Everyone Called Him the Ugliest Dog in the Shelter and Laughed at His Crooked Grin Online, Until a 9-Year-Old Girl Saw the Photo, Burst Into Tears and Begged to Meet Him

Part 2: The Girl Under the Hood

The girl’s face was different.

Her cheekbones were flat, almost missing, so that her face seemed to slope downward from her eyes. The outer corners of her eyes tilted down. Her chin was small and set back. Where her ears should have been, there were only small, folded shapes, and the thin headband held a hearing device behind one of them. Faint, pale surgical scars traced along her jaw and beside her eyes.

Bethany had worked at the shelter for six years. She’d learned how to keep her face still no matter what she saw.

But she couldn’t help it. She caught her breath.

The girl heard it. Her shoulders flinched. She started to reach for her hood.

Then the little ginger dog threw himself against the chain-link.

He wasn’t wagging anymore. He was crying. A high, eager, desperate whine. Pushing his strange little face against the wire, his crooked teeth catching on it, his tongue straining toward her.

Bethany didn’t think. She unlatched the gate.

The dog shot out of the kennel like he’d been fired from a cannon.

He ran straight into the girl’s lap, knocked her backward onto the concrete, put both front paws on her chest, and licked her face. All over. Her cheeks. Her chin. Her scars. Her forehead. Her folded little ears. He licked and licked, his curly tail spinning, his tongue hanging out, making happy snorting sounds through his crooked teeth.

The girl lay on the shelter floor with the dog on top of her.

And she laughed.

Loud. Out loud. A big, bright, helpless giggle that bounced off the cinderblock walls of the kennel room.

Behind her, her mother put both hands over her mouth.

She stood frozen in the aisle, staring at her daughter rolling around on the dirty concrete floor, laughing, with the ugliest dog in the shelter licking her face.

“Mom!” the girl shrieked between giggles. “Mom, look! He likes me! He likes me!”

Her mother started to cry.

Bethany turned to her. “Are you okay?”

The woman shook her head, then nodded, then shook it again. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan.

“I’m Rachel Quinn,” she said. “That’s Harper. She’s nine.”

She watched her daughter on the floor.

“Harper was born with something called Treacher Collins syndrome,” Rachel said quietly. “It affects how the bones in the face develop. Her cheekbones. Her jaw. Her ears.” She swallowed. “She’s had eleven surgeries. The first one when she was three weeks old. They rebuilt her jaw so she could breathe. Her cheekbones. Her eyelids. She has another one scheduled this summer.”

Bethany looked at the little girl giggling on the floor.

“She’s brilliant,” Rachel said. “Reads two years ahead. Funny. Kind. But at school…” Her voice broke. “The kids call her names. They take pictures of her. In the lunchroom. At recess. Last fall, a boy in her class posted one online and wrote ‘monster.'”

Bethany closed her eyes.

“She stopped taking her hood off,” Rachel whispered. “Stopped raising her hand in class. Stopped going to birthday parties. I can’t remember the last time I heard her laugh out loud anywhere outside our house.”

She looked down at her daughter.

“Last night she saw that picture of him. On her iPad. With all those comments.” Rachel’s lip trembled. “And she started crying. And she looked up at me and said, ‘Mom, people laugh at me like that too.'”

On the floor, Harper sat up. The little dog crawled into her lap, turned around once, and lay down with his head on her knee, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, grinning up at her.

Harper stroked his scruffy ginger ear. She looked at Bethany.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

Bethany hesitated. “The staff calls him Pickles. But he’s never really had a real one. Nobody ever took him home long enough to name him.”

Harper looked down at the little dog with the jutting jaw and the crooked teeth and the tongue that never went back in.

“Can he come home with us?” she asked her mother.

Rachel looked at Bethany. Bethany looked at the orange low adoption potential sticker on Kennel 31.

Then she ripped it off.

“His name’s Handsome,” Harper announced.

Her mother laughed through her tears. “Handsome?”

Harper put her arms around the dog’s neck.

“Because he is,” she said simply.

Part 3: Seven Hundred and Forty Days

Handsome went home with the Quinns three days later, after his paperwork and vaccines were done.

The night before, Bethany sat down with Rachel in the shelter’s small office and opened his file.

“You should know his story,” she said quietly.

Handsome had come into the shelter when he was a year old. Owner surrender. A young family in Meridian.

Bethany turned the intake form so Rachel could read the reason, written in the box at the bottom in a hurried hand.

Kids are scared of his face.

Rachel stared at the words.

“They’d had him since he was a puppy,” Bethany said. “His underbite got worse as he grew. The tongue started hanging out when he was about six months old. Their little girls started crying when he tried to play with them. Calling him a monster.” She shook her head. “So they brought him here.”

“And then two years,” Rachel said quietly.

“Seven hundred and forty days.” Bethany looked down at the file. “Hundreds of families came through. Some of them took his picture. Some of them laughed. A couple of them put him in their arms and then put him right back. Nobody ever filled out an application.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“But here’s what I want you to understand,” she said. “Every single person who walked past his kennel for two years, he ran to the front and wagged for them. Every one. The ones who laughed at him. The ones who said ‘gross.’ The ones who took pictures for their friends.” Her voice cracked a little. “I used to think he just didn’t understand. That he was too sweet to know what they were doing.”

“But?”

“But last summer, a teenage boy came in on a class trip. He stood in front of Kennel 31 and did a whole comedy routine for his friends. Imitating Handsome’s face. Sticking his tongue out. Everybody laughing.” Bethany looked up. “And when they all walked away, that boy hung back for a second. And I saw his face when he thought nobody was looking. He looked so sad. Like he didn’t really want to be doing any of it.”

She swallowed.

“And Handsome went right up to the chain-link and licked his fingers,” Bethany said. “Just him. Not any of the others.”

Rachel sat very still.

“I’ve watched that dog for two years,” Bethany said quietly. “He doesn’t wag at everybody the same. He wags hardest at the sad ones. The kids standing at the back. The people who look like they’re hurting.” She looked toward the door, where Harper was sitting on the hallway floor outside Kennel 31, reading a library book out loud to the little dog through the chain-link. “And when your daughter walked in with her hood up and her head down, I’ve never seen him throw himself at the fence like that. Never.”

Rachel put her hand over her heart.

Handsome came home on a Saturday.

He slept at the foot of Harper’s bed that very first night. In the morning, Rachel found her daughter sitting up in bed, hood down, in her pajamas, giggling, while the little dog licked her face and snorted through his crooked teeth.

For the first two weeks, Harper barely let him out of her sight.

Then, on a Sunday afternoon, she asked her mother for her phone.

“I want to take a picture,” she said. “Of me and Handsome. Together.”

Rachel froze. Harper hadn’t let anyone take a photo of her face in over a year.

They went out to the backyard, under the apple tree. Harper sat in the grass in a yellow T-shirt, hood down, her face fully in the sunlight. Handsome sat in her lap, his tongue hanging out, his bottom teeth sticking up, grinning his crooked grin.

Harper smiled. A real smile. As big as her face would let her.

Rachel took the picture.

Then Harper asked her mother to post it. On Rachel’s own Facebook page. And she told her mother exactly what to write underneath.

We are different. We are still beautiful.

Rachel hesitated with her thumb over the button for a long time.

“Harper,” she said gently. “Sweetheart. People can be really mean online. You know that better than anybody.”

“I know,” Harper said. She put her arms around Handsome. “But people already laughed at him. And people already laughed at me. We’re not scared anymore.”

Rachel posted it.

By Monday morning, it had been shared four hundred thousand times.

By Wednesday, it had been shared three million times.

Then on Wednesday night, a message showed up in Rachel’s inbox.

From a man named Jake Morrell.

Rachel didn’t recognize the name at first. Then she clicked on his profile.

He was the administrator of the Facebook humor page with nine hundred thousand followers.

The one who had posted the picture of Handsome with the caption When your face was built by the lowest bidder.

His message was only one line long.

Mrs. Quinn, I need to talk to you and your daughter. Please.

Part 4: The Lowest Bidder

Rachel didn’t answer for two days.

She was angry. Furious. She read his one-line message over and over and thought about what it had done to her daughter to see those comments. Somebody put this thing out of its misery.

On the third day, he sent another message. A long one.

Mrs. Quinn. I’m the guy who posted the picture of Handsome. I won’t make excuses. I’ve been running that page for six years. I post whatever gets laughs. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about the dog. I didn’t think about anything except the numbers.

Then I saw your daughter’s picture. And I sat in my car in a parking lot for an hour.

I have a son. His name is Caden. He’s six. He was born with a cleft lip and palate. He’s had four surgeries. He has a scar here, from his lip to his nose, and his face is a little different from other kids.

Last week, he came home from kindergarten and asked me why the other kids won’t sit with him at lunch. One of them told him he looked like “one of those funny pictures on the internet.”

I’ve been making those funny pictures on the internet for six years.

I’m so sorry. I’d like to apologize to your daughter in person. And to Handsome. If you’ll let me.

Rachel read it three times.

Then she showed it to Harper.

Harper read it slowly, sitting on the kitchen floor with Handsome in her lap. When she got to the part about Caden, she stopped.

“He has a son,” she said quietly. “Like me.”

“Yeah, baby.”

Harper was quiet for a long time.

“Tell him he can come,” she said.

Jake Morrell came to the Quinns’ house on a Saturday afternoon in May.

He was thirty-four, tall and thin, in a plain gray T-shirt and jeans. He stood on the front porch holding a bag of dog treats like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept.

Holding his hand was a little boy with dark hair and big brown eyes. A thin, pale scar ran from the middle of his upper lip up to his nose. He was hiding behind his father’s leg.

Harper opened the front door with Handsome in her arms.

Jake looked at her face. Really looked. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look away.

He got down on one knee on the porch so he was eye level with her.

“Harper,” he said. His voice cracked. “I’m the one who posted that picture. Of him. And I wrote that mean thing under it. And I let all those people say those cruel things.” He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve to see that. He didn’t deserve it either. Nobody does.”

Harper looked at him for a long moment.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

Jake opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Because I thought it was funny,” he said finally. “Because I never once thought about the dog in the picture as somebody who could be hurt. Or about kids like you.” He looked down at his son, hiding behind his leg. “Or my own kid.”

Then Handsome squirmed out of Harper’s arms.

He hopped down onto the porch. He walked right past Jake. And he went straight to the little boy hiding behind his father’s leg.

Caden peeked out.

Handsome sat down in front of him. Tilted his head. Tongue hanging out. Crooked teeth. Curly tail wagging.

Caden stared at him. Then he slowly reached out and touched the little dog’s jutting jaw with one finger.

“His face is different,” Caden whispered.

“Yep,” Harper said. She knelt down next to them. “So is mine. So is yours.”

Caden looked at Harper. At her face. Up close.

Then he touched the scar on his own lip.

“Do kids laugh at you too?” he asked her.

Harper nodded.

“Do they laugh at him?”

“They used to,” Harper said. “They put his picture on the internet and laughed at it.” She glanced up at Jake. “But he didn’t stop smiling. Not even once. So I decided I wasn’t going to either.”

Handsome leaned forward and licked the scar on Caden’s lip.

Caden giggled.

Jake Morrell sat down on the porch steps and put his face in his hands.

Rachel brought out lemonade. They sat in the backyard under the apple tree for three hours while Caden and Harper threw a tennis ball for Handsome.

Before he left, Jake handed Rachel an envelope.

Inside was a letter, typed and signed. A promise. He would pay for every single one of Handsome’s veterinary bills for the rest of the dog’s life. Food. Dental care for his underbite. Everything.

“It’s not enough,” Jake said quietly. “But it’s what I can do.”

That night, Jake deleted his humor page. All six years of it. Nine hundred thousand followers.

Then he posted one last thing before it went dark. The picture of Harper and Handsome under the apple tree.

I’m the one who posted this dog’s picture to make fun of him. I was wrong. This is what he really looks like. And this is the bravest kid I’ve ever met.

It was shared two million more times.

Rachel stood in Harper’s bedroom doorway that night, watching her daughter sleep with Handsome curled on her chest.

For the first time in years, she felt like maybe everything was going to be okay.

Two weeks later, Harper’s school asked if she would speak at the end-of-year assembly.

In front of all four hundred students.

Part 5: The Assembly

Harper said yes.

Rachel couldn’t believe it. Her daughter, who hadn’t raised her hand in class in a year, wanted to stand in front of the whole school at Garfield Elementary and talk.

“I’m bringing Handsome,” Harper said. “He’s going to help.”

She practiced every night for two weeks. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror. In front of her mother. In front of Handsome, who sat on the bath mat with his tongue out and wagged at every word.

On the last Friday in May, she stood in the middle of the Garfield Elementary gymnasium in a yellow T-shirt, hood down, with Handsome on a leash beside her and a microphone in her hand.

Four hundred kids on the bleachers. Teachers along the walls. Rachel in the front row, gripping her purse so hard her knuckles were white.

“My name is Harper Quinn,” Harper said into the microphone. Her voice was shaking. “And this is my dog, Handsome.”

She told them. About Treacher Collins. About the eleven surgeries. About the pictures kids had taken of her at lunch. About Handsome, two years in a shelter, his picture on the internet with all those mean comments.

“He didn’t stop smiling,” Harper said. “So I’m not going to either.”

Some of the teachers were crying. Most of the kids were quiet.

But up in the top row of the bleachers, a group of sixth-grade boys were whispering. Snickering. One of them had his phone out under his knee, filming.

Harper saw it. She kept going. She finished.

The gym clapped. Most of it.

That night, the video showed up on social media.

Thirty seconds. Harper at the microphone, her face filling the screen, her voice shaking. Handsome beside her with his tongue out. Someone had put a caption on it. And a laughing sound effect.

Beauty and the Beast. Except there’s no beauty.

It spread through every phone at Garfield Elementary by Saturday morning. Then to the middle school. Then beyond.

The comments were worse than anything that had ever been said about Handsome.

Rachel found out on Sunday morning, when she heard Harper crying in her bedroom.

Her daughter was sitting on the floor with her mother’s old iPad in her lap, reading the comments. Her hood was pulled up. All the way up. Over her eyes.

Rachel took the iPad away. It was too late.

Harper didn’t come out of her room on Sunday.

On Monday, she wouldn’t go to school. Or Tuesday. Or Wednesday.

She stopped eating dinner at the table. She stopped reading. She kept her hood up even in her own bed.

And she wouldn’t let Handsome in her room.

The little dog lay outside her closed bedroom door all day. Every day. His crooked chin on his paws. His tongue hanging out onto the carpet. Every time he heard her move inside, his curly tail thumped against the door.

She never opened it.

On Thursday night, Rachel sat on the hallway floor next to Handsome and spoke through the door.

“Harper. Baby. Please let me in.”

For a long time, nothing.

Then, very quietly, through the door:

“Mom. I want to give Handsome back.”

Rachel felt like she’d been hit in the chest.

“Harper, no. Why?”

“Because they laugh harder when we’re together.” Harper was crying. “It was bad before. But now it’s worse. Now they have two of us to laugh at. If he wasn’t with me, maybe they’d leave him alone. Maybe somebody else would adopt him. Somebody normal.”

“Sweetheart…”

“And I don’t want my surgery in July,” Harper sobbed. “I don’t want any more surgeries. What’s the point? I’m still going to look like this. They’re still going to laugh. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

Rachel put her hand flat against the bedroom door.

On the floor beside her, Handsome had stopped wagging. He lay with his face pressed against the crack at the bottom of the door, his crooked teeth against the carpet, whining softly. A small, broken sound.

“Please call the shelter tomorrow, Mom,” Harper whispered through the door. “Please. Let him go to somebody who won’t make it worse.”

Rachel sat on the hallway floor next to the little dog in the dark.

She didn’t know what to do.

Part 6: The Boy at the Door

On Saturday morning, someone knocked on the Quinns’ front door.

It was Jake Morrell. And Caden.

The little boy’s eyes were red and swollen. He was holding a piece of paper folded in half.

“I’m sorry to just show up,” Jake said quietly. “Caden saw the video. Of Harper at her school.” He shook his head. “Somebody showed it to him at kindergarten. On a phone. And then a kid in his class told him he’d be the next one.”

Caden’s lip was trembling.

“He hasn’t stopped crying,” Jake said. “He keeps asking if Harper’s okay. He made her something.”

Rachel let them in.

Caden walked down the hallway to Harper’s closed bedroom door. Handsome was still lying in front of it, his chin on the carpet.

The little dog lifted his head. When he saw Caden, his tail thumped. Once.

Caden knelt down beside him. He slid his folded piece of paper under the door.

“Harper,” he said, his voice small. “It’s me. Caden.”

Silence.

“I made you a picture,” Caden said. “Of you and Handsome and me. Under the apple tree.” He sniffed. “A kid at school said I’m gonna be on the internet next. And I got scared. And I didn’t want to go to school anymore.”

On the other side of the door, there was a small sound.

“But then I thought about you at the big assembly,” Caden said. “With the microphone. In front of everybody. And I thought, Harper’s the bravest person in the whole world.” He started crying. “So please don’t stop being brave. Because if you stop, I don’t know how to keep going.”

Handsome pressed his nose against the crack under the door and whined.

Then he did something he’d never done before.

He barked. One sharp, snorting, crooked-toothed bark.

Then he scratched at the door with both front paws. Hard. Again and again. Crying. Pushing his whole little body against it.

The door opened.

Harper stood there in her pajamas with her hood up and her face blotchy from crying, holding Caden’s picture in her hand.

Handsome launched himself at her.

He jumped into her arms, knocked her backward onto the carpet, and licked her face, the way he had the very first day on the shelter floor. Her cheeks. Her chin. Her scars. Licking the tears right off her face, snorting, his curly tail spinning.

Harper wrapped her arms around him and sobbed into his scruffy ginger fur.

Then she looked up at Caden, standing in her doorway, crying.

And she pushed her hood back.

“Come here,” she said.

Caden ran to her. Harper wrapped one arm around him and the other around Handsome, and the three of them sat in a heap on her bedroom floor.

Rachel stood in the hallway with her hand over her mouth. Jake stood beside her, wiping his eyes.

“I’m not giving him back,” Harper said into Handsome’s fur. “I’m sorry I said that. I’m sorry, Handsome.”

Later, sitting at the kitchen table with Caden’s drawing in front of her, Harper told her mother something.

“When I saw that picture of him,” she said slowly, “the one with all the mean comments. I cried because it was like looking at me. But I also got really, really mad.” She looked down at the dog asleep in her lap. “Because he didn’t do anything wrong. He just had a different face. And they were laughing at him anyway.”

Rachel waited.

“And that’s when I figured something out,” Harper said. “If it was wrong for them to laugh at him…” She swallowed. “Then it was wrong for them to laugh at me too. It wasn’t my fault. It was never my fault.”

She stroked Handsome’s crooked jaw.

“Everybody thinks I rescued him,” Harper said quietly. “But I’d stopped taking my hood off. I’d stopped talking at school. I was trying to be invisible.” Her eyes filled. “He was the first one who ever looked at my face and was happy. Not sad. Not scared. Happy.”

She looked at Caden, sitting across the table with a cookie.

“And now I’m gonna do it for somebody else,” she said.

She looked up at her mother.

“Mom,” Harper said. “Call the hospital. I want my surgery in July.”

Part 7: Unique

Harper had her twelfth surgery in July. Handsome slept on her hospital bed every night for a week, by special permission from the children’s hospital in Salt Lake City. The nurses took turns sneaking him bacon.

In September, Harper went back to Garfield Elementary.

Hood down.

That fall, she and Handsome visited their first school. A small elementary school in Nampa, twenty minutes away. A counselor there had seen the photo under the apple tree and called Rachel.

Harper stood in the gym with Handsome on his leash beside her and said exactly what she’d said before.

“My name is Harper Quinn. And this is my dog, Handsome. We’re different. We’re still beautiful.”

Then she let every kid in the gym come up and pet him.

They’ve been to eighty-three schools now. In Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Washington. Sometimes Caden comes along. He wears a T-shirt that says Team Handsome and stands right next to Harper while she talks.

Jake Morrell drives them. He pays for Handsome’s vet bills, just like he promised. Last year, Handsome had dental surgery on his underbite to make sure his crooked teeth would never hurt him. It didn’t change his face. He still has the jutting jaw. The tongue still hangs out. Harper wouldn’t let them change a thing.

At the Treasure Valley Animal Shelter, Bethany Cole convinced Greg Powell to change the way they photograph the long-term dogs.

No more orange stickers. No more low adoption potential. Every dog with a crooked face, a missing eye, a strange ear or a tongue that won’t stay in gets a new label on their kennel card now.

Unique.

And they’re photographed the way Harper photographed Handsome. Outside. In the sunshine. Grinning.

That year, the number of dogs with unusual faces adopted from Treasure Valley doubled.

Last spring, Harper and Handsome visited the shelter on a Saturday afternoon. They walked down the long row of kennels together, past Kennel 31.

At the end of the row, a little gray terrier with one eye and a scar across her nose was pressed against the chain-link, wagging. A young family was standing in front of her kennel.

They weren’t walking past.

They’d stopped. The little boy was on his knees, his fingers through the wire, giggling while the one-eyed dog licked them.

Harper stood back and watched with Handsome leaning against her legs.

For seven hundred and forty days, a little dog with a crooked grin smiled at everyone who walked past his kennel, and nobody ever stopped.

Now, Harper stopped at every single one.

They took his picture to make fun of his underbite and his tongue. My daughter had already had eleven surgeries on her face. She looked at that picture and cried, “People laugh at me like that too.” Then she named him Handsome.

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