Stacey was my best friend, never in my worst nightmares would I have imagined the dreadful circumstances that surrounded her death.
When I was 15 I was very best-friends with a girl named Stacey. She was outspoken, loud, and sweet and caring as well. The two of us did absolutely everything together; she practically lived at my house! We shared clothes, make up, jewellery, you name it. There wasn't anything the two of us didn’t do together. Our friendship lasted for two years. While we always had fun, towards the end of year ten, little things started to come between us.
Stace and I were very different, like I said she was really loud and sociable, but I was more reserved. A lot of our fights started because she began hanging around with some people I didn’t like very much. The fights eventually got worse, other girls got involved, things were said behind people’s backs and we each found out. We were drifting apart.
We tried to sort through our problems with the school councillor but she didn’t help. All she said was to not worry about it and that it’s just a teenage girl thing, we’ll just get over it. We may have stopped fighting but things were never the same and eventually Stacey and I stopped hanging out. By the time I left school in year 10 we didn’t have anything to do with each other.
I never saw her again. Sometimes I heard things about her from friends of friends. She seemed to stay in touch with same people she was friends with from school. I became part of a different crowd. I never heard that she got involved with anything bad like drugs or alcohol, but like I said I just didn’t hear very much about her at all.
In September 2006 I went on holidays to Sydney and came back to find a voicemail message from her. The message basically said that she didn’t want the feud going on anymore and she wanted to be friends again. My instincts told me that she was a genuine girl and that we should patch things up but I guess I was just lazy and kept putting off calling her back.
A few months later I found out she had been brutally killed. I still remember the morning I found out; my Mum came into my room with the newspaper and there she was on the front page. My former best friend Stace, murdered.
Her death was dubbed the wheelie bin tragedy and was part of a very controversial case. The story was all over the news and I just felt so helpless. She moved in with her killers after only knowing them for two days. What they did to her was psychotic and senseless. I was really angry with myself for pushing her out of my life. We were once the best of friends and now I had lost her.
I don’t like to remember her in terms of her death, I like to think of all the good times we had together. The countless sleepovers, all the secrets we'd shared. She had the cutest British accent; I loved hearing her talk. She taught me that chicks can rule the pool table even though I wasn’t very good. She was great at putting funky outfits together and despite the fact that her feet were one size smaller than mine, she always wore my pink heeled shoes when we went out.
I try not to live my life in regret but sometimes there's just no escaping it. Lots of little things trigger memories of her; the shops, the park, even dressing up and photos. Nowadays I try following my instincts more, if I do have a falling out with a friend I think about the consequences. If I think it’s worth it I don’t let little spats get in the way of friendship. I make more of an effort to patch things up. I learnt the hard way that you can’t just sit around and wait for friendships to fix themselves; you have to make it happen.
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