Quinton Wingo wants to be an astronaut. He can’t say for sure that will happen — if not, he says, “I’ll just do whatever pays well” — but science is his favorite subject and he loves learning about space, so flying aboard a spacecraft would be his “dream job.”

Considering how far he has come, maybe it is not so wild a dream.

Wingo graduated from Trinity Episcopal School last weekend, an independent high school in Bon Air, a world away from the neighborhood where he spent part of his childhood — Fairfield Court, a public housing project in Richmond’s East End. In August, he will head to Christopher Newport University, where he hopes to play football.

Wingo experienced what might charitably be described as a challenging upbringing, bouncing from home to home, and, as a result, he lacked the sort of stability and direction one would seem to require to find a path to a promising future. What might have been a journey to nowhere, however, took a dramatic and happy detour at the end of his elementary school days when he signed up to attend a new middle school for not much more of a reason than because he had friends who planned to go there.