Yes

"Wow! You, uh, picked a good test. I would never have done that," she said. Their minds were still entangled just a bit, and he found that she had no fear of him. She had not suddenly lost her trust, now that she knew he really did have these powers. "Well, it's getting late. How about if we do more tests tomorrow? I am quite interested in exploring this further. It'll be Saturday, and we can spend all day on it," she asked.

"Sure, that sounds great. I’ll tell my mom that we’re studying for science, which is more or less the truth," he smirked. He was really looking forward to spending more time with Karen. The prospects looked promising in this budding relationship especially with all the extra and very personal exposure to each other granted by your new abilities.

"So, how's it feel to be a human guinea pig?" she inquired jokingly. She laughed, which lit up her face. She really was a pretty girl.

He smiled at her and said, "I’m just waiting for the side effects to kick in. I’ll probably grow scales or horns or turn green or something.”

“We’ll deal with that as it comes,” she said reassuringly. She sounded as if she took that a little too seriously. “See you tomorrow about ten, then. Bye.”

“Bye.” She stayed in the lab while John walked out of the school and went home.

On the ride home, he decided to practice his new skill. Now that he had some kind of mind screen working, he tried selectively reading just one person’s thoughts at a time. Before long, he could screen out everybody’s thoughts, except the person he was mind reading. Hmm, he didn’t know Mrs. Abramowitz, the old lady down the street from his house, lived through Auschwitz during World War II when she was six. Suzy, the twelve year old on the corner, stole some makeup from the **** store today. Tommy from two blocks over cheated on a test last week. Linda, the sophomore across the street, wants to jump his bones. She was kind of cute, but in a kid sort of way; he liked girls more his age and maturity. And to his surprise, he learned that his neighbor, Lina Bellamont, was in fact a lesbian, no, wait, bisexual. It was her partner, Cordelia Godard, who was a true lesbian.

He finally got home. As he walked in the house, the smell of dinner wafted throughout. It smelled like maybe chicken and something a little nasty. Mentally, he checked out who was in the kitchen and found his mother. 'Eww, she’s cooking Brussels sprouts,' he thought. “Hi, Mom, I’m home!” he shouted out to the house. He scanned her surface thoughts and found that his mother had to leave on a trip for the office and would not have been home for a number of days, but she had explained what happened to him and stayed home.

“I’m in the kitchen!” she called back. “Dinner in fifteen minutes!”

“Okay, I’ll get ready.”

He headed upstairs to think for a bit, lying down on his bed.