When I was in high school, we had a community service requirement in order to graduate. It was a 50-hour requirement to be fulfilled sometime in the course of our four years of high school, so it wasn't exactly the Peace Corps, but you had to do it. And most of us tried to get it out of the way early, in order to make way for the wonderful jobs we would later have in retail.

Just as an aside, my best retail story involves the job I had the summer before college, which was in a sandwich place at the mall. On one very, very slow night, a girl named Bridget and I were working, and we were the only ones in the place. It was hot as hell behind the counter, so we were blowing several oscillating fans in various directions. Gradually, we became aware of a vague burning smell. We went around to each of the fans, pressing our faces close to the grills, trying to see if we could figure out which of them was overheating, which is what we figured was going on. At just about this time, one of the young security guys came strolling in, very casually. Most of them weren't much older than we were, and they had possibly the only job in the mall more boring than ours, so we would give them glasses of water or cups of coffee or anything else that had a marginal cost of approximately zero. So he came in and asked us for a large glass of water. Bridget was occupied with sniffing the fans so I went over and grabbed a styrofoam cup and dawdled in strolling over to the sink, pausing to sniff over by the coffee pots to see if the smell was coming from there. Bridget explained what we were doing. "We think," she said to him, "that we smell something burning. Do you smell something burning?"

"YES," he said very firmly. "I DO. May I please have a LARGE . . . GLASS . . . of WATER." I filled the cup up with water and handed it to him, and he bailed out into the main part of the mall, where he poured the glass of water directly into one of the trash cans, which belched up a plume of steam and smoke. Bridget and I burst out laughing, of course, and as the guy walked back toward us, she choked out, "Why didn't you tell us what you needed it for?" He looked at her, and then with his most serious expression, said, "We're not allowed to say that." "Not allowed to say what?" Bridget asked him. He leaned over toward her. "Fire," he whispered.

Anyway, you wouldn't want to miss out on those priceless moments, so it was important to get your service project done early. I did it the summer after ninth grade, and chose a nearby children's hospital, which put me in the Child Life program. This was basically a very big playroom -- I'd go and get kids from their rooms, trying to get them interested to come down and play with the stuff we had. There would be arts and crafts some days, or we'd play games with them, and with some of the kids, all you did was something they called "infant stim," where you'd take a kid with very little ability to interact and just stroke his face with a furry mitten, or shake something shiny in his face. Infant stim, as the name suggests.

While I was working there, I became acquainted with a kid by the name of Caroline. Caroline was Irish, in the sense of actually being from Ireland, complete with brogue. She was probably about eight or nine, with exactly the freckled face and thick red hair you're thinking of. She was no soft touch, this kid -- having spent quite a bit of time in hospitals during her life, she had had just about all the arts and crafts and just about all the puppet shows and clowns and certainly all the high school students fulfilling their community service requirements that she cared to, thank you very much. She would come to Child Life when she damn well felt like it, and at absolutely no other time. She was never entirely sure whether she liked me, and on some days, I was convinced she would refuse to come down to the room just to frustrate me. If we got her down there, one of the only things she was interested in was the computer. Now this would have been in the mid-1980s, so a computer to play with was a game in and of itself, and certainly the fact that it was attached to a printer made it a free-standing form of entertainment. The kids would stand in line to play with it, and they loved nothing better than the fact that it could make a banner. Probably with some early version of Print Shop, you could set it up so that the dot-matrix printer, which still printed everything onto folded paper you had to tear into sheets by hand, would print a landscaped line of text in eight-inch-high letters so you'd wind up with a five- or six-foot banner you could hang over your bed or cajole the Child Life lady into hanging in the room for a few days. They would print out banners for birthdays, or to say they loved their moms, or to express just about any other sentiment for which we had an adequate paper supply.

One day Caroline decided she would make me a banner, but she didn't want me to see what she was typing until she made it. I went off to do something else, and eventually she came over and handed the banner to me and, without saying very much, walked off. I unfolded it one fold at a time, and this is what it said: "ALLI IS A GOOD BOLD GIRL." I thanked her profusely the next time I saw her, because I knew she wasn't a warm-gesture kind of kid, and I knew she was trying to say something to me.

But honestly, there was part of me that cringed at it, too. "BOLD," I thought to myself. Right. That means "loud." It means "pushy," and "overbearing," and . . . well, did I mention "loud"? It was very embarrassing to me then, not being able to blend into the scenery like one of Seurat's little dots. I always seemed to have three elbows, and my laugh was very loud, and I was convinced that my life would be a lot better if I could become one of those girls that people are curious about because they never talk. In fact, I took "BOLD" as sort of grudging, like it was nine-year-old for "has a good personality."

I kept that banner for a long time as a souvenir, and hung it in my bedroom, thinking it was kind of wryly funny, and it kills me that I eventually got rid of it. Unfortunately, I had already parted with it by the time I got smart enough to file it under the great compliments I have ever received.

When I started coaching high school mock trial a few years ago, I gained a new appreciation for the Good Bold Girl, because I see her all the time now. Interestingly, "Bold" means many of the things I thought it meant -- they are indeed often kind of loud. And pushy. And a lot of times they do have three elbows and a loud laugh. The sting of it is that I doubt they appreciate being Good Bold Girls either -- it's undoubtedly still not a simple life.

But you grow into the laugh. And you find that extra elbow comes in handy in a crowd. But what still kills me is that Caroline was one of these girls too, and if I had been smart enough to get it, I would probably have understood that it was an acknowledgement of our shared stubbornness, almost like a secret handshake. It was a lot to learn from a dot-matrix printer.