''See,'' she says, still trying to remember, ''this is proof that they didn't go anywhere! They didn't want to do teen press! I said, 'They are teenagers. They're 19! What do you mean, they don't want to do teen press?' ''

Wait, she remembers now. Eve 6. Pop-punk guys, power trio, interesting T-shirts. Teenagers. Majewski wanted to use their song in ''Know the Words,'' a Teen People front-of-the-book featurette that parses pop-song lyrics so Teen People's people can better sing along. Think of it -- Teen People's 2-million-plus audience, a massive and ever-growing cross-section of young America, could have had the words to this alt-rock gem down cold like pivotal history-class dates. All those kids, screaming from the cheap seats about wanting to put their tender hearts in blenders and watch 'em spin around to a beautiful oblivion, and Eve 6 said they didn't want to do teen press, that they were worried about losing their credibility, and (in so many words) that this kind of stuff was, y'know, corny, so no thanks.

''And I said, 'Excuse me?' '' Majewski recalls. ''And, all right, where did they go?''

Silence. Crickets chirping. Point taken. She doesn't seem particularly irked by the memory of the slight itself, just shocked that any band would turn down her magazine on those grounds.

Teen People, after all, is no mere Oxy-sponsored locker-door-poster rag. Spun off from Time Inc.'s venerable entertainment glossy People in January 1998, aimed squarely at the opinion leaders of the too-young-to-buy-beer demographic, Teen People blossomed fast, establishing a beachhead in the crowded teen-mag sector by emphasizing entertainment coverage. While competitors like Seventeen, Teen and YM still pull better circulation numbers overall -- during the first half of 2000, market leader Seventeen averaged 2.37 million copies sold per month to Teen People's 1.67 million -- Teen People's growth spurt has defied expectations. In the two years since it first hit the stands, the magazine has upped its rate base -- the minimum number of eyeballs a publication guarantees its advertisers -- from 500,000 to 1.6 million, as of its February 2001 issue.

And while Teen People covers all the teen-mag bases from month to month -- fashion, makeup, accounts of public humiliation involving tampons -- it's effectively an entertainment magazine content-wise. And to the extent that you can judge a magazine by its covers, it's a music magazine: Ten (or 11, if you're willing to give Jennifer Lopez her pop-diva bona fides) of Teen People's 12 covers in 2000 featured music stars, from boy-band stalwarts the Backstreet Boys to platinum-selling poop aficionados Blink 182 to panties advocate Sisqo.

So it's a music magazine, one that happens to be aimed at -- and reaches -- a segment of the CD-buying public most music bizzers would trade their right arms and their framed Don Henley grip-n'-grin photos to tap. A music magazine that averaged a whopping 676,000 copies sold on newsstands for the first six months of 2000, consistently mopping the floor with more established music glossies such as Spin and Vibe and the Source and that other magazine, whaddayacallit, the one in the Dr. Hook song. Oh yeah. Rolling Stone.

Launched in 1998 under editor Christina Ferrari, Teen People's arrival on newsstands coincided serendipitously with a record-breaking boom in the teen-music sector. The Backstreet Boys made the magazine's cover in its first year, back when they were still in their awkward, huge-in-Europe phase; after that, the deluge commenced. ''Before we knew it,'' Ferrari says, ''there was Britney, and there was 'N Sync, and Christina Aguilera. And what started to happen was the demand for music that appeals to teens became so big, record companies realized that quickly and responded to it, and everybody started seeing success. And what we were seeing was a corresponding connection between the numbers of CDs these people were selling and newsstand sales. For us, it's been kind of a no-brainer.

''We don't want to ignore television and movies,'' Ferrari adds. ''We just had a Charlie's Angels cover, and we've had other movie stars as well. But they tend to be big, big people. They have to have a huge fan base in order to reach the kind of numbers that our music covers are getting.''

Under Majewski, Teen People's music coverage is to the cresting wave of teen pop what Jon Schechter and Dave Mays's the Source was to hip-hop's late-'80s heyday, simultaneously stoking and responding to the passions of a specialized audience. And when it comes to minting stars for this audience, the magazine's clout is ''massive,'' according to Lois Najarian, head of publicity at Clive Davis's fledgling J Records imprint. ''Somehow,'' Najarian says, ''they've tapped into something so right. They know what kids like, and they deliver it better than a whole music magazine.'' And with teen pop's stock -- the Backstreet bubble-burst notwithstanding -- still bullishly high, Majewski ranks alongside influential rock-press editors like Rolling Stone's Joe Levy and the Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn. She's a power-broker for the pubescent set, the print equivalent of Total Request Live prince/babysitter Carson Daly.

Majewski's magazine-world experience includes a mid-'90s stint as an intern at Spin (she's remembered for despising grunge, not exactly a safe stance to take back when Seattle was in flower). Later, as an editor at Teen People competitor YM, she pushed for music coverage that gave pop stars the same level of props the magazine traditionally gave actors and models; today, she takes credit for getting both No Doubt's Gwen Stefani and Toni Braxton on YM's cover.

More importantly, Majewski spent her formative years doing the best research a future teen-mag editor could do: worshipping pop stars with zeal and devotion, devouring Star Hits -- the American version of the British teen-music mag Smash Hits, known for its elevated attitude toward goofy kid stuff -- and basking in the sallow magnetism of the Cure, the Smiths, Depeche Mode and Spandau Ballet.

Above all, Majewski worshipped Duran Duran, camping outside hotels and recording studios for an encounter with Simon and co., and editing the unofficial Duran fanclub's newsletter -- Too Much Information, the Definitive Duranzine -- well into the '90s, even as the group's audience dwindled. (Majewski hasn't lost touch with that part of her history; when she sits down for an interview at Teen People's offices a few days after the Destiny's shoot, she's sporting a Culture Club T-shirt which, as a fellow Teen People staffer notes approvingly, is vintage, ''not from, like, Trash & Vaudeville.'')

Having accrued that firsthand experience in the teen-fan trenches, Majewski is uniquely suited to serve as a cultural gatekeeper for today's fans. Unlike the crusty rock critics malingering on the mastheads of many music magazines, she actually likes these bands -- or, at the very least, remembers what it was like to live for a band that crusty rock critics hated.

''As somebody who was obsessed with a band, and who loved these groups so much, I understand these kids,'' Majewski says. ''In my office, I have old Star Hits, old Duran Duran tour books, a picture of me and Nick Rhodes circa 1985 -- things that remind me of what it was like to be a teenager. I never forget. I'm still a teenager.''

Later, Majewski elaborates, pointing out that many music journalists ''look down their noses'' at teen pop when they deem it worthy of coverage at all. ''We're not here to make that judgment,'' Majewski says, ''because kids don't make that judgment. Kids don't sit in an office and make a judgment on a group because of the clothes they wear.''

Striving to avoid knee-jerk cynicism is, to be sure, an admirable goal for any journalist. And Majewski insists that despite the overwhelmingly positive spin the magazine puts on most of its editorial, there's nothing fluffy about its coverage -- in particular, she cites the newsy angles Teen People took in recent stories on Eminem and 'N Sync (Teen People got them to go on record about their lawsuit with Lou Pearlman's Transcontinental Records, before a gag order took effect). And she's not wrong, exactly.

But the fact remains that no one ever went broke being a little extra nice to multiplatinum recording artists. There's a reason -- beyond circulation -- why Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, who's made no secret of his belief that most music journalists are craven playa-haters -- wanted to make Teen People the one and only cover story his band did to promote their recent album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. Teen People may not shy away from tough stories about pop acts, but its editorial voice defaults to a certain the-kids-are-all-right credulity. The cover of Teen People may rival Rolling Stone as a ''get'' for music publicists these days, but that's partly because Teen People has dispensed with the old, somewhat romantic idea of a music magazine as a hipster-staffed buffer between the record-buying public and the scheming record industry.

Still, Majewski takes pride in Teen People's newsgathering staff of 35 high-school and college-age journalists whom the magazine counts as regular contributors, and its army of around 9,000 ''trendspotters'' across the country who report back from the front lines of youth culture. Majewski, too, devotes an appreciable amount of her time to listening to and working with lesser-known artists -- both signed and unsigned -- and the record business has taken notice. Publicists and managers regularly bring their latest discoveries up to the magazine's offices -- a roomy spread in the Time Inc. building, its walls a bright Caboodles purple -- for an audience with the editors.

''If they believe in something,'' says Columbia Records senior vice president of marketing and media Larry Jenkins, ''and feel it's for their audience, they'll take the chance and give significant coverage. Not just a little photo and a couple paragraphs -- they'll do photo shoots, they'll do stories very early. And then they'll stick with the artists they believe in.''

''When you get a photo and a demo,'' Majewski explains, ''you can't really tell what these people are like in person. Are they going to be able to command an audience on stage? Are people going to want to read about them? When we invite some of these artists up, it's to get to know them, and also to find out how we can help them, provided we like the material.''

As Teen People's reputation as a youth-culture pipeline has grown, Majewski and her colleagues have found themselves becoming de facto career counselors for artists looking to reach The Kids. LMNT, a new boy band made up of former Making the Band castmates, have been up several times. ''We'll sit around,'' Majewski says, ''and we tell them honestly -- Jeremy (Helligar, entertainment editor) will say, 'I don't like that ballad,' or I'll say, 'Gosh, that's a really unique way of thinking about it.' They know we were here for 'N Sync and Backstreet at the very beginning of their careers.'' (There's also a more pragmatic explanation for the magazine's close relationship with LMNT -- Teen People is planning a co-branded record-label deal with fellow Time Inc. property Atlantic Records, possibly with LMNT as the first signing.)

Recently, LFO's manager dropped by the magazine's offices with a tape of the band's new music, which no one else had heard. Najarian, who represents the band (they're now a J Records act), notes that ''it's rare that a magazine will let you do that. I think it's probably born from their hunger to know what's hot, and trusting that you might be bringing them somebody who's potentially a huge star.''

At the same time, Majewski insists that even though being a teen-pop superfan -- and, by extension, evaluating artists according to the sensibilities of teen consumers rather than with the credulity of a rock critic -- is basically a requirement of her job, she doesn't make editorial decisions based on chumminess alone.

''I'm not going to help an artist if I don't like the song,'' she says. ''There are people, there are bands that I honestly don't find very talented or charismatic. I am a journalist, deep down. I like to think I'm an open-minded journalist who's there to help new groups, but -- I mean, I know music, I like music, and I'm not going to support (a band) I don't believe in.''

She pauses.