Headscratchers / Lucas

• Apparently Lucas is considered "too young" to be in high school, even though he's 14 years old. However, when I started high school I was just turning 15, while most of the other freshman in my class were 14 when they started, was the school structure different back in the 1980's?
  • Many schools in the 1980s had junior high school as grades 7-9 and high school as 10-12 (rather than today’s more common system of 6-8 middle school and 9-12 high school), so even though a freshman would earn credit toward his diploma, he wouldn’t be attending high school yet.

• Did anybody else find it insensitive of Lucas telling Maggie to "keep an open mind," when she is clearly upset and uncomfortable with the fact that her dad left her mom for someone close to her own age? Sure it's important to keep an open mind, but anybody who is/ has been in Maggie's position would understandably be upset themselves over the situation.
  • That could be read as Lucas trying to get Maggie to think more positively about dating someone much younger … like, say, Lucas himself. Which doesn’t make it any less insensitive, of course.

• Lucas keeps referring to the bugs in this film as locusts, when they're clearly cicadas- which look nothing like locusts. How can a budding entomologist like Lucas make that mistake?
  • In many parts of the US, periodical cicadas are commonly referred to as "locusts" because of their swarming behavior. You'll often hear them called that in the midwest and the south. Perhaps Lucas calls them locusts when talking to his friends because that's the (inaccurate) term that other people are most likely to be familiar with. It's no different from equally inaccurately calling vultures "buzzards" etc.