Watching this 19-year-old girl in her black skinny jeans and matching patent-leather Topshop boots perk up after Kings defenseman Drew Doughty nearly body checks an Avalanche player through the glass in the first period—“That’s a big-boy hit, ooh.”—I start to get a clearer picture of who the actual Moretz is. Hearing her yell, “Fuck you, Colorado!” and “Ref, you suck!” also helps.

Ever since she was about 14, Moretz has made a concerted effort to separate her real self from the celebrity version of herself. “It’s a very strange dichotomy,” she tells me before the game starts, not the only time she’ll use an SAT word during our conversation. “I chose to have my own life and have my career. I started separating my personalities—I can be strictly in my work and very serious, and then fully break it off when I leave set and have time to myself. Be young, make dumb jokes, be a kid.”

A decade ago, “being a kid” for Moretz meant holing up in a room, listening to Lady Gaga and obsessively playing Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed. Now it means being a self-described dork. “I read a lot of political articles,” the golden-haired Moretz says, half-proud and half-embarrassed. And lest you think Moretz is one of those kids from freshman year you wish you hadn’t started a conversation with at a party, she comes prepared to back up that assertion. She reads the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, she says, and will gladly talk your ear off about Hillary Clinton’s education plan (she likes it) or Bernie Sanders’ soft stance on gun control (she does not like it). She’s remarkably passionate for a (famous) teenager about participating in the American democratic system, and is seriously agitated by any kind of political apathy. “I’m different than most kids my age in that sense,” Moretz says, not realizing the half of it.

There’s the real dichotomy: Moretz is at once someone who is and isn’t 19. The way she thinks about her career, the things she has to deal with on a daily basis, and the perspective she’s gained from acting for 13 years already—a full career for many—make her seem and sound far older than she is. In the middle of the hockey game, she tells me about a house she’s buying being in escrow, and fields a call from an insurance agent about a claim being made on one of her cars. She already has directing and producing on the brain, and talks about how hard it is to accept and trust people, because she’s already spent so many years in Hollywood witnessing the “depravity and lack of morals,” and having “best friends sell stories and call the paparazzi” on her. Her publicist didn’t come to the game to keep an eye on her, but she didn’t have to. Moretz is smart and experienced enough to police herself and maintain her own image.

But then there’s the other side of the coin—she really is 19, and is going through many of the things everyone her age deals with: self-discovery and the onslaught of emotions that comes with that, burgeoning sexuality, and the sort of experimentation and wading through personal relationships that partially defines young adulthood. She was admittedly “asexual” early on in her teen years—awkward and insecure—but has grown bolder with age. When I first met her at the Complex photo shoot, two days before the hockey game, she had this easy confidence that put me back on my heels. The way she was so sure of herself—not flamboyant or cocky, just cool—made me feel like I had to appease her, like I had to prove to her that I could be self-assured, too.

Right now she says she’s been into dating. She won’t say with whom, though gossip magazines have pointed to Brooklyn Beckham, son of David, and more recently Chance the Rapper, but she denies having anything going with either guy, and assures me that no matter the subject, it’s nothing serious. “I have no real plans,” Moretz says. “I don’t want anything right now. I can’t handle that right now.” She says she just likes to meet people and have fun. Case in point: I saw her exchange numbers with one of the male models after her shoot had ended—it was a seriously suave-looking boss move by her. And, judging by her thoughts on date-night restaurant selections, a fairly typical one. “I want to be with someone who’s adventurous and wants to go do something,” she says. “Don’t take me to Nobu and get me nigiri. I’m OK. I can take myself to Nobu. I don’t need someone to take me to Nobu.”