Sex, Lies and Phys Ed

He wasn't old enough to drive, so he asked his 19-year-old cousin Amy Moyer for a ride. On the way, he had her stop at a Gulf station to buy Ms. Tapp a rose.

For Jason, it felt like the classic schoolboy daydream was about to come to life. But as such liaisons increasingly show up in police blotters, what used to be regarded as little more than harmless trysts are now regularly prosecuted as crimes. "Over the past three or four years, there have been more cases than ever before," says Robert Shoop, an educational-law expert at Kansas State University and author of Sexual Exploitation in Schools: How to Spot It and Stop It. In the span of a single week last year, three female teachers were arrested for sleeping with male students — and that was just in Tampa, Florida. ("I loved today," 28-year-old math teacher Stephanie Ragusa had texted her alleged 14-year-old lover at Davidsen Middle School. "The sex was amazing.") Those arrests stole the spotlight from married English teacher Jennifer Mally, 26, who that same week pleaded guilty in Arizona for her affair with a 16-year-old, often conducted in the back of her Nissan Xterra. Two months earlier, Rebecca Bogard, a 27-year-old science teacher in Mississippi, allegedly seduced a 15-year-old in her Jaguar with plates that read grrrrr, and later texted the boy, "I love you, yeah it was the best, which night was the best 4 you, I'm sensitive but not sore, you were good." Scandalous as those cases were, they were followed by more arrests — notably that of Julie Pritchett, 34, a teacher in Alabama accused of seducing eight members of the high school baseball team.

Given such salacious details, the media tend to treat these cases as entertainment — at least, that is, when the teacher is a woman. But as Jason Eickmeyer was about to discover, the incidents don't always end cleanly for the boys involved. Long before the police were summoned, Tapp's supposed lovefests with students were the talk of Hammonton High. Indeed, the story of Jason Eickmeyer and his gym teacher is as much a story about the hothouse environment of high school, a place where gossip is currency, hooking up is the norm and allegiances shift as frivolously as any other teenage trend. Blur the lines between teachers and students, and it creates a backdrop that's part Penthouse Forum, part Melrose Place — a reflection of a broader cultural shift, in which a boy who has sex with his teacher is viewed not as a survivor of sexual abuse, but as the luckiest kid in 10th grade. Why treat a woman like a criminal, after all, when all she did was give some randy teen the best night of his life?

After buying a rose for Ms. Tapp, Jason had Amy drop him off at the Dunkin' Donuts by his teacher's house. He hugged himself against the cold; it was February, but he'd thought a coat would look uncool. A minute later, Ms. Tapp rolled up in her gold Infiniti. She wore red sweatpants and a blue O'Neill T-shirt, and Jason could smell wine on her breath. They went straight to her condo.

Leaning back against Ms. Tapp's kitchen counter, his hands shaking, Jason took a photo out of his pocket. He'd brought it as a conversation starter, since Ms. Tapp had expressed disbelief that he had lost 33 pounds to make weight for wrestling. She examined the picture of Jason shirtless at age 14: washboard abs, pecs like cliffs. "I need something to compare it to," she said. Jason whipped off his shirt. Instantly, he and his phys ed teacher were locked in the most passionate kiss he'd ever known.

When at last they separated, Ms. Tapp asked if he wanted to watch a movie. In her basement, Jason settled onto the black-leather couch while Ms. Tapp switched on the DVD player. "We'll just watch whatever's in," she said.

It was American Pie.