“What are you doing?” Chelsea asks as she stands in her bedroom, stuffing pajamas into her pillowcase.

“Folding,” I say simply.

“Why?”

“How come your shirts are inside out?” I ask, ignoring her question.

She rolls her eyes playfully and goes back to packing. I put the last shirt on the top and we run out the door into the warm night, crossing the yard to my house.

Chelsea has been my friend for eight years, since she moved into the beach house next door. She makes the two-hour drive on Thursdays and goes back to her other home Tuesday mornings, every weekend, every summer. She’s everything good. She’s friendly, easygoing, fun, and has a good sense of humor - all the good stuff.

Every weekend, as long as I can remember, Chelsea has left something at my house when she visits. Whether a sock, her glasses, cell phone, bathing suit, book, shoes, whatever. She never remembers a toothbrush, so I leave one under the sink for her. Pillowcases are her slumber party bag of choice. She never folds her clothes. I hear that her room at her winter house is a disaster area while mine stays organized, with only a stray shoe here and there. When I take a book to the beach, I put it in a plastic bag to keep it from getting wet or bent. My clothes are always folded, with the inside in, for that matter. We balance each other out.

We are the Three Stooges: my 10-year-old brother, Bay, Chelsea, and me. Chelsea watches action movies with Bay and chick flicks and scary movies with me. We like the same music. While I read on the beach, they’ll dig a hole in the sand. When Bay doesn’t want to go in the ocean, I’ll go in with Chelsea and we’ll sit right at the edge, laughing, while the waves crash on our heads.

We have a shared history. We remember the same things and tell the same exaggerated stories. Two summers ago, Chelsea talked us into walking through the muddy swamp across the road. When Bay fell in a hole, Chelsea put her foot in too, and pretty soon we were all up to our knees in muck. Then there was the time we swam in the murky lagoon out back, and the day we found little water-filled fungus things on our crab trap and squirted them at each other, and ended up with a rash.

At my tenth birthday party, we played Fear Factor, and Chelsea ate a mushroom to win a dollar, throwing up afterward. When we were little, we used the windows in the playhouse and our Power Wheels to play drive-thru, and then later we traded Power Wheels for motor scooters, riding them to the honeysuckle bush at the end of the road.

There’s a photo of the three of us in my room. My mom took it after we made cookies. The dough we had left after we “tasted” it, came out of the oven looking like pancakes because we forgot to add flour. In the picture Bay is squished between us, with me on one side, smiling wide, and Chelsea on the other, suppressing her laughter. I have a feeling that this is how it will always be, because Chelsea is our best friend. I know this as well as I know who left that iPod on my desk last weekend.