Matters of the Mind
A gay high school senior in a small rural homophobic town discovers how to read minds and puts it to use to ensure justice prevails while learning related social lessons the hard way.
A gay high school senior in a rural setting retreats into computers and radio (the latter needed for Internet connectivity). He is very bright, and discovers a way to merge the two to read human thoughts. It works well, but is quickly overwhelmed when he takes it into town. Eventually, he is able to get it to cope with groups of people and single out individuals.
He finds it is a two edged sword, as while he can easily find other gay teenagers to befriend, he also hears what people really think of him (even friends don't like everything about you) and learns secrets and regrets of others.
He goes to college in the big city and discovers that he needs a lot more computer power to be able to really handle the crowds there, but is able to use the device to get work to pay for his tech toys. In the process, he has to choose between a highly profitable use via unfair knowledge gained and barely enough for his needs, but by using the information, he would only be helping someone, and not taking advantage of others without his capabilities.
Once he has the New, Improved mind reader working, he discovers that already he's been taken advantage of, and is considered pretty much a hick with few social graces by many of those around him, which sends him into something of a depressive rage, which becomes a downward spiral. While he never does anything outright evil, he does make use of his knowledge to get revenge far beyond his injuries. While he does "hear" what people think of how petty his problems are, he just feels "misunderstood".
He has sunk pretty low and is on the verge of telling someone something he knows will cause them to suicide, when he does some minor good deed for another gay man about his age who's worse off than he is, and been far worse in the past, but says nothing. He learns about them from his device, as well as what they think about his kvetching about minor insults. This forces a review of himself, what he's becoming and what he could be, especially as he views things around him from a different perspective.
He talks to the other gay man, learns from him and they fall for each other. He then has to "come out" about the mind reading device, and together they work out how to use the device for good and start using the device to start searching for cases of injustice and arranging for information to fall into the right hands to right the wrongs.
