FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – For five magical days, the two high school classmates exchanged hugs and tender “I love yous.”

When one of the girls ended the chaste love affair, the other told police she was so devastated she pulled a gun in a hallway at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.’s Dillard High and shot the pretty aspiring dancer she loved.

Teah Wimberly, 16, now stands accused of second-degree murder for killing Amanda Collette, 15.

Charged as an adult, she faces the possibility of life in prison.

“I love her more than I love any human on earth,” Wimberly tearfully told a police detective within an hour of the Nov. 12, 2008 slaying.

“I can’t believe I hurt her.”

On Monday, as potential jurors took a lunch break, Wimberly’s defense attorney, Larry S. Davis, sought to keep her recorded remarks from reaching their ears.

“I didn’t want to kill her,” Wimberly told the police detective. “I wanted her to feel what she made me feel, the pain.”

Davis says his juvenile client did not speak freely and voluntarily.

She wore shackles in a police interview room, was emotionally distraught over having shot Collette and had not been given an opportunity to speak to relatives before she waived her rights and implicated herself, Davis says.

Broward Circuit Judge John Murphy has not yet ruled on the defense’s motion to suppress Wimberly’s statement.

In the 23-minute videotaped segment, Wimberly said she was gay, deeply in love with Collette and could not handle the peaks and valleys of her own emotions.

They exchanged no more than hugs and “I love you’s” before Collette ended things for “no reason,” Wimberly said.

“I can’t get over it…it messed me up,” Wimberly said. “It’s like she hates me…It’s like I made her skin crawl, and that hurt me to death.”

Collette’s parents Joyce Collette and Anthony Thompson clasped hands as they listened to Wimberly’s account, which was played Monday so lawyers could argue the pros and cons of admitting it as evidence.

As Wimberly described being snubbed by Collette in the school hallway, taking a gun out of her back pocket and shooting her friend once in the back, Joyce Collette dabbed at tears with a folded handkerchief. Jury selection will resume Tuesday.

Once a panel of six jurors and two alternates is sworn in, the trial is expected to take up to two weeks.

Davis will present an insanity defense, saying Wimberly’s history of parental abandonment, sexual molestation and beatings culminated in tendencies of self-mutilation and suicidal thoughts.

The end result, Davis says, was mental illness. Meanwhile, Collette’s parents say their emotional wounds are still fresh.

“We’re just doing one day at a time,” her father, Anthony Thompson, said as he left the courtroom.

• Tonya Alanez