When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort by Sharon Lee Snow

When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort | Sharon Lee Snow

The brisk Monday October night when Mr. Boppo flounced into the glass-walled English Department Classroom 301, we all looked up bleary-eyed from our critique group stories full of suicide ideation, suspicious yarns of days lost to raves from another era, and the usual amount of coming out tales to find a small man hovering at the door, costumed in a ruffled white tent of a shirt that bounced with a life of its own. Under a ridiculous pointed white hat, an equally white face with expectant eyes framed with black triangles smiled at us despite our obvious discomfiture. He headed straight to the empty seat beside me, bowed quickly to the class in general, and bounced his hula-hoop shirt with its red pom-pom buttons with a flourish as he sat down. 

We turned to Professor Corelli – who we called Jim since we were grad students – but Jim didn’t seem to know what to do with the little clown either. He scrolled his enrollment rolls and looked up just as perplexed. “Mr. Boppo?” he asked the man. “You were approved for this class?”

The small man stood up and bowed again; this time, a proper bow. 

“He’s one of them French clowns,” whispered my critique partner, Kelci, as she appraised him. “The sad ones.”

“I think you mean Italian, like Pagliacci,” I said. 

Kelci didn’t appreciate my interjection, and I admit I was somewhat doubtful too. I wasn’t so sure of my clowns, and my opera knowledge was limited to what I watched on The Simpsons combined with my mother’s love of a great tenor solo from time to time. 

In truth, I hated clowns. For no particular reason. Just like most people I knew tended to hate them. 

We stared at the clown. 

I was waiting for a French accent, or for him to begin belting out an aria, or jump to life, honking a horn and talking in a goofy clown voice. But a neutral North American accent simply stated: “I am Mr. Boppo.”

The class was silent, watching.

I expected a lot more questions from Jim, but he threw up his hands and said, “Welcome,” because he had tenure and one more year before retirement. 

At that, Mr. Boppo sat down, scooted his chair closer, and joined our group. I figured he would sit back and take stock of the situation, but instead, he produced a neatly stapled short story. “I’m Mr. Boppo,” he said again, as he passed out the required three copies to the three of us already in the critique group. He waited for us to announce ourselves and to read his story.

Kelci was serious about the class and the MFA program. I could see her mind working. Was this experimental writing? Was this performance theatre? Was this some test? Wyatt, next to me, secretly worked gig jobs and studied pre-med as a practical backup to being an MFA student. Wyatt had zero patience for nonsense, but he could write like a son-of-a-bitch.

“Look, clown,” he began, but Mr. Boppo held up a hand. 

“I’m just a student,” he asserted. “Same as you.”

So, our small critique group introduced ourselves and passed him our stories which worked out strangely well since we were short a group member with Emma home puking. I pulled Mr. Boppo’s story over to me, angry about it and Mr. Boppo in general. Still, I was intrigued. I picked up the paper, hoping for a fascinating insider’s insight into the circus, or about his unique life living as a clown outside of the circus. 

But it was none of those things. The story was surprising from the first line. It sang, it cried, it was light like a communion wafer on the tongue, cleansing you of tired tropes and metaphors and themes. The noise of the elevator opening and closing outside our classroom door, the hum of students talking, and the bright fluorescent lights dimmed and went silent. I went to a new place I didn’t recognize. When I put the story down, I couldn’t remember what I read but felt like the weight of the girlfriend in trouble had lifted, that things were clear, beautiful even. I handed him a paper with marks written that I did not recall making, and he thanked me with a tiny bow from his seat. 

I could see that everyone was reacting the same way to Mr. Boppo’s story. At the end of the evening, everyone in our group was at least somewhat entranced with the clown – even stoic Wyatt – and Kelci posed all of us for her Instagram post. 

When I got home, Emma had finished throwing up and was curled up in a fluffy pink blanket on the couch, like a fuzzy, helpless kitten. Her face was gaunt, her skin white and translucent, dark smudges of bags under her eyes. My worry for her was a constant ball in the back of my throat, choking me. We both knew what had to be done but couldn’t explain why it hadn’t happened. Nothing was happening at all, and I was terrified.

I sat by her and stroked her hair and told her about Mr. Boppo.

She didn’t believe me at first, but then I showed her the picture of our critique group plus Mr. Boppo on Instagram, and she laughed but then grew worried. If clowns can join the MFA program, she mused, then what value did it have anymore? Why were we going into hideous debt for a clown college? 

“I think it’s some kind of experiment,” I offered, trying to cheer her up. I couldn’t explain exactly how it felt reading his paper, so I brought out his remarks on my draft. “Let’s read them together,” I said, and she cuddled up next to me. 

Initially, his markings didn’t appear to be language, and we looked at each other. “Gibberish,” she said, but then the writing began sorting itself out, smoothing out into a lovely handwriting like magical self-writing elvish runes. We watched as it took shape in the margins, swirling up and around paragraphs, curving around bad sentence structure and cliches as it went. In the end, an exquisite red vine of words, both encouraging and meaningful, flowed through my story pages. We leaned in and read it, sighing in places where he’d nailed a particular problem in the plot line, smiling at his kind support of a well-written phrase.

“It’s wonderful,” Emma said, looking brighter. “I must meet this clown.”

Our cohort took our classes together, so we were not surprised to see him in our class the following morning. Emma had put her makeup on and looked happier than she had in days. She took a seat next to Mr. Boppo, who stood up briefly, bowed, and kissed her hand. Emma giggled. 

He looked exactly the same, as if he slept in his costume and makeup, as if they were not in fact applied but rather a part of him – or more specifically, him, himself. I found myself annoyed at how Emma continued to smile a little to herself. All the things I had been doing to cheer her up: her favorite foods, cleaning up puke, binge streaming through her favorite shows that I secretly hated…and now, a clown. It took a clown to make her smile again.

My suspicions about Mr. Boppo were back now that I was removed from his magic writing spell. And my pregnant girlfriend was giggling with him over something, like they’d been best friends for years now. 

I felt like screaming out the obvious. Nothing good could come of this infection of our tight cohort group. Why is a clown in our class? But the class was moving into place like nothing strange was happening, even those who’d missed last night’s workshop. 

Mr. Boppo looked up from regaling Emma with a witty remark that had her chuckling. He stared right at me. There was no mirth in those black clown eyes. The corner of his mouth quirked up.

Yeah, I made up my mind. I would bring down this fucking clown, this ridiculous Mr. Boppo. This imposter in our midst.

It wouldn’t be too hard, I figured. We were working on short memoir pieces, so that would provide some details on this clown. He couldn’t hide who he was forever. At that moment, the door opened. The students and I watched with interest as Professor Beadle strode into her class. Professor B was young, but also ran a tight ship. 

“Good morn—” She halted to a stop in her practical black pumps, frowning at Mr. Boppo. She looked around and verified that we were indeed her 10 a.m. memoir class. She made up her mind and walked right over with a brittle smile. 

“Good morning! Are you auditing our class today? I didn’t get any notice.” 

He popped up and bowed. “Mr. Boppo!” he said with a flourish of his hand. “I’m a student, Professor.”

She sucked in a deep breath. Her brows knit together in pain. You could feel her thinking, just what I fucking needed. She nodded and went to the computer where she furiously tapped in her password to get to the enrollment page. With a resigned sigh, she stared hard at him as he smiled back at her with a circus-wattage smile. Then she shrugged and opened her slides. “Let’s begin.” 

Mr. Boppo stayed attached to Emma’s side when class ended. I was even more annoyed then, because we knew nothing more about the mysterious clown now than we had at the beginning of the class. Professor B was delighted with his ability to parse dense material and create a discussion around Roxane Gay’s story so intense that everyone seemed disappointed when class was over. For all his talking, he had said, I realized, actually nothing. 

“Good morning!” he said, bowing at me when I finally managed to insert myself between him and Emma as we packed up to leave.

“Great discussion, right, babe?” Emma was glowing like she used to when we’d started dating. 

“I look forward to reading your memoir next week,” I told him, making a point out of grabbing Emma’s hand. A bigger man would have been grateful for anyone who got their clinically depressed girlfriend out of her funk. But staring down some challenge in his clown eyes, I found I wasn’t that man. 

When the class made plans to grab lunch in the Student Center, Mr. Boppo came along as if he did this every Tuesday. Emma dropped my hand and joined the herd. I hung back with Wyatt, who had just finished an online quiz for his Organic Chemistry class. I wanted a reality check.

“Don’t you find him strange?” I asked him. “The whole thing – this Mr. Boppo clown?”

“Of course I do!” he said, stuffing his computer into his backpack. “Why is a fucking clown in our program? I worked hard to get into it and now they’re letting in any clown?”

“Well, there’s that, but him in general. Being a clown. Like all the time.”

Wyatt shrugged, tossing on his backpack. “There is something weird about it, yes, but I don’t have time to care.” He patted me on the back. “I’d watch my girlfriend if I were you, though.” And he winked. 

In the lunchroom, Mr. Boppo regaled us with funny stories without monopolizing the conversation. Everyone laughed over their cold, shitty pizza slices. I noticed Emma had a better appetite and didn’t seem inclined to throw up in his presence, something I resented. 

When we migrated to our next class, I walked behind the clown. He was asking Emma about her writing, and she hadn’t noticed when I slipped back. Surely someone else could see how ridiculous this all was. 

“What do you think,” I whispered to Kelci, “about this clown?”

Kelci shrugged. “It’s odd. I find myself forgetting things. Like, what did we just talk about at lunch? And what did he even think about Roxane Gay’s piece? I wanted to remember it, but I couldn’t. Still, I like him. There’s just something about him.”

The week went on, and Mr. Boppo became a part of the cohort as if he’d never not been a part of it. Emma began washing her hair and putting on makeup again. Her clothes were clean, and there was color in her cheeks. Her eyes sparkled. She couldn’t wait to get to class, where she always sat next to Mr. Boppo, forcing me into an odd man out role. 

Thursday evening, we all went out to the local student drinking hole after Jim’s class, as was often our custom. Jim came too. Emma was talking quietly with three girls from the cohort. 

For once, I caught the clown alone, sitting at the bar by himself. I sat down and bought him a beer. “So,” I said to him. “How are you enjoying the program?” 

“It’s great,” he said, smoothing his white tent shirt. “Such talented writers.”

I nodded. “You seem to know all about us, but we know so little about you.”

He smiled at me and took a sip of beer.

“What’s your name, for instance?”

“You know my name,” he said. 

“That’s not a real name. What’s your first name? Where are you from? Why are you here? Why do you dress like a clown?” I spoke as fast as I could with an eye on our group slowly making their way to us. 

Mr. Boppo leaned back. “You’re an angry man,” he said. “So much anger for a young man. You can’t appreciate that something can just exist. You can’t see the miraculous.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said, practically spitting as I whispered. “What are you here for?”

“That’s a good question, Evan,” he replied. He looked concerned, then nodded at Emma. “Don’t you have more important things to consider, though?”

After that, I really hated the clown. I began to hate his fucking guts. My whole existence became entwined with pulling off the mask of this clown, exposing him as a fake, as a fraud, a pretender. We had all earned our way into this program, and some sketchy guy in makeup had become the sudden darling of the cohort, the mascot of our MFA program. But who the hell or what the hell was he?

I spent my nights on the computer trying to smoke him out. There was nothing. Just a million references to Boppo the clown in cartoons or in general, but nothing about our Mr. Boppo. And the whole Pagliacci story worried me, with its sad, vengeful unraveling clown, the faithless wife. I began staying up until 3 a.m. just to get to my schoolwork. When I did sleep, my night was tormented with violent dreams that didn’t end well for clowns and with me getting nudged awake by a frightened Emma. 

Emma would not listen to reason. “I feel better around him,” she said. “He makes me happy. What have you got against him? Everyone loves him except you.”

One late afternoon after we’d come home from class, she was still smiling. She wouldn’t show me what Mr. Boppo had written on her paper, the vines of beautiful writing swirling around her pages. 

“I think we need to speak about what we’re going to do,” I said. I hated to do it while she was so happy, but for some sick reason, I felt a need to kill whatever joy the clown had given her. I also needed her strong enough to hear the truth. “We are running out of time.”

There. We’d danced around this for too many days. It was finally out.

She stopped smiling and stared at me. “Is this about the clown? Why are you so jealous of Boppo? Is it because he makes me happy? All you do is bring us down with your focus on what is wrong. In your writing and in life.”  

That hurt, but was so off the point that I lost it. 

“It’s not about school!” I screamed. “It’s about our fucking predicament. We are running out of options and it’s time we got our heads out of our asses!”

I felt bad when I said it, but only for a minute because she wasn’t looking sad or helpless or kitten-like at all. She was glaring at me, through me, like I was the clown, a buffoon, a piece of shit. 

That did it. “Enough about that damn clown! That stupid, stupid clown! Who the fuck does he think he is anyhow? Mr. Boppo. I hate his fucking guts! And you need to stay the hell away from that psycho!”

She didn’t wait for me to finish yelling. She marched to the bedroom and threw things in a small suitcase, grabbed her computer, her marked-up story, and told me she was going to stay with Kelci.

I didn’t sleep that night and was even more furious the next day. This was going to be my chance, I thought. I was finally going to critique Boppo’s memoir piece. I couldn’t wait to read that bullshit and rip it to shreds. In front of everyone, I decided. Time to end this shit.

When we got into our groups, I was sad to see that Emma wasn’t in our usual spot, but glad on some level. Kelci flipped me off and went into the other group with Emma on the other side of the classroom. Wyatt joined me and Mr. Boppo to make the required minimum of three participants.

Mr. Boppo was serious today, watching me. 

“I’m worried about you, Evan,” he said, handing me his paper. 

“I’m going to find out your game, you fucking clown,” I whispered. “I’m bringing you down, Mr. Boppo.”

Mr. Boppo actually frowned, and I saw the paint crack on his forehead, which made me smile until he said, “Is this really what you should be focusing on? Is that really what you want?”

Wyatt ignored us and plowed right into the work. When he was done, he tossed his comments on our desks and began working on Organic Chem homework. I finished Wyatt’s excellent piece about the Christmas tree he and his single mom had made inside the car they lived in when he was a little boy, and then I went to work on the clown’s essay.

It was a short piece, slightly shorter than the required page limit, and I marked him off for that right off in gleeful, savage strokes. It began in a weird place, too, in the future, which seemed odd for a memoir. Try as I might, though, I could not escape the pull of his beautiful words, his magic art of storytelling. The memoir piece was like everything he wrote: deep, packed full of meaning without being pretentious, but light as well, full of airy hope and tears mixed, like a beautiful composition balanced with both salty and sweet candy, like hitting the perfect note on a beautiful aria. He was at once a child living in a world that only loved creatives when they were confined to specific places, and a man yearning to be more than this clown, pushing at the boundaries of allowed place and time. 

When I finished, I was wiping away tears. I found I had written in the margins in a beautiful vine-like way, and the words were encouraging, wanting more of this story. I sniffled, handing it to Mr. Boppo. 

Wyatt looked up once and shook his head, muttering something before going back to tapping on his computer. 

“Thank you,” Mr. Boppo said, reading my critique. He smiled, and it was a normal smile, not his big-ass clown smile. 

“It’s not been easy,” I said to him, picking up my story with his critique, knowing it was the same story as his, the future my future, the pain my pain.

“It’s not been easy,” he agreed.

“How will I know?” I asked him, understanding at that moment that he was going to walk out the door forever in two seconds. “What is the right thing? What the hell is real in all of this mess?”

He just smiled. “Art, beauty, truth. It’s not about the right thing. It’s about what is important, Evan, what is important…to you.”

He was at the door now, and only I was watching him leave. “How do I know what’s important?” 

But he just bowed and shut the door. 

Wyatt pulled his head up for a moment and stared at the closed door. “I thought that clown would never leave.”

Read by the author:

Sharon’s story was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Short Fiction Prize winner by Michael Czyzniejewski. Mike had this to say about the piece…

“When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort” is a story that works on so many levels. The surface weirdness of a sad French clown joining a fiction workshop in the middle of a term is a surreal type of absurdity that drew me right into the story. Then, as it plays out, the narrator’s insecurity over his writing, his relationship, and his life choices in general tells me that this author understands character and how to control narrative. It’s a terrifically weird and wonderful piece of fiction.

about the author: