But there’s another story here you can’t see. This one is about poverty and chance, about the ease with which accomplished young people on an upward trajectory can be derailed by life’s circumstances. It’s also about how a sense of family and stability can be found in the most unlikely places — in Accime’s case, in a public school that wouldn’t let him sink, and a rarefied museum.

Accime is a member of the Teen Arts Council at the Institute of Contemporary Arts/Boston, and he went to Washington last month to represent the ICA, which received a national honor for teen programming. He attended a ceremony in the White House East Room, along with ICA director Jill Medvedow, and was congratulated and hugged by Obama.

From first handshake on, Accime is cheerful and soft-spoken, with a natural charisma, fashionable glasses, and braces on his teeth. Also, an impressive resume: He is student senate president at Boston Preparatory Charter Public School in Hyde Park, where he’s a senior. He has a paid position on the ICA’s Teen Arts Council, where he helps develop programs that connect teens to contemporary art.

He attended Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy, a three-year precollege program for about 30 low-income, high-achieving students. He has plans to be a fashion designer and has this to say about himself on the ICA’s Teen Arts Council Web page:

“I am all about FASHION! I live for fashion and one day wish to be the most respected person in the fashion industry. Remember my name, you will see it all over the world!”

After the White House visit, he became something of a local hero. The photo of him with Michelle Obama was projected onto a screen during his school’s community meeting. He was honored at an ICA celebration. Meeting her was “the greatest experience of my life,” he said. He thanked the ICA for being a “pivotal force” in his life, helping him overcome his “life’s difficulties.”

Accime lives with his mother, Simone Medilien — he barely knows his father — and has an older brother, Daneley. If there’s one thing Accime knows a lot about, it’s moving. He calculates that he’s moved eight times since he started school, living with relatives or strangers in spare rooms or basements in New Jersey, Dorchester, Dedham, Randolph, Braintree, and Hyde Park. “All I do know is my mom would yell [at] me ‘We are moving,” and we moved.”

When Accime was in fourth grade, they moved to Boston, where Medilien, a stout, energetic woman with a wide smile, has found work as a baby-sitter and home health care aide. She’s also a Pentecostal missionary, returning to Haiti, her native land, twice a year to minister to poor children.

Accime first went to a private Catholic school in Dorchester. But it was too expensive, so his mother said she prayed for a new school where she didn’t have to pay tuition and where students wore uniforms so she wouldn’t have to buy clothes.

One day when she was shopping at a Mattapan grocery store, a woman approached her. She told Medilien about a new public charter school called Boston Prep with a mission to prepare all students for success in college.

Admitted by lottery, Accime started at Boston Prep in the sixth grade. The school emphasizes ethics and academics; to Medilien “this was like a gift sent from heaven,” said Accime, during an interview at school where he was wearing the uniform — yellow button-down shirt, khaki pants.

Teachers describe him as a strong student, sensitive, and friendly and a “real Boston prep zealot,” said Scott McCue, founder and former head of the school.

“Romario is a huge part of the reason I came to Boston Prep,” said Twink Williams Burns, the school’s director of college counseling. “Driven, talented, magnetic. He has the ability to reach out to every kind of person and meet them where they’re at.”

Accime said this is no accident. “In each home [we live in], families always have different personalities. My job was to learn how to adapt to them, to know what I can and cannot say. I was always being cautious for my mother. . . . Worrying about me being a nuisance was something I definitely didn’t want her to have to do.”