The party was in full swing by the time I pulled up to the small house. Maddox greeted me at the door and gestured to some stairs off to the side that led to a basement.

A variety of sodas were in a cooler at the door beside a table of various bags of chips and the type of store-bought cupcakes where the icing stained your teeth.

"Crazy Train" was blaring through a portable speaker behind Lucas and Chase as they were playing Super Smash Bros. It looked like Lucas playing Kirby was destroying Chase as Link.

Emma Kate sat beside Bradley on the couch, watching the boys duke it out. She leaned against his arm and sipped on a can of lemonade.

"Parker," Bradley said. "Join us."

I took an empty seat near the foot of the long curving couch. Chase cursed as Lucas made another perfectly timed attack against his character. The English major just sat silently pushing buttons as he crushed Chase again.

"Wanna play a round?" Chase asked. "Lucas is killing me here. His fifth win of the night."

"I'm not good at Smash," I admitted.

"I'll take a turn," Emma Kate said. "Let me all kick your butts as Princess Peach."

"Awe," Bradley said. "But I don't think you can beat Lucas, sweetie."

Emma Kate pushed out her lip in a pout. "It's annoying when you're right."

Riley walked into the room, followed by Maddox. He held a stack of party games from Monopoly to some game I'd never heard of called Poetry for Neanderthals.

"Who's winning?" Riley asked.

"Lucas," Emma Kate, and Bradley said at the same time.

It was strange to see how in sync they were. Bradley seemed perfectly content to have his arm around his girlfriend. I didn't know for sure how long they'd been together, but from their ease with one another, I had to guess the relationship wasn't exactly new.

"I'll add in on the next round to give you a fighting chance against Lucas," Maddox winked at Chase. "Bradley, I hope you didn't have anything special saved in the kitchen. After Raisa scoffed at our chip table and store-bought trash, her words not mine, she said she would whip up something in the kitchen. I left Cynthia to supervise and hope she doesn't burn down the place."

"I think there's some pizza dough I had plans for, but honestly, I need to make a grocery run tomorrow," Bradley said.

"Such a preppy princess," Chase rolled his eyes. "Did you hear her mom called three of the theater companies that didn't accept her as an intern this summer?"

"She's only finished freshman year," Emma Kate said. "She has plenty of time. Besides, if it was anything about her audition on Wednesday..."

"You said you weren't supposed to talk about the auditions until the cast list was posted at midnight," Bradley said.

Emma Kate laughed. "Oops. You didn't hear that."

Bradley smiled and poured his soda from a can into a red solo cup of ice. "I never hear anything, babe."

"I'm confused," I frowned, looking from Bradley to Emma Kate and seeing all the other smirks in the room telling me I was missing some kind of joke.

"We'll tell him when he's older," Bradley said, tapping the back of his ear. "Just enjoy the party, Parker."

"Did you bring the hat?" Riley asked, changing the subject.

"The improv team is disbanded for the summer," Maddox said. "But I have an old fedora upstairs and a list of prompts."

"I know where this is going," Lucas groaned.

I almost jumped. It was the first time I'd heard his voice all evening. He'd paused the Smash game and turned towards the rest of us.

"You know you love it, English major," Bradley said.

"I do not love the Moron Games," Lucas crossed his arms. "I'm not a theater major."

Emma Kate frowned. "It's the Oxymoron Games, and you know it. Maddox, the hat of destiny if you please. Get Raisa and Cynthia. We need a full house to play."

"What are the Oxymoron Games?" I asked.

Bradley grinned. "Improvisational games designed to help actors think fast on their feet. We call them the Oxymoron Games because the games are goofy and paradoxical. Also, everyone gets an oxymoron name. We might even get the terrible trio to come if we Snapchat them a round of games. The whole theater department loves them."

"I'll get the hat," Maddox said. "The Official Oxymoron Games will begin in ten minutes."

Bradley and Chase moved the couches to make room and set up a few folding chairs for an audience. Emma Kate turned down the music and pulled out her tablet.

"You'll get used to the madness," Lucas said next to me as he shut down the gaming system and the television. "And the Moron Games aren't too bad. Just wait until they give you your name for the games. I'm Historical Present. You'll like it."

It was more than twenty minutes before all of the party-goers were sitting in front of the cleared area everyone was calling the stage. In the meantime, Jude, Lorne, and Kayleigh joined us because, according to Bradley, they loved what Lucas called The Moron Games. Even Lexi made it in time to slip into the back next to Cynthia.

Finally, Maddox stepped onto the stage and held up an inflatable microphone. Everyone grew silent as he grinned.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he said in his best game show voice. "And welcome to the Oxymoron Games. We have a fabulous show lined up right here. Please submit your audience feedback on the group survey while I lay out some of the rules for tonight's games."

Everyone looked down at their phones and began furiously typing. I pulled out my phone, trying not to look foolish, and found Lexi had sent me a link to a shared survey.

Maddox laid down the rules while I answered a dozen questions on the survey. I had to write down a few names of well-known characters from movies, a few genres and suggest a few random nouns and adjectives.

The rules were simple. Maddox would call players to the stage for a game. He'd choose who was playing what role, and then the game would play out with our suggestions from the survey.

"We also have two new players tonight to the Oxymoron Games," Maddox said. "Say hello to Cynthia Becker, the incoming Freshman from Midland Heights. We won't be voting on official names since the club isn't in session, but tonight, you'll be Old News. Now from Crestview, football extraordinaire Parker Christian-Porter. Tonight though, we'll be calling you Champion Underdog. This is the Oxymoron Games hosted by your very own Maddox, AKA Guest Host. Good luck, ladies and gentlemen. May the hat be in your favor."

Maddox walked over to a small table where a lime green fedora was filled with a dozen slips of paper. He reached in and made a show of digging his hand around before pulling out three slips.

"First up, for a crowd favorite, we like to call Customer Service to the stage as the manager, I'd like to call Random Order, and as the customers, we'll need Found Missing and Bitter Sweet."

Raisa, Riley, and Jude made their way to the stage. According to the rules of the game, Maddox would whisper an item that Raisa or Riley would be returning, except that item, had a strange quality which was the reason it was being returned. The catch was they could only describe the object and the problem, and it was Jude's job to figure out what they were returning and why they had a problem with it.

We all laughed as Raisa mimed a pogo stick that ribbited every time she jumped on it. Jude had a harder time guessing an alarm clock that created a gravity well, but after five or so minutes, he caught on that it had something to do with space and gravity.

Next, Maddox called a game called "Who's on My Bus?" He selected Lexi as the driver of the bus and then had her wear noise-canceling headphones as he assigned Lucas, Lorne, and Cynthia to each enter the bus as Yoda, an influencer obsessed with hitting 100K followers, and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

Lexi then took off her headphones and had to guess the occupants on her crazy bus. They could only reach their stop if she got it right. She figured out Lucas was Yoda almost instantly, and Cynthia did a good impression of Cookie Monster, but she had a harder time guessing Lorne's influencer as he pranced around the bus shoving the others aside to take the best pictures as he yacked with his agent on an invisible phone.

Next, Maddox introduced a game called angry production. He and Emma Kate would play producers of a TV show and would interrupt Bradley, Chase, and Kayleigh and change the genre of the show they were trying to perform.

The game seemed fairly straightforward. I didn't see how it would get as chaotic as the others, but boy was I wrong. Bradley, Chase, and Kayleigh started making up a scene about a dramatic breakup with Bradley as the guy Kayleigh was leaving Chase for. Then Maddox stopped the scene.

"Rubbish," Maddox said. "You are the worst actors I've ever seen. I just got off the phone with the studio. Kids won't watch this. They want to see overaged hot guys play sixteen-year-olds. You guys aren't even old enough."

"He's right," Emma Kate said. "The studio wants drama. Give us drama."

"I know," Maddox smiled. "Do it again as film noir detectives."

Parker nearly fell out of his seat as Chase and Bradley completely delivered in their roles as film noir detectives trying to overanalyze each other's thoughts and solve the mystery of Kayleigh cheating.

"Cut!" Emma Kate said. "That was a horrific idea. Film noir is so aged. The studio should fire you all."

"Nah, we can't afford that," Maddox interjected. "But you know what we can afford? Action. Special effects. Lightsabers. Do it like you're the next Star Wars."

This time Chase pretended to be Luke Skywalker on his way to rescue Princess Leia, and when he unlocked the cell, he found Kayleigh as Leia making out with Bradley as Han Solo. Chase challenged Bradley to a lightsaber duel just as Maddox stormed out to cut them off again.

"I almost liked that," he said. "But the studio thought it was trash. Somehow though, I think we're on the right track."

"Well, I don't," Emma Kate said. "We want drama and action. This is for teens, not nerds. Do it like there was a car crash in a medical drama."

Naturally, Chase, Bradley, and Kayleigh staged a crash. Doctors Chase and Bradley fought at the scene over Kayleigh, who lay injured. Emma Kate and Maddox clapped when they were done and let their actors bow.

Maddox announced the last game before something he called the tiebreaker. As he explained it, five of us would each be given a person to imitate as we gave our section of the local news.

"Our players will be Friendly Takeover as the anchor," Maddox said. "Your co-anchor will be Old News, who will play an old man who can't find his teeth. Next with the weather, we have Sugar Spice is, an Olympic sprinter outrunning a thunderstorm."

Bradley, Cynthia, and Kayleigh took the stage. They'd likely all do amazing. Maddox continued down his form and grinned.

"Doing a field report is Random Order who is growing younger," he said. "And finally, doing sports is Champion Underdog playing an interior designer for Batman."

"You got this, dude," Chase whispered behind me.

Then it hit me. Champion Underdog was the name that Maddox assigned me for the night. It was time to make my Oxymoron debut. 

Hey everyone!!! This chapter took much longer than I thought it would, and I apologize for that. I ended up finally splitting what I had in half and getting two chapters out of it when it was all said and done. Let me know what you think.

--- Eliana