No Time to Fry

It started, as most Loud family disasters did, with a coupon.

Lynn Sr. found it wedged between the couch cushions on a Saturday morning, and he held it up like he’d discovered buried treasure. “Behold! Buy one Burping Burger Gutbuster, get one free! The whole family eats for half price!”

“Burping Burger?” Lori said, wrinkling her nose. “Like, literally the place with the health code violations?”

“Those were rumors,” Lynn Sr. said. “Alleged rumors. Probably started by Big Tony’s Pizza.”

“Dad, Big Tony’s got shut down twice,” Luna said.

“Exactly! And look at them now. Thriving.” Lynn Sr. kissed the coupon. “Tonight, we feast.”

Leni gasped. “Does this mean I can get extra pickles?” “It means we’re all going to regret this,” Lori said, already reaching for her phone to text Bobby about her terrible family. Luan grinned. “What’s the deal with free burgers? They’re grate!” “No,” said eleven voices at once. Lynn cracked her knuckles. “If I get sick, I’m using Dad’s coupon as a tissue.” “That’s the spirit!” Lynn Sr. said, missing the point entirely, as fathers do.

Nobody should have listened. Everybody knew nobody should have listened. But free Gutbusters were free Gutbusters, and by six o’clock the entire Loud family was crammed into a corner booth at Burping Burger, thirteen trays of fries between them, the air thick with grease and poor decisions.

The restaurant itself was a health inspector’s nightmare. The floors stuck to their shoes. The menu board had something brown smeared across the prices. A ball pit in the corner sat empty, which Lana declared “the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” and she once watched Dad cry at a car commercial. Leni stared at the ceiling tiles. “Do you think those stains are art?” “Those stains are a crime,” Lisa said.

The burgers arrived. They glistened. That should have been the first warning. Burgers should not glisten.

“Dig in!” Lynn Sr. said, unwrapping his with ceremony.

What followed could only be described as a massacre of appetites. Lincoln took one bite and went slightly green. Leni stared at hers like it had personally offended her. Lana, who once ate a worm on a dare, pushed her tray away.

“Dude,” Luna said, holding her burger at arm’s length, “this thing is leaking something purple.”

“Purple?” Rita leaned over. “Let me see that.”

Sure enough, oozing from the side of Luna’s Gutbuster was a thick, glistening ribbon of something unmistakably purple. Not ketchup purple. Not grape-jelly purple. Something else. Something wrong.

“That’s just the special sauce,” said the teenage cashier without looking up from his phone.

“Your special sauce is purple?” Lynn asked.

“It’s artisan,” the cashier said.

Lincoln poked his burger with a fry. It jiggled. Burgers should not jiggle either. Lana sniffed hers and recoiled. “It smells like the dumpster behind the school!” “Everything smells like that to you,” Lynn said, but she didn’t take a bite. Lucy held hers like a dead bird. “I shall name him Sorrow, for he brings only pain.” Luan lifted her burger to her mouth, paused, and whispered, “Even I have standards, and I once ate a sandwich I found in the couch.”

By nine o’clock that night, the Loud house sounded like a hospital ward. Groans echoed from every bedroom. The bathroom line stretched down the hallway. Lincoln had claimed the downstairs bathroom and refused to surrender it, barricading the door with a laundry hamper.

Upstairs, the twins had declared their bedroom a quarantine zone, which lasted until Lola needed the bathroom and Lana bribed her way in with a juice box. Rita had given up on the couch and was camped in the hallway with a pillow, directing traffic like an air traffic controller. “Lynn, bathroom’s free in thirty seconds! Luna, hang in there!” Lynn Sr. emerged from the kitchen, pale as milk, clutching a sports drink like a life preserver. “I cooked for this family for years,” he moaned. “How could a burger do this to me?”

Lisa emerged from her room in her pajamas, took one look at the carnage, and adjusted her glasses. “Fascinating. A textbook cluster outbreak.”

“Lis, I am dying,” Lucy moaned from the couch, a blanket over her head. “Tell my poems I loved them.”

“Nobody is dying,” Lisa said. “Probably.” She examined Lana’s leftover burger, which Lynn Sr. had brought home in a doggy bag for reasons no one could explain. She prodded the purple ooze with a cotton swab, held it to the light, and frowned. “This appears to be escherichia coli.”

Lynn, sprawled across the recliner clutching her stomach, lifted her head. “In English, doofus.”

Lisa sighed the sigh of a genius surrounded by mortals. “We appear to have contracted e. coli.”

From the kitchen came the sound of Lynn Sr. dropping a pot. “Ding dong dang it!”

“Language,” Rita said weakly from the floor, where she was lying with a cold washcloth on her forehead.

“I’ll language when my intestines stop staging a revolt!” Lynn Sr. shouted.

Lisa was already at her microscope, the burger sample smeared across a slide. “Curious,” she muttered. “The bacterial load is consistent with contaminated filler, not the beef itself. Which raises the question of what, precisely, this purple substance is.”

“Do we want to know?” Lincoln called from behind the bathroom door.

“We do not,” said Lucy. “But we will learn anyway. Such is the way of suffering.”

The next morning, half the family still looked like zombies, Lisa marched into the kitchen carrying a petri dish and a printout. “I’ve completed the analysis. The purple substance is not a sauce. It is not a garnish. It is an industrial binding agent — a synthetic protein slurry being used as filler in the burger patties to cut costs.”

“So it’s not meat,” Lynn Sr. said slowly.

“It was never meat,” Lisa said. “It was barely food.”

Luan stared at the petri dish, opened her mouth, closed it again, and finally said, “I don’t even have any jokes for this.”

Every single Loud said in unison, “Good,”

Lynn Sr. went very quiet. Then he stood up, and the chair scraped against the floor, and he said the words that would change everything: “”We’re suing.”

Rita nodded slowly. “They poisoned our children, Lynn.” “They poisoned ME,” Lynn Sr. said, clutching his stomach at the memory. “I had three bites!” “You had four,” said Lucy, who missed nothing. “I counted every single one.“”

The courtroom was smaller than everyone expected. The Burping Burger corporation sent a lawyer in a suit so expensive it probably cost more than the restaurant. The Louds sent themselves — all thirteen of them, plus a petri dish.

“Your Honor,” the corporate lawyer began, “my clients maintain that their product meets all—”

“Not cool, dude!” Luna shouted, pointing at him. “You poisoned my whole family!”

“Order,” said the judge. “Miss Loud, you’ll have your turn.”

Lisa took the stand with her printout and her petri dish and the calm of a four-year-old who had never once been wrong. “The defendant’s patties contain a synthetic filler compound laced with escherichia coli due to improper storage temperatures. I have the cultures. I have the spectrometry. I have the supply invoices.”

The corporate lawyer paled. “Those invoices were supposed to be shredded.”

“Nothing is ever truly shredded,” Lucy whispered from the gallery.

Lisa turned to the Burping Burger executives sitting at the defense table. “You need to reformulate your ingredients.”

Every single Loud, from Lori to Lily, said in perfect unison: “English, Lisa!”

Lisa pinched the bridge of her nose. “Stop putting poison slime in the burgers.”

The executives shifted in their seats. One of them loosened his tie. Another whispered furiously to the lawyer, who was now sweating through his expensive suit. The judge peered over her glasses at the petri dish, which Lisa had thoughtfully labeled with a skull and crossbones. “The court has seen enough,” she said.

The jury deliberated for eleven minutes. The verdict was unanimous. The Loud family won — damages, legal fees, and a court order forcing Burping Burger to overhaul its entire supply chain.

Outside the courthouse, the family stood blinking in the sunlight, victorious and still slightly queasy. Lynn Sr. threw his arms wide. “Well, we won ding dong dang it!”

Everyone cheered. Confetti that Luan had smuggled in for “victory purposes” rained down over the courthouse steps.

Lori was already on the phone. “Bobby, you will literally not believe what just happened.” Luna had her guitar out, strumming a victory riff. Lynn was doing push-ups on the courthouse steps, claiming the adrenaline needed somewhere to go. Even Lily clapped her hands and shouted “Woo!” which may have been her first word, though Rita insisted it was “Mama” three months ago and nobody believed her.

Luan stepped forward, grinning, winding up like a pitcher. “Hey, everybody — you know what the best part is?”

“No,” groaned eleven siblings in preemptive unison.

Luan beamed. “Now that’s what I call a funny taste!”

And every single Loud shouted: “Luan!”