Adam Perry punched a pencil through the forehead of Ben Franklin on a $100 bill. He ripped down the length of it, and snapped the bill up for inspection. It was unharmed.

"Now I'm going to show you how I did it," he said.

He placed the pencil in the folded bill.

"It doesn't rip the paper … because it melts into it," he said, slowly tilting the pencil through the paper again, revealing no secrets.

Perry, a senior at Austin High School, is a magician -- not an aspiring magician, not a budding magician, not a rising star. Those word describe many young talents, but this guy is already there. He is the real deal.

At his high school variety show, he stood behind a box and held up a sheet. He dropped the sheet, or rather someone else did, because he had somehow appeared at the back of the auditorium, his friend standing where he had been moments before.

It's not much of a stretch to compare him with the well-known magicians today. His idol is David Copperfield, and many of the illusions he performs are inspired by famous acts, with his own touches to make them unique.

"Now, I go to a live (show) and when (Copperfield) has new stuff, pretty much by the end of the show, I'll have it," he said.

Observation, trial and error and hours of practice have taken Perry to that level.

He started young. The first time he saw Copperfield perform, he was about 5 years old.

"I thought it was the coolest thing in the world," he said. "When you're a kid, you're always like, 'Oh, I want to do that,' but you never do, you know. There's always something else the next day."

When he was 8 or 9, he went to another show, and that's when the bug really set in. He got a magic kit and some books and worked to master those tricks.

"After that, I wanted to get better and better," he said. "Because if you wanted to know how I did it, you could just go to the library. What I wanted to do was stuff where if you really knew, you'd have to be a magician."

He observed tapes of famous performances. When he thought he had something figured out, he'd test it. He's done this time after time, and continues to do it today, all the while throwing in his own touches and ideas to create his own routines.

Perry is a showman. In performances at local talent competitions as well as video-recordings of new ideas, a wave of his hand doubles as a dance move and the catalyst for illusion.

He's planning a show this summer with some of his friends, who will add break dancing and different kinds of music to the routines.

His preferred audience is teenagers and adults. More so than children, adults get his jokes and set-ups, and they realize what they are seeing should not be happening.

"To the magician, nothing's impossible," he said. "With little kids, they think anything's possible anyway."

Not that they're wrong, because that is exactly what he is trying to prove to the audience. With adults, it's just more of a challenge getting them to believe.

Perry said magic is a trick, manipulated by his hands and played on the audience's eyes, but it is not necessarily fake. "Magic is real, but it's not," he said; it falls somewhere in that middle ground.

What you're seeing is there; there are no holograms or other artificial devices. What is happening, however, might not be as it appears. It's illusion created by slight of hand and subtle moves to force the audience into doing or seeing what he chooses.

His first illusion was Michael Jackson's "moonwalk."

"It's an illusion," he said. "You're not really walking forward but moving backward. It looks that way, but it's not."

Magic has had a positive impact on Perry's life. He was not a very outgoing person when he was younger, but since taking up his hobby, things have changed.

"It's helped me get out," he said. "When you're doing this, you build up more confidence."

One of the most valuable aspects of a talent such as his is its uniqueness. Often in high school, athletes have the most-recognized talents in the school, he said.

"Say you're not the most popular kid in school. But, guess what? You can do other things no one else can do," he said.

For those truly aspiring magicians out there, do not come to Perry for tips. Hard work and careful observation is as specific as he gets as to how his magic is done. His secrets are his own, and he is disappointed if other magicians reveal their methods.

"You don't do that," he said. "You just don't because people's respect for you goes down. They think, 'Oh, you're not so great.'"

Besides, the uniqueness of his talent is what makes it so interesting.

"I'm very happy that not many people do it," he said. If that were the case, "it wouldn't be cool because you'd see it every day."

For the future, Perry is not considering magic too seriously as a career. He is not sure what his plans are, but one rather shocking idea is to make the water tower by Wescott Field disappear.

Most of all, Perry hopes his magic can help people enjoy themselves and feel a sense of wonder.

"Magicians aren't out there to make people feel stupid," he said. "They're out there to have fun."

Matt Merritt can be reached at 434-2214 or by e-mail at :mailto:matt.merritt@austindailyherald.com