The first book in the Freddy and the French Fries series, 2005

To Spencer and Collin, my two favorite Fries.

FREDDY T. FUNKHOUSER stood at the door of the Burger Castle and scratched his ear, which was a little difficult since he was wearing a chicken costume. He rubbed his beak and practiced his clucking as he waited for customers. His father, Alfred Funkhouser, insisted that Freddy greet each customer that came into the Funkhouser family’s restaurant with a welcoming “cluck-cluck.”

“Pow-pow-pow!” said Alfred Funkhouser as he rolled by on skates, dressed in his tomato costume, shooting seeds from the automatic seed shooters attached to his forearms. The seed shooter was one of Alfred’s many strange inventions. “Take cover, incoming. Ack-ack-ack!” cried out Alfred as he fired all over the place.

“Better save the ammo for the paying customers, Dad,” Freddy said as he patiently picked the tiny seeds off his wings.

“Right-O, Freddy. How many customers have we had today?”

“That would be, like, zero,” said Freddy’s thirteen-year-old sister, Nancy, as she flounced by in her ketchup-bottle costume. An aspiring actress, the tall, skinny Nancy Funkhouser flounced dramatically everywhere, swishing her flaming red hair this way and that. She had a large trunk of costumes in her bedroom she had gotten from an old theater and dressed up in crazy outfits all the time. She constantly spouted dialogue from plays, movies, TV, and commercials.

“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” cried out Nancy to an invisible audience. The five Guacamole brothers, who worked at the restaurant dressed as French fries, looked up, sniggered, and went back to their card playing and magazine reading.