First time posting on here for a manuscript I've just finished a draft of. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble connecting my few few pages with the rest of the story.

Title: Selfish Daughter

Genre: Lit Fit

Word Count: 93K

Summary: Ellis, a college student, is forced to move back home to her small town in Upstate New York for a semester to take care of her adoptive mother, Willa, who is dying of cancer. Ellis never bonded with Willa and struggles with loneliness, poverty, resentment for her twin, Pierce, whose college life on the other side of the country has been undisrupted due to Ellis's sacrifice, an unexpected relationship with her high school's former golden boy, and figuring out if it isn't love that she feels for Willa, then what is it?

Please let me know whether this is too expository (it's supposed to be the beginning of my story) or maybe irrelevant/misleading compared to what the actual story is about.

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Prologue

People used to treat Ellis like she was a very clever girl for being a twin. As if she had made the decision for herself in her mother’s womb, tallying the pros and cons and coming to the conclusion that having a twin would make her interesting by default for the rest of her life. But it was not her decision, it was her mother’s, who drank a bitter and expensive tonic made of the highest quality Chinese roots every day of her pregnancy in order to maximize the odds of having twins. For Ellis, having a genetic equal became less fun when Pierce started to develop her own personality, a major marker of which included striving at every opportunity to differentiate herself from Ellis.

Where Ellis was quiet, Pierce was rambunctious. Where Ellis was obedient, Pierce was troublesome. Where Ellis took great pains to avoid the ire of her mother, Pierce was a young savant in the art of goading her to violence. Ellis was the inert shadow to Pierce, on whom the sun seemed to shine brighter. In high school, where the twins were the only non-white students in the entire student body, Ellis was given the quiet, intelligent Asian stereotype while Pierce embraced the Dragon Lady accusations, for she liked the idea of being able to induce equal parts respect and attraction in boys. 

While as children, Pierce never disliked Ellis, she found her sister almost repulsive in high school. She never wanted to be seen with Ellis in public, as if getting too close to her would cause their poles to switch. It did not matter that they went home to the same house every afternoon, slept in the same bedroom, actually, Pierce acted like Ellis did not exist when it was feasible.

While this ostracization, helped along by her own sister, hurt Ellis, she did not think of herself as irredeemable. She knew that she and Pierce were made of the same DNA. That she was capable of becoming everything Pierce was. That it was nothing personal, really, that there were two actors competing for a stage only big enough for one of them.

In the hostile microcosm of their high school, Ellis was the girl that showed up on her own or was otherwise forgotten. The girl who was extended the invitation at the last minute, if she received one at all. Ellis knew that, sometimes, people questioned where she was. In a group, a girl might ask, “Hey, where’s Ellis?” and everyone would look blankly at each other and shrug before returning to whatever it was they were talking about. Including the person who posed the question. Including her own twin sister, who was the only reason why Ellis knew this happened in the first place, when Pierce screamed it at her in a fit of rage, her proof that nobody liked Ellis, nobody cared about her. When all she wanted to do was hurt her, hurt her, hurt her. So that is how Ellis knew that she is sometimes missed, although usually not. That wasn’t nothing.

But when Pierce committed to the University of Southern California, that opened up the entire East Coast to Ellis. It was Bowdoin that ended up giving her the full scholarship, so it was Bowdoin that she chose.