The magician grabs his props and prepares to wow the crowd. The crowd stays hooked through each movement he does. They are trying to figure out every step of his trick, but a magician should never reveal their secrets and he has many distractions along the way. The music gets louder, quickly approaching its peak, and then silence. Then cheering, they don’t understand it but they know they witnessed something great and mysterious. For freshman Pollux Doty who has been practicing magic for the past seven months, this scene often looks like one of his magic tricks.

“I first became interested in magic when I saw the America’s Got Talent winner Shin Lim doing his own performance,” freshman Pollux Doty said. “I think the lure of it is that you’re the one performing magic and you do something that blows people’s’ minds. They don’t know how you did it, but they’re excited about it because they don’t understand it. It just gives you a good sense of happiness, and it causes happiness for other people.”

Beginning a hobby in magic isn’t something that can just be done overnight, it can take small steps and dedication for a person to fully understand how to pull off these tricks.

“To start off, I just looked on YouTube to find tutorials on how to shuffle or fan, basic tricks,” Doty said. “Now, I can do a trick where I memorize the entire deck in 30 seconds and find the card a person had. I can also have someone take a card, put it back in the deck, and have it magically appear back on the top of the deck. There’s also trick where all the cards will turn into the nine of hearts or just a normal deck.”

In his first hour class, Doty was able to show off a few tricks to his fellow peers and teacher.

“We were having a class party before one of our vacations and kids were saying ‘what can everyone bring?’ and pollux said ‘I’ll bring magic!’,” science teacher Kimberly Wilhite said. “It’s phenomenal that he has some other kind of interest and will share that with others. A lot of people are self conscious about those things and won’t share that in high school.”

Most hobbies end when choosing a post-secondary school, and are put on the shelf as a party trick. For Doty, this mysterious lifestyle will continue after high school, and he will pursue it as a career.