Fast and Loose

"He's told me he isn't with them," Hines says. Does she believe him? "Yeah, I think so." Why does she stay? "He makes me feel like nobody else in the world exists," she says.

Some experts look to childhood experiences to explain this female fascination with the cad. "Whether we melt for wounded poets, melodramatic daredevils or charming con men depends on what kind of masculine role models we were exposed to," Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman writes in her book "Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live With Them, When to Leave Them."

Also: Think of the sense of adventure, tantalizing especially to the good girl. "He'd be kind of intimidating. He'd influence you to be bad. It wouldn't be boring," says a girl hanging out with her friends at Springfield Mall.

"Everybody would know them, so when you were with them, you'd be well known, too," offers another girl.

Not so fast, says the liveliest girl in the group. Her name is Felicia Cameron and she's a tall, athletic graduate of Lee High School on her way to Old Dominion University in the fall. She has seen a lot of playing and wants no part of it.

"I know a guy who's 21. When he was in high school, he had a sweetheart in one school and several other girlfriends in several other schools."

He would use the same techniques on each girl, she says. One was: "He'd find out from her friend what her favorite movie was, then he'd see her one day and say, 'My favorite movie is. . . . Have you ever seen it?' Pretty soon, he'd be into, 'You're the best,' and 'I think I'm falling in love with you.' "

In this lucky guy's case, none of the young women ever found out about the others, she says. But sometimes they do.

Cameron continues: At Lee's annual male talent show earlier this year, four young women who discovered they had been played by the same guy conspired to sit together. When the rake came onstage to Lil' Flip's song "Game Over!," they knew they had him. Together, they loudly sang the refrain, "Game over! Flip! Flip! Flip!" and watched, with considerable glee, as he slunk away.

Wanting What You Don't Have

Duane Tigney arrives at his senior prom with a beautiful brunette in a lavender party dress that is made to dance in. This is his full-time "chick"; her name is Laura Brookhiser, and she has her hands planted firmly on his lower back in a futile attempt to push him past all the girls whom he pauses to hug or kiss on the cheek.

They've already partied with about 20 other couples at Albrittain's, then in the stretch limousine, and together they move easily and suggestively on the floor of the Clarendon Ballroom. Even a call on Tigney's cell phone doesn't stop their dancing.

"While he's gone out with other people before me, and not been that faithful to them, [our relationship] is different," Brookhiser says. "He's never, like, done anything. He just flirts. It's okay, I guess."

"It's not that these guys play hard to get," Erin Dall-Silver says at the prom. "It's just that once someone has 'em, another girl wants 'em. Girls want what they can't have. At least I do."

Dall-Silver is Huston's date of the evening. Tall and regal in a strapless, tight, white Jessica McClintock gown, she says she and Huston have only been "talking" for three months and that she knew before she asked Huston to the prom that he wouldn't stick by her side. "I'd be upset if I found out he was kissing someone," she admits. She spends a lot of time at the prom looking for her escort.