmother and tried to remember what she had told her when she had asked a similar question about hateful people.

"Eller, it is fear of the other. Way back when humans lived in caves in small tribes, all they knew was their own tribe and animals they had learned would hurt or kill and eat them and they would try to avoid them. Imagine, if you will, there they are, cave men, women, and children doing their daily thing when suddenly other humans appeared. They didn’t know what to think. They had never seen other humans before. They obviously weren’t the animals they feared, but how were they to react to these others? They reacted with fear—fear of the unknown, fear of how differently they looked, how differently they were dressed. Were they going to attack them? Were they going to try to eat them as the animals would? Who were they? What were they?

And so, Eller, this fear of the unknown, of difference, was passed along to us through DNA from generation to generation. We are innately afraid of that which is different, those who appear to be different or who have been deemed to be different. Those of us who are educated, who are reasonable, who understand what I have just explained to you, know that when we encounter someone who is different from ourselves, we have to give them a chance to let us know that we have nothing to fear from them, that we all have a great deal more in common than there is difference. But, Eller, the sad fact is that there are people who are not like you and me and countless others who can overcome innate fear of others with simple curiosity and a sense of fairness. It is their fear that causes them to do hateful things. Understand?

Yes, Momma, I do. Thanks. It’s just so sad. Something must be done to make it better. Momma, I need to check on Ronnie and go to bed. We’ll talk more tomorrow.

"Okay, baby. If