Bridget filled a lot of her days by going to a group in Bellevue called Youth Eastside Services—or Y.E.S., set up to help homeless teenagers. Dave thought it was pointless to go there. There wasn’t anything to do but hang out all day and play backgammon. When the sun went down, savvy teens knew they could score drugs at another group allegedly meant to help street kids. Dave found the “counselors” there creepy and didn’t feel they were a positive influence on Bridget.

“I’d meet her there to rescue her by going for walks with her for hours. She said some of the counselors had made fairly sleazy advances, but, of course, her self-esteem was so low that she thought it was something she had done that made them do that.” When the place was investigated for suspicion of sexual abuse and drugs, it was closed down.

Bridget sometimes went to a kind of hobo jungle in an overgrown lot close to downtown Bellevue. Teens would gather there and live in their cars. She also hung out at a Bellevue bowling alley where aimless dropouts gathered.

Bridget maintained a brittle, tough facade most of the time.

“She had a fearless nihilistic quality that I really admired at the time,” Dave recalled. “Now, I see that we were both just scared of life and it wasn’t going very well for us. We were accepting failure as a given and then going from there. There is strength in facing the worst and not caring, because it couldn’t hurt you if you’ve been hurt enough already.”

Bridget was far from morose or depressing to be around. “She was ‘up’ almost all the time, and she had a quick and clever way about her. She wasn’t afraid to speak plainly, so she was refreshingly ‘no B.S.’ ”

But Dave realized there were things that could really hurt her. Bridget mentioned something to him once about having a baby, and he shot back, without really thinking, “Oh, you’d be an awful mother!” Her face crumpled as she answered, “That’s a terrible thing to say!” And she began to cry. It was the first and last time he saw her cry. He panicked when he remembered that she’d said she’d lost a baby, and apologized. She seemed so tough most of the time that he thought she had no nurturing qualities at all, and he was too young to realize how tender she was behind her mask.

“Well, look at your own mother,” he countered. “She did a lousy job with you.” Bridget nodded and calmed down.

“I never met a funnier girl—or one more in pain. Sometimes, when she would knock on my window at night, I would ask ‘Who is it?’ as if I didn’t know, and she would say ‘My mother’ in a funny voice. God, she was funny.”

He didn’t know that she had had two mothers—her birth mother, and Patricia Meehan who had raised her lovingly.

Dave heard Bridget call home once to ask if she could come by and take some things she needed from her old room, and was apparently told that she couldn’t.

“I took the phone away from her,” Dave recalled. “I screamed at her mother that they were treating their daughter like shit and that they should be ashamed of themselves. She hung up on me.”

There were several aspects of Bridget’s life that Dave was unaware of. The Meehans had become wary of having their two youngest children come to the house when they weren’t there. Bridget, and sometimes her brother Tim, would take things from their parents’ home to sell for cash: coins and other collectibles.

“It was typical teen attitude, I think,” Bridget’s brother Dennis said. “They figured that anything in the house belonged to them.”

One day, Bridget convinced Dave to go with her to her house when she knew no one would be there. They went to the neat home in a good neighborhood, and Bridget opened a window she knew would be unlocked, then she let Dave in through a side door. He saw that the house was tidy and the objets d’art were expensive. “But it all looked like it was unused. Bridget was really embarrassed by an old family picture and she took it off the wall so I couldn’t look at it, and replaced it when we left.”

Dave had stayed in the living room/rec room while she gathered some of her clothes in her bedroom. She called him in to show it to him. “It looked like it hadn’t been changed a bit since she left, almost like a museum to their ‘ideal’ child, like someone might save if their child died. I really don’t know why they wouldn’t let her come home. I think she really wanted to.”

Dave looked through Bridget’s albums and she was humiliated when he came across a few of the Doors’ records. She thought them “teeny-bopper” stuff. Her favorite recording artists were the Seattle group Heart, and the B-52s. She explained that it was because they were strong women doing creative work.

“The Doors weren’t really doing music.” Bridget laughed. “They just thought they were.”

Dave and Bridget bought Pink Floyd’s new tape, The Wall, which was what they identified with in 1980. Their love for music was, perhaps, their strongest bond. Bridget told him that she wanted to be a singer, and Dave realized that she had a lovely voice as she sang songs like Heart’s “Heart of Glass” and “Tugboat Annie,” or from B-52 albums. She talked about writing songs, but she never sang any for him. He would realize many years later that they were both “victims of rock,” with grand plans but no action to carry them out. It didn’t matter in their fantasy world.

Dave would do almost anything to please Bridget. She once admired a plaster seagull anchored to an iron base behind a dentist’s building. “I twisted that seagull for about forty minutes until it came loose. The next day, we walked by that same spot hand in hand, laughing because two guys were out there scratching their heads and arguing about where the bird went. They didn’t even glance at us and we laughed openly about it and at them.”

They often ran into teenagers that Bridget had known from Bellevue High School, and she told Dave afterward that she felt they looked down on her. She hadn’t fit into the social life there, where many students came from wealthy homes. “They’re just jerks,” she said.

Dave had gone to Lake Sammamish High School, which was more laid-back, situated as it was near the newer, less posh neighborhoods. Later, his mother had sent him to private school—Icthus—on Mercer Island, one of the upper-class bastions among Seattle suburbs. But neither of them made him feel like an outcast as Bridget seemed to believe she was.

Dave sensed that he was the most intelligent boyfriend she had had, and her intelligence matched his, but they were both broke and there was no way they could make a home together. “I may have painted a darker portrait of us than I should have,” he would say with the wisdom gained over two decades. “We were cynical and messed up, but our emphasis was on staying above it all. We were a bunch of people with great potential but low self-esteem. Bridget and I were perhaps the most extreme examples of that. We bonded.”

Bridget worked that summer of 1980 as a maid at a Holiday Inn and then at a nursing home, making minimum wage. She had always been attracted to people who were down on their luck. Just as she had rescued stray animals when she was a girl, she now tried to save people in trouble. Toward the end of the summer, she got involved with a teen named Brian who had a huge hole in his leg because he’d fallen on a sprinkler while he was intoxicated. She looked after him and changed the bandages on his wound.

“The guy was seriously messed up,” Dave said. “And I think she felt sorry for him. It lasted for about five days…. When I asked her about him afterward, she dismissed him with ‘He’s a dreamer. He’ll never get anywhere—all he does is talk.’ It hit a little close to home, and I knew what she was thinking. We were all dreamers.”

Bridget was always too thin, and Dave fought gaining weight. She had either low blood sugar or diabetes—he can no longer remember which—but she loved candy and told him she had to eat it for health. “I remember isolated things about her,” he said. “That Paul Simon’s only movie, One Trick Pony, was her favorite movie, and blue was her favorite color.”