On my twenty-third birthday, I died.
I think that's the perfect way to start a story, really. Here's your main character. He's going to be telling the story in first person, because that's the most comfortable for him. Besides, it's his story, so why shouldn't he be the one telling it? Oh, and just as the story starts, even though he obviously had some amount of life before that moment, he's going to die. End of the story. Hope you enjoyed it.
(Come to think of it, I think the "main character dies right a the beginning" thing has been done before, and probably by a better storyteller than me. But still, this is my story, and I'll tell it however the hell I want. In this case, that means that the story starts on the day it becomes a story worth telling... Anyway, since I did die on my twenty-third birthday, I'm not about to lie and tell you I didn't. Especially since then there would be no explanation for the loss of my input after that particular day.)
But yeah, in case you missed it the first six million times I mentioned it, I died on my twenty-third birthday. Life was pretty good, if a little boring, up until then. I had been out of college for a handful of months (but then, I did some study abroad and some student teaching before I graduated), and I had a job as a high school chemistry teacher that I enjoyed a lot more than I originally thought I would. Add to that a really hot boyfriend who was the latest up-and-coming medical technology super genius (at that time he was busy working out some of the kinks in a cold sleep system that the military was dying to get its hands on)... and yeah, I was happy.
What happened was, well...not really an accident. I don't think the person responsible meant to kill me, but that doesn't change the fact that he did. I don't know what happened to him in the end, but I'm sure it ruined his life for good.
As I said, I had a job as a high school chemistry teacher. I was a fairly popular teacher, since I was young (and pretty good looking, if I do say so myself), and the teacher who I replaced had been pushing seventy and had been forced to retire after several girls in his honors class accused him of trying to get them into his bed. (He was given the choice of retiring or being fired, since everyone knew he wasn't quite all there anymore anyway...) The girls likes me, partially because I was easy on the eyes, partially because they thought I was playing hard to get. (More like I was already quite sexually satisfied and would never lay a hand on a student in the first place, even a student only five years younger than I was.)
Most of the boys didn't seem to have any problems with me either. I was somewhat the enemy because the girls liked me, but because I never showed any interest, most of the anger diffused before it could get anywhere. And that was enough for most of the boys, except for one Aaron Shelder.
Aaron was a quiet kid, kinda dark and very private. No one in my classes really seemed to know him, but he seemed to have a group of friends who were in other classes, so I can't say I ever really worried about him. The kid I worried about was the girl who never talked to anyone and sat in the far back corner muttering to herself all day long. She seemed like the unstable type...especially since the only time I ever saw someone talk to her was to ask to borrow a pencil during class.
Aaron, though almost no one in my classes, myself included, had a girlfriend. She was another girl from the same class as him, and I don't think I ever saw them together, but they were still apparently going out. Until the day before my twenty-third birthday, that is. That night she broke up with him over the phone, claiming that she liked someone else. Knowing that I was popular with the girls and having some sort of innate dislike for me (not sure why on that one...), Aaron decided that the "someone else" was me. So, the next day he came to school with a gun stuffed in his book bag, and in the middle of class, he stood up, yelled something about his girlfriend dumping him, pulled the gun out, and shot me.
I don't really think he was aiming to kill, just to hurt me. But he was nervous, his hand was shaking, and he didn't really have any experience with a gun. Rather than going wild and missing me completely, though, the bullet headed straight for my head. I didn't have time (or the mental capacity) to react, and the last thing I remembered was pain, screaming voices, and then blackness. And that was it.
Kinda boring, huh?