Return ArrayList from ArrayList method type

Question

I'm making a little card deck program that uses an ArrayList for the deck. One of the limitations set upon me is that the method in which I "deal" the cards must be an Arraylist type. The problem I'm running into is that I don't know how to return just a specific index value from the ArrayList. See below.

public ArrayList deal(int n, boolean up){
    Card card0 = new Card();
    boolean cardFace = card0.state(up);
    return al.get(0);  //<-- This doesn't work, Netbeans says that it is a string type
                            //not an ArrayList type.  The only thing it will actually
                            //allow me to return is:
    return.al;  // But this doesn't work, I don't need to return the whole list,
                // just the first element, but Netbeans calls that a String type, not
                // ArrayList

So how can I return the first item of the List and still have it be the correct type? The rest of the code doesn't matter, just the Method type and return statement.

EDIT: As requested

package deckofcards;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Deck{
    ArrayList<String> al = new ArrayList<>();
    public void shuffle(){
        Collections.shuffle(al);
    }
    public String displayDeck(){
        String returnDeck = "";
        for(int i = 0; i < al.size(); i++){
            String printDeck = al.get(i);
            returnDeck += printDeck;
        }
        return returnDeck;
    }
    public ArrayList deal(int n, boolean up){
        Card card0 = new Card();
        boolean cardFace = card0.state(up);
        return al.get(0);
    }
    public void populate(){
        al.add(0, "Ace of Spades");
        al.add(1, "Two of Spades");
        al.add(2, "Three of Spades");
        //yadaa yadaa

Answer 1

If you cannot change the signature and it is mandatory to return an arraylist, then you can create an arraylist with just one element and return it. Something like this:

ArrayList returnList = new ArrayList();
returnList.add(al.get(0));
return returnList;

Does not look great to me :-(