Collegian | Rachel Kookogey
Vika Nuñez and I started rooming together in the summer of 2019 when we both interned for the Marketing Department. We didn’t know each other super well at the time, but she had already trusted me with dying her hair red — and has several times since then.
Some of my strongest memories from that summer include: pausing our two-movie afternoon marathon to run around campus in a rainstorm, sharing our pet peeves we had with the other while we dug weeds out of a neighbor’s yard for her, and both having a crush on the same boy — except I didn’t like him after I realized just how much she did.
After summer, we went to our pre-planned separate room assignments across campus from each other. However, that didn’t stop her from sleeping over at my dorm a couple times.
I would visit her dorm too. But the one time I was too busy to come over was when she really needed me over — she was hosting a surprise birthday party for me. So, in order to get me to come, she convinced me that we were taking our friend to the ER because she was “throwing up and passing out” due to a concussion.
The following year, our junior year, it only made sense to go back to being roommates. And we’ve been roommates ever since. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about Vika.
Movies are her love language, especially ones featuring Sandra Bullock or Julia Roberts. And warning for anyone who watches them with her: She takes it pretty personally if you don’t like a movie she does.
When we were sent home for COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020, we kept up our long conversations via text and FaceTime. She sent me so many screenshots of her texts with the guy she liked that one time she accidentally sent them to him instead of me. After that, I was in charge of all her outgoing messages.
Vika often has big ideas. One time she told our friends to all send baby photos to her so that she could make a slideshow of them all and we would have to guess which baby was who. I sent her photos, but I never actually saw the slideshow come to be.
She also has come up with most of our pranks, including rallying the majority of female dorm Resident Assistants on campus to put plastic forks in one male dorm’s yard, and the ill-fated first Mrs. Niedfeldt portrait thievery of January 31, 2021. But don’t test her with pranks on her own dorm. As the Head RA of Paul House, she has chased prankster boys away from the premises with a broom, even while her hair was wrapped in a towel.
She’s graduating early and getting married, so we only have a few more weeks together as roommates. She likes to say I’ve prepared her well for her marriage. Just like her fiance, I’m bad at filling up our Brita filter. I in turn tell her that her future husband will have to learn to deal with her Enya-esque shower music choices and her interesting culinary concoctions.
But in all seriousness, I will be sad when I have the room to myself because I cherish each of those memories and many others — like the overly-analytical late-night conversations, the many tears shed together, and the time my sister’s fiance walked in on us two snuggled together in hoodies in my bed watching a movie.
It’s been a good couple of years with my funny roommate.