In Dallas, after a small show in the packed Majestic Theater downtown, the girls did a live interview on a radio station that broadcast from a garage in the plush suburb of Highland Park.  Run by two sophomores at Southern Methodist University, KBAD played only heavy metal with an emphasis on the degenerate glam spectacle of the eighties and what was left of it in the nineties: Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Cinderella, Pretty Boy Floyd, Motley Crue, Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns and anything else with hair and groupies.  Floozie fit right in.  The station owners, who were also the DJs, Mark and Ty, weren’t in it for the money – all they wanted to do was rock out, courtesy of their wealthy parents’ money.  Both guys were nuts about Floozie and had delayed KBAD’s usual 9:05 p.m. Saturday night kick-off so they could attend the Majestic show.

     It was 11:45 when they went on the air.

     After some canned intro music (“Girls, Girls, Girls,” no less) and a hearty welcome of the band to “the most rockin’ airwaves in Texas,” Mark said, “You guys rock so hard, I can barely believe it!”  He had long, straight brown hair and a grill of indecipherable tattoos on his left arm.  “My damn ears are still ringing.  Okay – I heard your record like a million times, but, you know, you can do anything in the studio and make it kick, but you guys are way better live.”

     “We love playing in Dallas,” Heather said as if she’d been there ten or twelve times already.  “So many cute guys and girls, you can’t even count them all.  That’s what makes it all happen on stage.”

     Ty had a big, floppy flounce of blond hair, like Robert Plant’s before he cut it, and was manic with energy.  I guessed cocaine.

     “A lot of our listeners . . .” he began.

     “Yeah, all twenty of them,” Mark joked.

     “No way, man, we got at least thirty that I know of – and like half of them owe me money.  Anyway, a lot of listeners have been calling up and begging us to play ‘A Tear Comes from Here’ like forty times a day – which is stupid ‘cause we’re only on three days a week for three hours at a time.  I totally rock out to that tune.  We see it on MTV all the time.”

     “Very sexy,” Mark said.

     “‘Nursery Rhymes’ is on MTV, too,” Krystal reminded him.

     “That one’s even sexier.”

     “Yeah, no shit – we dig that one, too,” Ty said.  “I wish I was that teacher sometimes, the way he gets to look under your desks, you know, when you’re sitting there.  Well, I guess it’s the camera that’s doing the looking, since it’s all Hollywood and everything – like, in other words, I know it’s just a video, but still.”

     “They may be babes, but they’re underage babes,” Mark cautioned, looking briefly (desirously) at the girls.  “Remember all that shit with that girl singer from Plano.”

     “Damn, I almost forgot about her.  Maybe I will someday, if you don’t keep reminding me about it all the time.”

     “Yeah, me and Child Protective Services.”

     “No shit.”  Ty motioned at Lilly, who was seated in line with the other girls on one side of a felt-covered poker table.  “Lilly, you wrote ‘A Tear Comes from Here’, right?”

     “Me and Gary did.”

     “Very cool song,” Mark said.  “I play along with it on my guitar.  And not air-guitar, either.  I can play that sucker.”

     “What kind of guitar you got?” Krystal said.

     “Byrdland, like the Nuge.”

     Krystal gave him a confused look.

     “Ted Nugent,” Mark said.

     “Oh, yeah, ‘Cat Scratch Fever.’”

     “Nuge rocks, but he’s too damn straight for my tastes.”

     “You thought he was gay?” Krystal said.  “Ted Nugent?”

     “No, straight, like in he don’t party.  Anyway, ‘A Tear Comes from Here.’  What’s the symbolism, Lilly?  What’s it mean, ‘a tear comes from here’?”

     As I had done before, I crossed my mental fingers.

     She gave me a quick glance and said, “It’s sort of about sex . . .”

     “Well, duh.  Like you guys sing about anything else.”

     “With yourself.”

     “I see,” Ty said.

     Five seconds of dead air followed.  I uncrossed my fingers.

     “That’s cool,” he said.  “Guys sing about it, why not girls?”

     “Guys don’t sing about that crap,” Mark said.

     Heather laughed; Celeste looked like she wanted to leave.

     “Bullshit.”

     “What song?  Name one.”

     “‘Imaginary Lover’ by that Atlanta group – rhythm group, or whatever they’re called.”

     Mark rolled his eyes and slung his hair back over his shoulders.  “I don’t even know who they are.”

     “Don’t matter, they suck.  Pop band from the seventies.”

     “Anyway,” Mark said, “you guys are teenagers – let’s go over your ages real quick.”

     Heather said, “Fifteen.”

     Lilly said, “Fourteen.”

     Krystal said, “Sixteen – July twentieth, so you guys can send me stuff when I turn seventeen next year.”

     “We already got the perfect thing in mind,” Ty said.

     “Me, too,” Krystal said.

     A little more dead air, and Celeste said, “Does it matter how old I am?”

     “More than you could ever know,” Mark said.

     “I’m sixteen.”

     “You look really good for sixteen,” Ty said.

     Mark tapped Ty’s hand with a pen.  “Plano, buddy, Plano.  Okay, so what’s it like getting up there in front of all those people?  You played Tarrant County last night.  That must have been friggin’ awesome.  We saw Aerosmith there in ninety-one, when we were in, like, ninth grade or something.”

     “It was pretty wild,” Heather said.  “You never really know what to expect, no matter where you play or how big the place is.”

     “The show itself is kind of secondary,” Celeste said.

     “How so?” Ty said.

     “Well, it’s like we pretty much play the same songs, do things the same way every night.  It’s the people that give each show its unique personality, I guess you could say.”

     Mark and Ty broke to play commercials for a tattoo parlor and a check-cashing outfit, then they ran a taped reminder that KBAD was the only radio station in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that played non-stop real metal, then they played the song “Nursery Rhymes.”

     Live with the girls again, Mark said, “We’re back here with Floozie, the hottest schoolgirls on the planet–”

     “Baddest schoolgirls on the planet,” Krystal corrected.

     “From this angle, I’d say hottest,” Mark corrected.  “Let’s talk about when you’re out on tour.  You guys stay at hotels and stuff on the road?”

     “Motels, mainly, if you’re differentiating,” Heather said.

     “Motel 6, Super 8, that kind of thing,” Krystal said.  “Real swanky joints.”

     Lilly and Celeste laughed.

     “What about parties?” Ty said.  “Do you have wild parties and trash motel rooms?”

     “Next tour,” Krystal said, and now everybody laughed except Krystal.

     Mark gave Ty a thumbs-up and said, “What kind of reaction do you get at your school?  We got some of your press stuff that just said you go to a private school.  Where is it?”

     “Studio City, near where we all live in California,” Celeste said.

     When Krystal saw me put my finger on my lips, she added, “Right, we’re not supposed to say where the school is, because of security issues or some kind of thing.  It’s called Shadowridge Academy, and it’s on Coldwater Canyon in Studio City, right off Ventura Boulevard.  And we hope every one of our fans in Dallas comes to visit us there as soon as possible.  Just walk in.  You can bring alcohol and drugs, nobody gives a shit.”

     I laughed hard before I could catch myself, and that made Lilly laugh.

     “This isn’t getting played back in L.A., right?” Krystal said, laughing a little herself, which got Heather and Celeste giggling.

     “I don’t think we reach quite that far,” Ty said.

     “I just didn’t want my mom to hear it or anything.”

     “So,” Mark said, “what do all your friends at Shadowridge Academy on Coldwater Canyon where nobody gives a shit about drugs and alcohol think about you being in a band with a killer CD and two videos and all that essential stuff?”

     “We don’t have any friends,” Heather said.  “What I mean is, we didn’t have any friends before the band, so we don’t care about friends now.  We’ve got each other.”

     “That’s sweet,” Mark said.

     “You had friends before the band,” Celeste said to Heather.

     “Not since seventh grade.”  To Mark and Ty: “We were never that popular before Floozie.”

     “Somehow I find that hard to believe,” Ty said.

     “Well, believe it,” Krystal said.  “Okay, Celeste was always popular, at least since puberty, but only because of how she looks, not her personality.”

     “Krystal, shut up,” Celeste said, reddening a little.

     Ty looked longingly at her.  I felt his pain at not being able to have her instantly.  She gave him a beautiful look that said: Not until the earth collides with the sun.

     “No shit,” he said.

     “We don’t have time for stuff outside the band,” Heather said.

     “What about school in general?” Mark said.

     “Well, we still have to go, if that’s what you mean, so we make time for it.”

     “And this guy sitting all quiet over there, your manager – he basically created Floozie, right?”

     “Yeah,” Heather said.  “Gary’s a genius, even though you wouldn’t know it to look at him.”

     The girls laughed uproariously.  Heather playfully stuck out her tongue at me.

     “Seriously,” Krystal said, “he had this whole vision for us all mapped out, before he even knew us.  It was all planned.  We were like his destiny.”

     Mark motioned me to the table; reluctantly I slid my chair up next to Celeste.

     “He’s like our dad,” Heather went on.  “He and Lilly live together.”

     “She’s staying with me,” I said quickly.

     “I have my own bedroom,” Lilly said.

     “Now, you wrote most of the Floozie songs, right?” Mark said.

     “Except for ‘A Tear Comes from Here.’”

     “He’s a great guitarist and teacher,” Krystal said.  “And a good protector.  He keeps us out of trouble.  Him and our bodyguards.”

     “We have bodyguards now,” Heather said.

     “Mainly to keep Lilly from wandering off with a stranger,” Krystal said.

     Lilly sucked some root beer into her straw and spit it at Krystal.  It splattered in her hair.  Heather started laughing her head off and scooted out of the way just as Krystal reached over and grabbed one of Lilly’s long braids.  A fun little skirmish followed.  Within a few seconds, two soda cans were upended and started foaming all over the poker table.  The girls were getting loud and out of control.

     “Hey, hey, easy, while we still got a studio here,” Ty said.  “It ain’t much, but it pays the bills.  We’re going to play ‘A Tear Comes from Here’ after a break, so as we go into that, one of you tell all twenty-five of our devoted metal-maniac listeners what your plans are from here on out.”

     Heather said, “We’ll be on the road till November 18, then we’re going in the studio to do another album, sometime after the first of the year.  A very different concept.”

     “What’s the concept?” Mark said.

     “Girls,” Krystal said and somehow made the word sound as delectable as chocolate.

     “Well, shit, count me in,” Ty said.

     “I’m all over that, dude,” Mark said and gave Ty a loud high-five.

     “And then we’re going to basically take over the world,” Krystal said.  “Because we can.”