Chapter 4: The Ghost of a Boy Named Arthur
Chapter 4: The Ghost of a Boy Named Arthur
The validation from Jean-Luc de Valois had been a balm, soothing the raw edges of her social exile. It had quieted the accusations from so-called friends and affirmed the rightness of her cause. But peace did not follow. In the void left by her vengeful fury, a quiet, insistent obsession began to grow. It had a name: Arthur Dubois.
He was a ghost haunting the opulent rooms of her memory, a phantom conjured by the cruel campfire stories of privileged boys. Her revenge had been for him, a symbolic act of justice. But symbolism was no longer enough. The abstract concept of a wronged boy had solidified into the concrete question of a living man. What became of him? Did the cruelty of that prank become a defining crack in the foundation of his life, or was it a wound that had long since scarred over?
And so, Elara’s nights transformed. After long days of building marketing strategies and managing client expectations, she would come home to her silent apartment, pour a glass of red wine, and open her laptop. Her mission was no longer professional; it was deeply, unnervingly personal. She became a digital archeologist, digging for the fossil of a boy buried under fifteen years of internet sediment.
She began with the basics. A simple search for "Arthur Dubois" yielded a deluge of useless information. There was a pediatrician in Lyon with a warm, professional smile; a celebrated chef in Bordeaux, famous for his canelés; a teenager in Strasbourg whose YouTube channel was dedicated to unboxing sneakers. None of them could be the boy with the sad elephant drawings.
Her marketing instincts kicked in. This was a search for a specific demographic, a ghost with a known psychological profile. She narrowed her parameters. "Arthur Dubois," born approximately 1987. "Arthur Dubois," Paris. The results became more manageable but were still a wilderness of dead ends. She found dormant social media profiles from a decade ago, showing men with the right name and approximate age, but their digital footprints—photos from raucous university parties, posts about finance jobs—felt wrong. They didn't fit the image of the quiet, sensitive boy she had pieced together in her mind.
Frustration began to mount. The internet, for all its interconnectedness, was an expert at keeping secrets. She was looking for a whisper in a hurricane of data.
Then she remembered the second piece of the puzzle, the cruel, childish nickname that had made Thomas and his friends roar with laughter. Elmer the Elephant.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, typing the shameful phrase into the search bar alongside his name. This time, the results were different. She was pulled back in time, into the digital catacombs of the mid-2000s. She found herself navigating clunky, text-based school forums with broken image links and obsolete slang. It felt like trespassing in a graveyard.
On one archived forum, under a thread titled "School Legends," she found it. A post from an anonymous user, dated fifteen years prior.
A wave of nausea washed over her. It was real. A piece of documented cruelty, fossilized in outdated HTML. Seeing it there, in black and white, stripped away any lingering doubt about her actions. This wasn't just a story Thomas told; it was a trauma he had broadcast.
But the trail went cold again. The forum was a dead end, a monument to forgotten teenage malice. For two more nights, she searched, her eyes burning from the screen's glow, the wine in her glass forgotten. She felt like she was failing him all over again, letting him fade back into the anonymity where Thomas had left him. Arthur Dubois remained a ghost.
On the third night, she leaned back in her chair, rubbing her temples. She was approaching this all wrong. She was searching for the victim, when she should have been tracking the perpetrator. Where was Thomas fifteen years ago? He had mentioned it once, a casual, arrogant name-drop at a dinner party meant to impress her. An elite, ridiculously expensive boarding school near the Swiss border.
Lycée Saint-Exupéry.
Her heart began to hammer against her ribs. This was the key. A defined location. A specific institution.
Her search became surgical. "Lycée Saint-Exupéry alumni." "Lycée Saint-Exupéry class of 2007." She found a clunky but functional alumni website, its design as dated as the forum she’d found. It had a section for digitized yearbooks. She navigated to the right year, her breath held tight in her chest.
The PDF was slow to load, each page a grainy scan of youthful faces. She scrolled past the confident, smirking faces of the rowing team, the debate club, the sons and daughters of diplomats and CEOs. She saw a younger Thomas de Valois, his handsome face already perfected, his smile holding the same effortless, unearned confidence. Beside him, grinning, were Hugo and Baptiste. The architects of ruin.
She kept scrolling, her eyes scanning the grid of portraits, looking for a face that didn't belong.
And then, she found him.
Page 84. Arthur Dubois.
The face that looked back at her from the screen was exactly as she had imagined, and yet it was more heartbreakingly real. He wasn't smiling. While the other students postured for the camera, he simply existed in front of it. He had kind, gentle eyes that held a profound, old hurt, even then. His dark, artistic hair was slightly disheveled, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He looked sensitive, intelligent, and utterly, achingly alone. Underneath his name, a single, terse line: Activities: Art Club President.
She stared at the photograph for a long time, the ghost finally given a face. This was the boy Thomas had tried to break. This was the quiet soul whose heart had been used as a source of entertainment.
Her gaze drifted to the small text at the bottom of his portrait, a space for students to leave a quote or a website link. Most had left sentimental quotes or inside jokes. Arthur’s space contained a single, almost-invisible line of text: an old, now-defunct web address for a student art portfolio.
It was a long shot, a digital thread that had likely snapped years ago. But on a hunch, she typed the root of the address—just his name—into her search engine, adding the word "artist."
The first result was not a dead link. It was a sleek, modern, minimalist website.
Arthur Dubois | Graphic Design & Illustration
Her hand trembled as she clicked. The screen filled with stunning, evocative art. Logos for independent companies, posters for music festivals, and a personal gallery. She clicked on the gallery, and her breath caught in her throat.
The collection was titled Solitaires. It was a series of beautiful, melancholic illustrations. And in almost every single one, hidden or in plain sight, was the recurring motif of a lone elephant. An elephant navigating a grey, abstract cityscape. An elephant silhouetted against a vast, empty sea. An elephant rendered in a kaleidoscope of resilient, hopeful colors, surrounded by a world of monochrome.
He hadn't buried the memory. He had transformed it. He had taken their cruelest weapon and forged it into his art, his voice.
At the bottom of the page was a small announcement.
Galerie Hiver presents 'Solitaires,' the debut solo exhibition by Arthur Dubois. Opening night: Friday, October 12th. 7 p.m. Le Marais, Paris.
Elara looked at her calendar. It was two days from now.
Her heart pounded. A simple email, an anonymous message of support, would be the sane, rational thing to do. But after weeks of chasing a ghost, sanity felt secondary. She had seen the cruelty. Now, she had to see the resilience. She had to stand in a room full of his art, his story, and see for herself if the boy Thomas de Valois and his friends had tried so hard to break had ever truly healed.
Characters
Arthur Dubois
Elara Moreau
Jean-Luc de Valois
